Transcript
Kevin Kilmartin: I've been living in the Falklands for 40 something years. The maths has escaped me. The Falkland Islands is home all over the world. People like home, however difficult life may be there. On my passport, I say I'm a farmer. We farm what you can see all around you from the mountains to the sea, right?
So I'm going to take the bus to the pier. A lot of people from cruise ships, they're not terribly sure what they're going to do, what was going to happen. They have to be prepared to experience something that perhaps they weren't expecting. Well, we hope the weather stays good. I think it's going to be good all morning after this morning.
A lot of them know they're coming to see penguins, but they don't know that there are different penguin varieties and they'll see a king penguin and not realize that they're looking at a king penguin. You can explain that is the second biggest penguin in the world. We started off pretty much a Land Rover-only expedition, and from that we've grown to what we do now.
Hattie Kilmartin: Get out of the kitchen, go on you little rat. Go on, shoo. Now, Kevin didn't see that. Did he have some water? Well, I came for six months and that was 24 years ago, and I just fell mad in love with the place. My role really is I do the cooking and or the baking and the jam making, and then on the cruise ship day I am running the shop.
When we set up the tour with the cafe and it was lovely, just their reaction, having seen all the penguins and then coming in where it was all nice and warm and having lovely home baking, that was fantastic. There's something very unique and beautiful about the Falklands, but you have to be quite sort of pioneering, sort of spirited type person, because you do have to do basically everything for yourself. So if you need anything or something breaks and it has to come from the UK, you are looking at three months. You just have to hope that someone's got that spare part or whatever else.
We started taking card payments before then. We could only really sell a few postcards. It was all had to be cash sales and now 80% of our sales are through credit cards. Without being able to take the credit cards, we wouldn't have this business.
Kevin Kilmartin: I think we just want people to enjoy themselves. We want to enjoy it ourselves, and part of that enjoyment is having guests enjoying it too.
Hattie Kilmartin: It doesn't matter how tired you are, if you feel everyone's gone away happy, it's brilliant. The Falklands is an unusual place because you think that it's going to change, but actually it doesn't really, it's a sort of funny, magical place that carries on and the actual fundamental sort of Falklands spirit I don't think has changed at all.
