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Road
They can be hired for about £45 a day, but as a 4 day minimum hire is required this makes self drive impractical. Equally if you have no experience of 4x4 driving on isolated roads away from phone communication then probably best to forget it! Better to go on a 4x4 tour (but quotes are hard to come by. Companies seem reluctant to publish any before seeing you. I wonder why???) Finally one Tourist office person suggested you should reckon with £200 a day for a couple) We managed to use the excellent services of a local driver/guide suggested by the B&B for a total less than that for us and two others to divide between all of us. Make sure you use an experienced driver/guide who knows his way around offroad. This is more than just going from A to B. It involves navigating across the peat bogs & gullies/knowing local tides to drive on beaches/how to reach fence openings….. We did not use any of the FIGAS (Falklands Islands Government Air Service) flights but had excellent recommendations from travelers who did. Factor in about £100 a flight on their Islander aircraft and the need to arrange accommodation before you go. One quaint point: the island radio broadcasts the names of all passengers using FIGAS flights each night so that destination islands are aware of them!
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4x4’s are everywhere. As so many are
recent and far from basic (a Hummer has recently appeared in Stanley) they show
the growing prosperity of the islanders. Outside Stanley they are essential as
most roads are unpaved and several destinations have no roads at all!!
We were very lucky with the
weather (sunny, warm but most of all – no wind!!) and so did a lot of walking.
We used the roads mainly but walking “off piste” is made difficult by the lack
of any decent scale maps that show the islands on anything other than an A3
sheet. This is probably for military reasons, although I should imagine
Argentina already has perfectly well detailed maps of the place, so depriving
tourists of a walking map to stop one falling into Argentine hands is probably a
pointless exercise. (Locals though are keen to give directions. They will stop
by the road and tell you a route or offer a lift) Equally, around Stanley there
are still many minefields, often in the best beaches. Goodness knows why they
are still there 25 years after the conflict. Officially both sides blame the
other for not jointly discussing their locations. Not just a few Islanders say
cynically they are deliberately still there to deter the people who planted them
