18.11 West Falklands: Carcas and Saunders Islands
I started the day with a 45min yoga session with an instructor from New Zealand! It is good for me doing some sports! Over the next days I will start a program in the gym, as otherwise I will be at risk getting fat with so much delicious food here!
Then we had the first 2 landings with the Zodiacs on the West Falkland Islands! My expectations were already extremely high, but they were even easily beaten! We had sunny warm weather of 10 degrees and the wildlife was fantastic! It was mind-blowing watching thousands of penguins! We had the rule of not actively going closer than 5m to a penguin, but luckily this is a one-sided rule not known by the penguins! So very often one ends in being closer to a penguin! Today I saw at least 4 different kinds of penguins and it was a great day for photograpy! There were also Albatrosses and other birds and many dolphins were nearly touching our Zodiacs!
Again I had severe technical problems with my Sony A7R! I will send it back to Sony! It is so unreliable! On the other hand my Canon 5dIII camera is great and would say that the 200-560mm is the best lens currently available in the market and not beaten by any Nikon glass! The 200-560mm is reason enough to go for Canon!
I already had 15 great shots on just one day, which is very seldom! But the penguins are very easy objects. Only sometimes other penguins run into nice, well-chosen frames and destroy them! And on other occasions you need some patience until the penguins open their eyes or are in a nice formation!
It is unbelievable seeing these Chinese people owning the best cameras and lenses! Even their waterproof bags seem to be the best available! First I thought that it was me bringing the best equipment on board (which costs already 30.000EUR). But these Chinese photograpers each have eqipment worth 50.000EUR or even more! It is hard to believe! So i am feeling poor on this cruise ship! It would be very interesting to see which frames they go for!
Another story from today: Someone lost and left his/her camera on the beach! It was a Nikon 800 with 24-70mm lens, so 4000EUR just lay in the sand! Unbelievable! First I thought one of the Chinese just left one of his 4-5 cameras! But the settings were in English and not Chinese. I guess they will find the owner!
This journey is that great that I would recommend you to book it right away! No time to loose and forget about all those second and third class holidays in Europe! If you want to experience something great then Antarctica is one viable option!
The Falklands are huge. We are now going another 200km on sea to reach the town of Stanley at the Eastern Falklands! It is the biggest town of the Falklands! It is british and also architecture is british! They don't accept Argentinian Pesos for obvious reasons! They even have a church, a supermarket and a pub! ;-) We will spend tomorrow morning there on land! Carcas Island however is very small with only 2 inhabitants. But usually in summer that population doubled, so then there are 4 inhabitants!
So interesting days are to come! The weather here is unpredictable, but today was a calm and warm day! Our expedition jackets were much to warm so I changed to my own cooler clothes!
Also interesting people here. I will maybe write another time more on them..
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