When I first arrived one of my earliest posts was about the idiosyncrasies of shopping for food here – Food Shopping 101. Since then I have honed my shopping skills. There are more options what can be bought locally in the shops or on Chebay (as the Facebook Bring and Buy group is known).

An obvious one is online shopping with firms that will ship to the Falklands – this is a limited group and sometimes shipping costs are prohibitive. It’s always a joy when one finds a UK company that does ship to the Falklands and even better if they send it by post rather than DHL. In August I ordered some clothes from Adini and also from Seasalt. Astonishingly the Adini parcel by post (via the Airbridge) arrived in 7 days. The Seasalt parcel with DHL took a month. The post is not normally so speedy but it is still quicker than DHL (a month is standard) as DHL goes to Santiago fast and then has to wait to be put on the once a week Latam flight to the Falklands. Or not, if the plane is full of passengers and luggage.

A less speedy but really reliable way of getting orders to the Falklands is to have them shipped by sea. It’s also quite a lot cheaper than post. A firm called Richard James International provide shipping services to the British South Atlantic Islands – Ascension, Falklands, St Helena and Tristan da Cunha.

One of their services is receiving individual orders that are delivered to them; consolidating these orders into containers and shipping the containters. The service includes being able to order food from supermarkets (of those items one can’t live without – Lady Grey tea anyone) and they will pack it securely into boxes and send it down. Or you can ask them to buy items for you from certain stores like Ikea and they manage it all.

The containers travel to Montevideo and are then transhipped onto the MV Unispirit which shuttles backwards and forwards between Montevideo and the Falklands, bringing us supplies and taking away fish and squid for export.

Once a month the Unispirit arrives full of goodies and when the containers are unloaded, the call goes out to go and collect your order. Sometimes it’s a box of presents that have been lovingly chosen and sent, more often (for me) it’s food. Either things that are not sold here or that run out regularly.

Although online shopping works, it is in no way instant. The consequence of the time things take to get here (2/3 months) is that you need think ahead and order in larger quantities. This means that if you come to my house you will find that drawers and cupboards are holding a surprising amount of supplies.

To put this in context, my stores are nothing compared to some of the walk-in store rooms I’ve seen in West Falkland and the outer islands, where you can easily add another month or two to having anything delivered. Their deliveries are transferred from the Unispirit onto the Concordia Bay, which is both the ferry between East and West Falkland and the supply ship for the outer settlements. I think some people have enough stores for six months or longer. I think outer islands inhabitants really do have Advanced Shopping skills and I can reasonably claim Intermediate status!