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At RAF Mount Pleasant, the Falkland Islands' ‘international airport’, the passengers of our Ministry of Defence flight RR3200 were welcomed by blazing summer sunlight and by two unemotional bomb-disposal experts, a Sergeant and a Corporal. In the Arrivals lounge, they showed us the dummies of Argentine land-mines, the sad relics of the 1982 conflict, of which 26, 000 still sit unexploded in the Falklands' scarred terrain, and warned that venturing onto a minefield constituted an offence punishable by £1000 fine. I thought that to collect this fine, they would have to collect and put back together all 1000 pieces of the trespasser first.

The minefields, clearly marked with "Danger: Mines" and
"Slow: Minefield" signs, lay on both sides of the road to Stanley, the Islands' tiny capital of 2,000 people. In 17 years since the conflict, the locals have learnt to live with the mines. On the island of West Falkland, I saw a golf course next to a minefield, and one of the houses in Stanley is adorned with a mock skull-and-crossbones sign: "Danger: Karl".

Despite, or maybe because of the minefields surrounding it, there is an immediate charm about Stanley, with its multi-coloured roofs, with its quiet streets running down the hill towards the harbour, with its several little pubs, where some ancient ABBA hits are still played, and all conversation stops the moment you walk in. Complete strangers say "Good morning!" to you in the streets, and soon you start greeting them too. If you forget about the newly opened Internet Cafe, this is what a typical British village of yesteryear must have been like. Only this wayward ‘village’ has split up from its motherland and ended up 8,000 miles away, near the South Pole.

The smallest capital city in the world, Stanley has a life of its own. Shortly before my arrival, the Islands' first zebra crossing appeared in Ross Road - Stanley's main street, outside the Post Office. ‘Penguin News’, a lively local newsletter, wrote that: "police are now looking at ways to educate the public in how to use it."

The residents of Stanley might be still unsure of how to cross the roads, but they do love driving their Landrovers. Or, maybe, they simply do not like walking. I was constantly offered lifts from Upland Goose Hotel opposite the Post Office, where I stayed, to Malvina House Hotel opposite the Post Office, where I went for lunches and dinners, despite the fact that the hotels were no more than a hundred metres apart.

This puzzling reluctance to walk might lie behind a sudden proliferation of taxis in Stanley, where several years ago the only cab was the Governor's car, which doubled as a taxi, when His Excellency was away or asleep in his stately residence. Taxis and cars as well as houses are routinely left unlocked in Stanley.

"Familiarity makes crime difficult," Ken Greenland, the Falkland Islands' police chief, told me in his headquarters, opposite the Post Office. Murder is practically unknown here. When the corpses of two Chinese fishermen were fished out of the sea in the Falklands' territorial waters last February, a forensic pathologist had to be flown in from London.

The local Community School is the pride of Stanley, and its oblong modernistic building on top of a hill is the loudest architectural statement in town. Its state-of-the art classrooms and laboratories are among the best I've ever seen. But the school's main assets are its 150 pupils - all neat, polite and well behaved. Probably because there are few distractions in the Falklands.

"Kids are such a joy here: out of 150, I haven't met a single nasty one. They are such a pleasure to teach," one of the teachers confided in me.

By 9 p.m. Stanley goes dead. At this time, it is nice to walk along its deserted sea-front, under strange unknown stars, breathing in the amazingly clean and crisp air, listening to splashes of water in the bay and to the gentle rustling of the fern and Diddle-Dee - an indigenous plant similar to heather. During one such walk, when I was ready to believe that I was in Zurbagan, a fictitious town of poets and seafarers created by Russian romantic writer Alexander Grin, I suddenly heard the theme tune of "The Archers" from a house near-by...

After a couple of days in Stanley, I set out to explore the Camp. A derivative of the Spanish word 'Campo' meaning 'countryside', the Camp denotes "everything outside Stanley".

The area of the Camp, 4,700 square miles, is roughly equal to that of Northern Ireland. These vast expenses of windswept and tree-less land, comprising hundreds of big and small islands, are populated by 800,000 sheep and less than 200 people. With the near absence of roads, the only effective means of communication between the settlements is a small fleet of miniature Islander aircraft, whose pilots also act as couriers carrying food, letters, money and gossip from one settlement to another.

The Islander that took me from Stanley to Port Howard was also carrying beer, ice-cream, burger-buns and a teenage schoolgirl travelling to her settlement for holidays. Embarrassingly, not only my backpack, but also its owner had to be weighed up before the boarding, and, naturally, I had to pay for the excess baggage which was myself, no doubt. I suddenly felt like a self-loading cargo, probably even ballast.

Our four-seater was hovering low above the ground, narrowly avoiding hilltops and sharp toothbrush-like rocks. I was rummaging through my pocket in search of airsickness pills and looking down at the barren brownish plane, only occasionally dissected with dirt tracks. Wherever there was a hut, it meant settlement. The pilot would then pull the joystick towards his chest, as if trying to bear-hug it, Yeltsin-style, and the Islander would promptly land on a bumpy turf-covered air-strip to be met by two locals in a dusty Landrover, to which a cart with regulation fire-extinguisher would be dutifully and rather unnecessarily attached. Islanders are safe, and the only recorded accident happened several years ago, when the plane's chassis got stuck in a penguin burrow on an airstrip during a take-off. Luckily, the penguin was not at home...

"Port Howard is pretty large," I was told by a friend in Stanley. What can I say? Einstein was right: everything is relative. In the Camp, where most settlements have the population between 2 and 10, Port Howard, which numbers over 30 and boasts a store, a school with three pupils and even a tiny War Museum, can be regarded as a huge metropolis and a cultural centre, on a par with Birmingham in Britain, perhaps.

My host was Robin Lee, a farmer and a fifth-generation Falklander, whose great-grandfather came to the Islands as a shepherd in the 1870s. His farm has an area of 200, 000 acres - enough to accommodate several European mini-states.

Well-mannered and softly spoken, Robin toiled non-stop from morning ‘till night. His farm's main produce was wool, but with the world wool prices going down, he was desperate to expand and to diversify his sphere of activities. He also helped his partner Hattie, a sophisticated cook from Cumbria, to run the Lodge - a warm and cosy B&B, with by far the best food in the Falklands.

"The most unpopular person here is the one who is not prepared to help others," he said from behind the wheel of his Landrover at the start of our quick - only half-a-day-long - drive around his farm. To illustrate his point, he showed me an abandoned hut that used to belong to Mrs McCuskie, who lived there on her own in the 1980s. Coincidentally, it was straight above her house - the only dwelling for miles around - that the antediluvian telephone wires used to - literally - cross, and Mrs McCuskie volunteered to act as a telephone exchange operator answering phone calls at any hour of day and night and putting the callers through to their destinations. Only God knows how many lives she has helped to save and how many problems to solve. Mrs McCuskie has been dead for several years, and with the Cable & Wireless now operating in the Falklands, people can communicate without intermediaries, but the selfless lady is still fondly remembered in the Islands, and the bay of the Charters River, where Robin and I went fishing, is named after her.

And what wonderful fishing it was! Having hardly learnt to cast, I was able to catch five large spangled sea trout within just forty minutes. The fish could not wait to swallow my Silver Toby spoon-bait. "Time you spend fishing is not included into your life span," Chekhov once wrote. Indeed...

On the way back to the lodge, Robin showed me the wreck of an Argentine Mirage plane, with the paint on its twisted fuselage still untainted - a reminder of how relatively recent the Conflict was. A small crater near-by was filled with rainwater, and two silvery Steamer ducks were floating happily on the surface of this man-made mini-pond - a triumph of Nature's common sense over the cruel irrationality of war.

Having spent some time on Sea Lion Island, I started having difficulty with the term "wildlife". The abundance of birds and animals on this tiny - 5 miles long and 1.5 miles wide - islet is such that after a while you start perceiving them as the main - and only - legitimate form of life, and a handful of visiting humans as superfluous and largely unnecessary link in the chain of evolution.

It was our hectic life in overcrowded smoky cities that suddenly seemed wild to me.

Wandering on my own along the beaches, I did not feel alone for a second, for I was rubbing shoulders with thousands of red-nosed Gentoo penguins walking to and fro past me in their black-and white business outfits like leisurely lunch-time shoppers in Oxford Street, bumping into each other and into myself and moving on without apologies. They were demonstratively ignoring me, and I was ignoring them until I inadvertently stepped into a puddle of their droppings - the stinkiest stuff I have ever come across, let alone stepped in. It took me a good half-hour of rubbing my trainers with
"Travelwash" back at Sea Lion Lodge to get rid of the all-permeating stench.

And the elephant seals - these huge (up to 4 tons each) tubs of fat with smallish by comparison feline faces - lying supine on the sand and snoring like drunken octogenarians in a nursing home. They were all males - enjoying themselves while females - each male has up to 120 in his harem - were busy procuring food and bringing up pups. What a life!

The seals do seem clumsy, lethargic and too heavy to move - a cross between a garden slug and a cow. One feels tempted to pat a seal on his oily belly or even to carve some graffiti on his uncomplaining back. But this impression is deceiving. The seals can be extremely agile, when in danger or hurt. Some time ago, a man from Staley stumbled accidentally across one and had a buttock bitten off as a result. I heard he had problems maintaining his balance when sitting ever since.

While on Sea Lion Island, I seriously wished I were a birdwatcher. But even the absence of a spy-glass, a silly Panama hat and other essential birdwatcher's equipment could not stop me from actually watching all these Rock Cormorants, Black-Necked Swans, Red-Beaked Oystercatchers, Striated Caracaras, Turkey Vultures, whom I came to call Cookie Monsters - they do look pretty monstrous: the head of turkey and the body of an eagle - their names alone can make any aspiring British birdwatcher cringe. As for a spyglass, one actually doesn't need it, for most of the birds are totally unafraid of humans and are easily approachable. I got quite used to tiny black Tussock birds pecking matter-of-factly at my shoes.

But the bird that I truly fell in love with was the famous Upland Goose. There are only about 300 of them left in South America, but in the Falklands they are still present in their thousands. You can see them everywhere: crossing the main street in Stanley, mingling with sheep in the Camp, or bravely waddling across a minefield. The thing that attracted me in Upland Geese was not just their natural grace and beauty - they have long necks, shapely bodies and lovely striped feathers, but their devotion to their families. Upland Geese mate for life and always walk and fly either in couples, or in extended families of four or five. They are very protective of each other, and males always hurry to the rescue of their partners, when the latter are in danger - what a difference to the blatant male chauvinism of elephant seals (and of some of the humans)! I couldn't help admiring these wonderful birds and thinking that by creating them Nature was trying to teach us humans a lesson.

In the Falklands' Government Archives in Stanley, I was shown a bulky folder of hand-written dispatches to London from Richard Moody, the Islands' first British Governor. In Dispatch 13 of 1842, he writes: "The settlers best adapted to colonise these Islands would be from among the industrious population of the Orkneys and the Shetlands, accustomed to a hardy life and as much seamen as landmen..."

This observation stands true 157 years later: the Falklanders remain a special breed. Torn away from their historic motherland, they nevertheless tirelessly cling to their roots defying the notorious ‘tyranny of distance’. They are flexible, hard working, extremely adaptable and always happy to help each other. Just like in the days of Governor Moody, when people in isolated settlements did not see any fellow humans for months on end, they still greet their guests with substantial 'smoko' - tea with mountains of home made cookies. Just like in the past, they are always happy to provide shelter for their fellow outcasts from all over the world - that was probably why I felt almost at home in the Falklands. And the country itself has a hardy resilient character of its first settlers: in a matter of years, despite the war and the continuing intimidation, it has travelled a long way - from a semi-forgotten impoverished outpost of the shrunk British Empire to the prosperous and self-sufficient state, with a gross domestic product equivalent to £12,000 a head, one of the highest in the world.

Interestingly, among 250 or so 'land-based' visitors coming to the Islands each year there are a number of escapists. Travelling in the Camp, I came across recent divorcees, who had come to the Islands "to recover"; the bereaved, grieving over the loss of a loved one; and simply dreamers fleeing the suffocating reality of modern Europe and America. Remember Oscar Wilde: "Society can forgive a murderer, but it never forgives a dreamer"? " The Falklands forgive dreamers. This distant country, whose soil is stuffed with unexploded landmines, gives them a warm welcome, a hearty smoko and coveted peace of mind.

Is it because, in their heart of hearts, the hardy Falklanders are themselves dreamers? One has to be a dreamer to be playing golf next to a minefield…

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