I did a contract down in the Falkland Islands in 2002 for Cable & Wireless, and was in Stanley for about a month with a weekend on Sealion Island. Things the HN

I did a contract down in the Falkland Islands in 2002 for Cable & Wireless, and was in Stanley for about a month with a weekend on Sealion Island. Things the HN crowd might be interested in: When I arrived an army officer in camo fatigues got up on the (tiny) baggage claim carousel before it started running and gave us a brief introduction to how to spot landmines, and instructed us how to obtain ordinance maps of the known existing fields if we wanted to go for a walk one day. I got one and gave it to a friend as a present. I believe he has it framed in his home. That beach they are discussing looks astonishing and there is little doubt if it's reopened it will not remain "wild" for a long time. That said, ozone depletion is still a thing, and whilst the climate is like Northern Scotland, there are sunny days but sun-bathing is not encouraged. Young military personnel are rumoured to occasionally try it, have to get treatment for quite skin burns, and because it's a self-inflicted injury will get court marshalled. Sometimes a penguin or other animal will actually set off a mine on that beach, or at least did in my time there - you'd hear a distant boom, and it was just assumed one had been triggered. However, it's a huge area to clear. Strangely, I seem to recall there had been an offer from a foreign government to run mad cows or unwanted apes along it to try and trigger the mines. Thankfully, it was never taken up. There is a lot of ordinance in the islands. After the war, some of the locals picked up discarded Argentinian weaponry and ammunition and stored it for use in case of another future attack. I sincerely hope that most of it is now discarded. More tech information for this crowd: back then, all phone and data ran over a microwave network rated to 9600 baud but some could get 56kbps modems running well over it. There is a small machine room, and we were running Solaris 7 on Sun kit back then. I got the gig as I was familiar with Zeus which was their preferred web server at the time. Connectivity was via a (very large) satellite dish back to the UK via a geostationary satellite. 1Mbps was the max transfer rate, and ping times back to the UK were > 500ms. They had investigated running fibre optic into the islands, but they (naturally) wanted to avoid that coming in via Argentina, so they'd costed running it up to the US straight up the Atlantic. It was doable, but would cost 10x the then national GDP of the islands, so, yeah, noooo… It's a very beautiful place with lovely people, and I imagine the connectivity is much better than it was 15 years ago - if you ever have the chance to visit or work there, I'd definitely consider it, but the routes in are limited: MoD flight from RAF Brize Norton, via Santiago, or cruise ships sometimes stop by. They actually suggested I might want a full time gig down there. Being in my early 20s and single it wasn't for me, but I could see for the right person, it's a pretty amazing place.