6- My Half Term Holiday and Snowy and Romeo Go Home

Hello all at Glaitness

I hope you all had a lovely holiday. I had a week off here also, so I took the chance to head out into the countryside. In the Falkland Islands the countryside is called ‘camp’ after the Spanish word for countryside, ’campo’. Camp is very big and very quiet. There are only a few hundred people living out there and for that reason there is no where to buy petrol and the food shop only opens for a few hours a week. You have to remember to take everything with you. 

The roads are also very different. They are not nice tarmac ones like in Orkney, they are quite rocky and rubbly and you need a 4x4 to drive on them. This picture shows road being worked on. There are no traffic lights, you are expected to drive straight through the road works.

This weeks main video is penguin based again! I will move on from penguins to show you more of the Falkland Islands soon! Enjoy!

I also had the chance to visit the southernmost suspension bridge in the world. It was made almost 100 years ago so that farmers could get their sheep across the rived Bodie. Nowadays there is a road that goes via a different route and it is a three mile walk across rough countryside if you want to reach the bridge. I did not cross it though, I touched it with my foot and the boards shook from side to side!

On our drive home we came across sheep being herded in for shearing. The farm that was doing the herding has 17,000 sheep, and a lot of them went straight past us on the road. If any of you like Take That (or even know who they are!), you will like the second video of them streaming past my car!

5 - Peat Day Outing - Sea Lion and Gentoo Penguins

I spent my Peat Cutting bank holiday out looking for wildlife. Here is a quick video and some pictures of what we found. I'll aim to get a video sorted about life at my new school for sometime next week.

On the way to Surf Bay I popped in to see SnowDrop and Romeo. They are very well and are now very accustomed to humans. They waddle over happily and eat as much fish as you will give them. They should be heading back to the wild in 3 or 4 weeks.

4 - A brief penguin update!

I’m not sure this is my most clearly spoken blog! It’s a very short update on the penguins where I get in a little bit of a flap over whether Romeo is a boy or a girl.