My big sister emailed me and said she had been looking at Google Earth at Grytviken and all she could see were rusty oil drums and litter so this is what I replied to her:
Of course Grytviken has rusty old oil 'drums' - they are big iron containers for holding all the whale oil when it was a whaling station last century. It might look scruffy, but there is no rubbish lying around ... only ARTEFACTS!! Huge whale bones, an old historic jetty, old sheds, the lovely Norwegian church, machinery used in processing the whales. It is really very sad here to remember the wholesale slaughter of all those hundreds of thousands of beautiful whales. I'm just so thankful to Mum that we never ate margarine (whale oil) or used cheap soap - we always had Palmolive, but we would have consumed or used many other things with whale in them - Bovril for a start. When Grytviken first opened as a whaling station they caught enough whales in the bay here for 3 years to keep them working full time. Only recently have whales been sighted back here, but it is so good to know that they can come safely here again.
We live, at the moment, at the British Antarctic Survey base at King Edward Point which is just under a kilometer away along a coastal path. If you look at it on Google Earth, go to the far end of the buildings from the big green boat shed and jetty and there is a longish whiteish building at the other end, on the inland side. This is Larsen House where the museum people currently live; it has 4 en-suite bunk rooms (for 8 people), two stores, an office, a dining room, kitchen, and a laundry, and the doctor's surgery and a hypothermia bath room. It has hot and cold running penguins just outside the kitchen window, and elephant seals and fur seals dotted liberally around what would normally be the 'garden'. We are leaving it to move into Drukken Villa (no, not Drunken!) at Grytviken which, when you look at the front of the Museum with the big mountain behind, is directly to the right of it - some times it looks attached but it's not. It has two double bedrooms upstairs, and one double en-suite bedroom downstairs, a big kitchen and living room, utility room, and shower room downstairs. It has been completely restored by re-lining the walls with plasterboard and something like Kingspan insulation, but the original structure is still there inside. Under the bedroom floors in the gap is a thick layer of cinders which was readily to hand in the whaling station days and acts as insulation. It would all have been like that but you can only see this gap through a doored hatch halfway up the stairs.
The fur seals and elephant seals are marine mammals that only come ashore to breed and moult. All the ellie babies had been born and weaned before I arrived, but are still lying around looking cute, but the furries are just starting their breeding. Huge big ugly, very smelly, males come ashore, and the pregnant females come to join their harems - you have to be really careful with them, but the bad boys are the immature males who lurk up in the tussock grass and wait for a nice lady to come strolling along the track on her way to work and then jump out and menace her! They rush up to bite as their defence - and the nerve-wracking thing is whether or not you can stand your ground and turn them away or use your bodger (big stick) to tickle their whiskers (honestly!) and give them a fright so they back away. Often if you just stand and stare at them and growl or clap your hands, they will suddenly remember something else they should be doing, and will lollop off, but now and again one will go in for the attack. Their bites are extremely dangerous - they have evilly dirty teeth with strange bacteria, and they grab hold of their prey (hopefully not ME) and shake and do the damage that way. So getting to work in the mornings can be an interesting exercise.
For those of you who don't know, you get two types of seals. True seals move around on their stomachs and don't use their flippers apart from a bit of steering and perhaps to prop themselves up a bit to get a better look at something - elephant seals are true seals, and our builders call them blubber-slugs! Eared seals (which is what fur seals are) are far more mobile and can almost gallop around on their front and back flippers, like performing sea lions. As their name implies, they have little ears that stick out (a bit like otters). Eared seals have their testicles outside their body, and I think that this must be the reason they are so grumpy all the time, especially when moving over stony ground! True seals - good, eared seals - bad!
I hope you remember all of this - I will ask you questions later.....
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