You May Not Want to Visit Here

Iles Kerguelen: If you're just cruising around your map of the Indian Ocean one day (and I don't imagine you are), trace your finger between Cape Town and Perth, and a little south, and way out there in the middle you'll come across the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, one of which is Kerguelen. Access is only by ship.

We wrote about Kerguelen previously, in a post titled Really, Really Remote Travel, and quoted the web site DiscoverFrance.net, which writes that Iles Kerguelen's "weather is harsh, with rain, sleet or snow falling more than 300 days a year; it is not unusual to get snow at sea level in the middle of the summer."

Not much to be learned about these mysterious islands, I thought at first. Now I've found a bewildering number of pictures on a site devoted to Kerguelen, ile.kerguelen.free.fr. And a book:

Just a little bit into The Arch of Kerguelen: Voyage to the Islands of Desolation by Jean-Paul Kauffmann, it's making me smile. At least at first, it's reminiscent of a very funny book, Come Hell on High Water, A Really Sullen Memoir, by Gregory Jaynes, about a really long trip on a really slow cargo ship.