Fjords of Chile

We have been sailing down through the fjords for the last two days.  It is very beautiful, but the skies are gray, misty and sometimes rainy.  My photos are pretty 'gray' so I won't post any yet.  I'm hoping I can photoshop them a bit when we get home to pop the colors out of the gray.

Tomorrow we will be in Puenta Arenas... penguins.  Internet may become spotty so I'll post as I can until we are back out of the Antarctic..

Puerto Chacabuco, Chile

Tuesday- We are in Puerto Chacabuco, Chile. We are now in the Chilean Fjords. It is very beautiful even if it is gray, misty and raining. We came into the inside passage area during the night so when we woke up this morning about 7:00 we could see the islands all around the ship. We were moving along very slowly and by 9:00 had arrived at our anchorage off Puerto Chacabuco. Frank (the onboard tour guide) had told us that there is nothing to do in this port unless you were on a tour… over 400 people did go on tours so they restricted the tenders until about 10:30 to get all the tours off before they opened them to passengers going in on their own. Since it is cold and raining, we decided not to go ashore and have enjoyed a very quiet day on the ship. It is very beautiful outside and when the sun breaks through the clouds for a few minutes it is spectacular. Now if mother nature will be nice to us and give us blue skies… we have three days of scenic cruising ahead before our next port.


The Captain just made his announcements prior to leaving port - he said there was a big storm in the Pacific and that it would be very rough tonight as we will go back out there and then south before we re-enter the fjords about 7:00 in the morning.

Random Thoughts:

The plumber finally fixed the water pressure problem in our cabin on Sunday and now we actually have enough water coming out of the shower head to take a real shower!! Our cabin has a full sized tub, but I haven’t been able to fill it to take a bath. I tried one night and after an hour I had 3 inches of water in the tub so I gave up on the idea of a nice soak and just had a quick bath.

Although all of the crew is happy and smiling and friendly as they have always been on Holland America, I’m not sure how they actually keep it up - they have to be exhausted especially with the illness problem we had where the crew had to work many extra duties. The cutbacks are noticeable; the stewards seem to have to tend too many cabins and the waiters wait too many tables - service is just much slower than it was a few years ago. I guess if people insist on these low prices, something must go and it is beginning to show. If you have never cruised before you wouldn’t notice anything, but if you have been on HAL for 10 (or so) years as we and many many passengers on this cruise have, we all notice it. One passenger summed it up perfectly, it seems that the crew/staff are reactive instead of proactive.

After saying all that, it really is a great cruise and the ship is just the size I like. She is easy to get around and there is never a line to wait for anything. I’d have no problem being one of the little old ladies that lives onboard the ship. I haven’t heard of any actually doing that on this ship as there have been on several of our other cruises. Maybe they need a mascot ‘little old lady’…. hmmm I might apply!

Puerto Montt

Sunday night was Superbowl night on the ship - they had it in the cabins and also on the three screens in the Showroom at sea and in the Explorations Café. I watched the first half, but since we had a tour in the morning I went to bed at about 10:15 - Jim watched it all. Since we were pulling for New Orleans I’m sorry I didn’t see all of it. They had the showroom decorated for both teams and a ‘Tailgate Zone’ set up with munchies.

Monday we anchored at Puerto Montt. We had what might have been the best ship tour we have ever taken. We first went to a small town and had an hour to wander around and shop for handicrafts. It was lovely and very Bavarian-feeling - much German influence there. We walked a few blocks to a church up on a hill, took a few pictures and then headed down to the craft market near the bus.

After that we headed to a ranch called a fundo which is smaller than an estancia. It was a working horse ranch and we were treated to some folkloric dances by some children and then the cowboys (called huachos) did a rodeo type show. It was very well done, but we had to watch in from inside the dining room as it had started raining. This area gets about 10 feet of rain each year so they were well prepared for this. There were musicians playing traditional local instruments and singing. One of the dancers was a little boy, much younger than the rest of them… he totally stole the show! We were served wine and appetizers and then a full lunch with more wine and then dessert and a cordial… it could have been nap time on the way back to the ship, but we were only about 15 minutes from the port so there really wasn’t time.

It was dinner time not long after returning on the tender, but we weren’t hungry… we decided to have dessert and coffee. Then we went to the Crows Nest to listen to Buddy on the piano for about an hour. They off to bed… I think we only read about 15 minutes and we were ready for sleep.

Isla Robinson Crusoe, Chile

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.

Valparaiso, Chile

Yesterday was Valparaiso, Chile. This was our first Ensemble exclusive shore excursion and it was a very nice one. We started with a bus tour of the city which is much like San Francisco. It is built on the many hills that come all the way to the sea. There are many very steep and winding roads along with Victorian era houses and buildings. It looks like a place I’d want to explore a bit more. We then stopped at the Museum Fonk which is about Easter Island. Since that was one of my favorite stops on our World Cruise I really found it interesting. It’s a bit too bad that two tour buses from our ship arrived about 20 minutes ahead of schedule. The museum is quite small and it got very overcrowded but we had just about completed the tour with our museum guide, so we looked at what we especially wanted to see and then boarded the bus and headed for the Casablanca wine valley. We rode through the mountains for about 45 minutes - it looks much like the Rockies near Denver with some palm trees added among the pines. The William Cole winery was really beautiful and although it is a small family ‘high end’ winery it has developed a nice visitor program. We did a short visit to the vines where Carmen (our winery guide) told us about growing grapes and then we visited the cellars for a quick tour and then on to the tasting room. They served three different types of wine for tasting one white and two reds and then we were offered a huge selection of appetizer-type foods - really a full lunch. Afterwards we headed back to the ship - most people napping from the wines.

In the afternoon we had a good folkloric show onboard the ship with a group of local dancers. They presented dances from the four regions of Chile.

As we sailed away from Valparaiso, the swells increased just as the Captain told us they would and the ship has been doing a bit of rock and roll all night and today (Friday) a sea day. We are headed to Isle Robinson Crusoe if the weather and seas hold up. The Captain did tell us that the Amsterdam was here 14 days ago on the World Cruise and had horrible winds and waves and after sailing all the way out to the island bumping all the way along had to miss the stop and then bump its way back to the mainland coast of Chile. I love hearing the Captain talk about the ‘bumps’ as he says boomps, like bump with a long U. We are having a number of whale sightings and some seals and sea lions.

At Sea

Another day at sea. Well… Jim and I are getting really lazy; this is the second day in a row that we have slept until 8:30. That’s really unheard of for us. We did just have a couple time changes so maybe that explains part of it. Another might be that these are the quietest cabins we have had; you don’t hear anything at all from the neighboring cabins and the doors are all set off the main hall so you don’t get any hallway noise either.


This morning book club was delayed until 10:30 to accommodate the “On Deck for the Cure”. I made book club, but have to confess I didn’t get moving in time for the walk. They will have another one later in the cruise and I’ll try to make that one. Our Trivia team is holding firm to last place this time. It’s funny we seem to be able to win on some of the port days where they give little prizes, but we can’t win on the sea days for the cumulative scoring.

I’m not sure I mentioned some of the little gifts HAL has given during the cruise… I know I mentioned the journal and key holders, but they just gave us some (quite nice) hats and scarves all embroidered with the 2010 South America Grand Voyage logo. There have been a couple others too, but I can’t think what they are right now.

The temperatures are getting noticeably cooler as we are going further south. Today is gray and cloudy with a temp of about 70, but with the wind and no sun to offset it, it feels quite cool out. When I went to “Orca (Killer Whale) racing” at 2:00, everyone was wearing sweaters or sweatshirts. Orca racing was a cute take-off of the traditional horse race.

Arica and Iquique, Chile

We had two port days in a row. Yesterday we were in Arica, Chile which is only about 25 miles below the border with Peru. It is also very much a desert port, surrounded by the brown sandy looking hills. There was a tall hill overlooking the port with a statue of Christ similar to the one in Rio. Jim and I wandered through the town, but since it was a Sunday morning everything was closed up except the cathedral. The church was very interesting in that is it constructed of iron. There was a service going on so we were not able to explore it, but looking in through the doors it looked very beautiful. Then we hired a taxi for an hour to take us to the top of the big hill. On the way there, we passed the ‘resort’ part of town that had nice sandy beaches and resort hotels along with the discos. The view from the top of the hill showed how big Arica is - about 200,000 people. It seems to go forever; I had no idea it was that large - our guide showed us the green valley coming out of the hills which was the reason the city is located where it is… water is a necessity and it never rains here.

We headed back to the ship as Jim said he really thought he was catching the cold I had… by last night he had it. Talking to others on the ship, it seems that the cold has been going around for a couple weeks. But, at least we haven’t gotten the Norwalk virus which has also hit the ship - apparently brought on by some new passengers in Callao (Lima). (I’m knocking on wood as I type this). Yesterday the ship went on ‘protective measures’. Sanitizers are everywhere and anything that people commonly touch have been either put away or are being constantly cleaned. In the buffet all food is served by the staff and the common items like salt and pepper have been removed from the tables. The Captain and staff are everywhere explaining and it seems that about 90% of the people are accepting it and just going on with things… the other 10% are bitching loudly about everything.

This morning we docked in Iquique, Chile just as we were waking up. After my coffee and sweet roll I headed into town on the shuttle. What a grate town! The entire center of the town [city?] is a UNESCO Heritage site and is full of Victorian era wooden buildings. The central plaza has a wonderful clock tower and many of the buildings are being restored and painted bright colors. There were several little market areas with local handcrafts. It was one of the most unique port towns I"ve ever visited.  Everyone commented on how clean it was... even well away from the main square.

We've had a few internet problems over the last couple days, but it seems to be better.  I have a number of pictures to add to this post... I'll see how it goes.  :-)