Saturday we visited one of the very remote inhabited islands well off the coast of Chile. Isla Robinson Crusoe was formerly known as Mas a Tierra or Aguas Buenas. It is the largest island in the Juan Fernandez archipelago. They are designated as World Biosphere Reserves. The weather was ‘iffy’ gray and misty so we delayed tendering over until about 10:30. It seemed that most other people did the same as we had quite a wait for a tender and it was full when we finally did get on one.
The island has several hundred people living on it - it’s beautiful… just tall tree-covered mountains rising out of the sea. We hiked up to some caves that we could see from the ship. There were 6 or 8 of them and they appeared very similar to the Japanese caves we visited at Rabaul, Papua New Guinea last year and were probably used in defense of the island during WWII. There were also some very old canons displayed in places and signs that were depicting the historic actions in the 1700’s. Sadly they were all in Spanish so I really don’t know what we were looking at. I’ll have to Google more about it when we get home.
We also walked along the coast for quite a distance. You can see that they are developing for tourists as there were a number of restaurants and bars, but almost all were closed. We did find a nice café that had the huge spiney lobsters - many people were eating them, but we just had a beer and sat at an outside table for a while. While we were sitting there a rainstorm came through, but it only lasted about 10 minutes. I was amazed when we came back to the ship that we had been gone for three and a half hours - a good hike for a gimpy person like me - but I was tired when we got back and slept like the dead last night.
The weather is getting noticeably colder as we head south; we should start into the fjord area of Chile soon.
I’d love to report that our trivia team is far in the lead, but the truth is we are somewhere near the bottom and strongly maintaining that. But we love it and have a great group - we have 5 original players and two additional ones so if we are all there, one of us has to drop out that day as the teams are limited to 6. It’s actually nice to have the extra person as many days someone is missing.
The ‘bug’ that hit us is on the downslide - not nearly as many people are sick and they are starting to relax some of the really heavy sanitary measures that were in place - the gentlemen dance hosts are again available for dancing. They are still serving all the foods in the buffet and the constant sanitizing is still going on throughout the ship. We escaped the bug and I am happy to report that our colds are gone. I never really got sick, just the cold, but it sure knocked my energy level down to say nothing of the million tissues I used.
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