MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Of garden gnomes and penguins

Back in 1983, when I was the FT's Buenos Aires correspondent, I wrote about my 14,000-mile journey to the Falkland Islands, two ways across the Atlantic, via the RAF base of Brize Norton in Oxfordshire via Dakar, Ascension Island, and an unscheduled emergency landing in southern Brazil.

Scarcely a year had passed since the UK and Argentina had fought over the islands, and they were declared off limits to any explorer trying to get there directly from the Argentine mainland.

Recently, I returned, testing the new air-link that now exists between two former enemies. There was a direct flight from Argentina, but it was only once a month, from the Patagonian town of Rio Gallegos, 300 miles from the Falklands, courtesy of LanChile.

I made my own arrangements to fly directly from London to Buenos Aires on British Airways, while separately flying to Rio Gallegos to await, overnight, the pick-up by the Chileans.

A friendly Argentine pilot, briefly diverted to Ushuaia, offered me a glimpse of the black peaks of Tierra del Fuego rising up from the green waters of the Beagle Channel. On catching sight of them, in the extreme south of South America, for the first time in 1832, Charles Darwin had described it as "cursed land". But it seemed to me beautiful rather than threatening.

Rio Gallegos, the capital of Patagonia, had also changed since the war, when half of Argentina's air force and navy seemed to be on a permanent red alert against a feared strike by the British special services.

The receptionist at my hotel was happy to present himself as an Argentine of English descent, whose grandfather was a leading committee member of the local Club Britanico.

As its name suggests, it was a little bit of empire that had survived the war, complete with fox-hunting watercolours, billiards room, thick leather furniture and members' bar.

Looking Anglo-Saxon, but speaking Spanish, members recalled the good old days when British sheep farmers had dominated the local economy. The Queen, they told me, had been invited to the club's 90th anniversary.

The next morning, the sight of statues commemorating "those heroically fallen in Las Malvinas", and a small museum run by surviving veterans, were among the reminders that something else had happened since the days of British colonisation.

I flew out later that day in a half-empty aircraft, occupied by a group of 20 or so people. "Welcome on board this flight to Falklands/Malvinas," the Chilean air hostess announced. It was a tactful reminder that