South America - Around Cape Horn

This is kind of dated since Nancy & I went on this cruise last year, but since now is the time when folks think about booking SA cruises for next winter, I thought I'd post our memories and invite you all on a virtual cruise.

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Sunday 2/29/04 from the Claridge Hotel before we head over to the ship.

2/25/04 Thursday:

It was warmer in Tierra del Fuego yesterday than it was in Palm Springs. I guess that is good news for the trip. Of course, the reality is that PS had a cold day. Still 45 to 60 degrees F is perfectly acceptable for traveling.

We flew from SFO to LAX via Alaska since we cashed in almost all of our miles to make this flight. Alaska then put us up on LanChile for the remainder of the trip to Buenos Aires via Lima and Santiago.

The one really odd thing about this trip, for us anyway, is that we consciously decided to spend money to go upscale for the journey. We usually find hotels that are clean and have soap in the shower, but it is okay if they don’t have shampoo -- how’s that for knowing our exact market niche?

This time, we booked a more luxurious cruise ship and a four star hotel on each end. Of course, Nancy being Nancy, we managed to find incredible bargains but still there is this extra bit of money we are spending that we didn’t absolutely have to. So now, we can not only talk about "Is it worth the money," but also "Is it worth the extra money?" Gosh -- a whole new dimension to our conversation.

Because we booked business class with our miles, Alaska and LanChile put us up in the VIP lounge between flights and otherwise treated us very nicely. My first thought was that it is worth at least some additional money to be treated like a human being rather than a sardine, but on further reflection, I keep asking myself "why can’t everyone be treated like human beings?

Perhaps, because in this context, we are "consumers" rather than human beings. The economists have a saying that bad money will always drive out good money, and it seems to me that with capitalism in general, cheaper ways of doing things will always drive out more expensive ways. What you end up with, however, are hotel rooms in Tokyo the size and double the height of a coffin, good old tourist class on airplanes and utter chaos and misery in the boarding lounges themselves.

So, if you pay a whole bunch more money (or airplane miles), you too can have granola and fresh fruit in the VIP lounge for breakfast rather than a pack of peanuts tossed across the aisle to you. We also got an express pass through the security checkpoint, larger seats, more leg room, more reclining room, a cup of coffee before takeoff, wine with each course of each meal -- love those omelets and Chardonnay for breakfast -- plus newspapers, pillows etc. You know, you could get angoraphobia -- or is that the fear of wool sweaters? -- from the distance between the seats in business class. I couldn’t reach the pocket in the back of the seat in front of me without unbuckling my seat belt and standing up. I never had to move in order to let Nancy ourt of her window seat. It took the first 7 hours of the flight just to understand all the controls for adjusting the seat plus selecting among 10 movies on our personal screens. It made a looooong flight bearable.

I can now say that I’ve visited Peru, but the reality is that it was a 20 minute jaunt through the transit lounge as the plane refueled. I might have to come back to cover the rest of the country. Santiago was an hour and 45 minutes in another transit lounge. We arrived in the dark and took off after dawn. We were so tired that we almost missed seeing the Andes explode up from the ground immediately after taking off from Santiago. You could shave with those mountains. Razor sharp edges.

My Spanish sure has gone downhill. I tried to get ice in my coke on the airplane and could see that my words weren’t making a connection with the stewardess. I took me hours to realize that I had been trying to get ice cream rather than ice in my coke.

I’m going to quit for now. Nancy wanted me to give a preview of Buenos Aires, which I promise to cover next time. It certainly is a city worth visiting. Wide, tree-filled streets, old european style buildings plus some modern ones too. Neither one of us are city visitors, and we both feel that we could spend time here.

Rick & Nancy

Thursday February 26, 2004 – landing in Buenos Aires

My first impression of Porteños (people who live in the port of Buenos Aires) was that they wear incredible shoes. The shoes were definitely upscale. The rest of the clothes were very casual until we got to the fanciest neighborhoods. Then everything was upscale.

Driving in from the airport, it is obvious that Porteños collect things, at least on a municipal basis. There were multiple collections of 10 or 15 apartment buildings, all of the same size and shape. In some ways, it looked like the Latin equivalent of the sets of apartment buildings that crowd the approaches to Manhattan, except these were concrete rather than brick.

We booked a ride from the airport with the Claridge Hotel, and our driver’s style made me think that Buenos Aires drivers are like Italian cab drivers in Boston. Our guy had an incredible sense of the exact dimensions of his car, and unfortunately since this is a metric country, he was able to squeeze into tight spaces not with inches, but with millimeters to spare. As in Italy, traffic lanes are a matter of ad hoc consensus, and the drivers are all balancing temporal need on the knife edge of vehicular self-expression. It is nothing more than survival turned into an art form.

Friday morning at 4 am … – sounds like that came from a Beatles song, doesn’t it – February 27, 2004. Yesterday, we walked around the downtown area of BA and bought a boat ticket to Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay for today. Our hotel is in the downtown area, but away from the business buildings. We can walk out the door and Calle Florida – a pedestrian shopping street is at the corner. Four blocks to the east is the middle-aged port, Puerto Moderno that has been converted to a Jack London Square sort of place. Condos here sell for $250,000 US. It is new and safe, and therefore, expensive.

It is hard to explain how nice Buenos Aires is. The buildings are a mixture of European and modern. The streets alternate between narrow and wide, and the people are friendly. We could definitely come back for a week or more of explorations, and neither one of us particularly like to spend time in cities.

Sometimes it is hard to understand even the simplest Spanish that is directed to me. Argentina was originally settled by Italians and Germans along with some Welsh. When you couple that with the Spaniards from the Canary Islands and the Portuguese influence from Brazil, there is a “susch-susch” sort of way of talking that sounds, to me, like the speaker is chewing on his inner cheeks while talking.

So anyway after getting back to sleep at 4am and then getting up at a normal time, we set off to Colonia Uruguay. Both the Argentineans and the Uruguayans seem to love border officials with stamps for your passport and forms to fill out. We must have filled out a couple of pages in our passports just getting across the Rio de la Plata – the Silver River which is colored brown – but was originally thought to flow from the silver mines in Bolivia. The mouth of the river is 120 miles across, so crossing it is like sailing across Lake Eire – flat, endless and utterly non-scenic.

When we arrived in Colonia, we discovered that we had been booked on the Spanish tour with the cheap lunch – canned ham and canned pineapple – by the utterly uninterested ticket seller. The only reason I remember her is that she was wearing the first bare-midriff pregnancy outfit I’ve ever seen. Anyway, when we arrived in Colonia, they insisted on moving us to the English tour and charging us more money to speak in English and to consume the fancy lunch. The bus tour of the area in general was kind of neat. We went to a bull ring that had been abandoned in 1912 and a casino that closed shortly thereafter. It seems that Uruguay had two periods of prosperity, one around 1912 and one around 1930 when they were the banking center of South America.

Their economy crashed when Argentina's collapsed in 2000, and things have been pretty tough since then. There were very few cars on the streets, and everything looked run down due to a lack of capital to fix it up again, but not dirty and poor the way Mexico appears.

After lunch, the guide walked us through the old part of Colonia. It is somewhat older than Antigua Guatemala, but not as nice to visit. The town doesn’t have a purpose or a center or a focus. It is interesting to look at the clash between the Spanish and the Portuguese styles of houses, roofs, paving stones etc., but all in all it is a one-day trip only for those who have never been to Antigua.

We bought a maté spoon – more about the tea later – and Nancy found a weaving to wear as a poncho/coat. It is natural dyed, hand woven and cost $21.00

We took the boat back to BA and arrived in time for a tango demonstration. Walking over to the tango place, I couldn’t help but notice the beggars on the streets. They didn’t look poor or squalid. They are obviously folks who got caught in the economic collapse. The one that I particularly remember is a mother with a babe in arms. She was standing up, and had her hand out to a Porteño. He had this almost evil, embarrassed smile on his face. She wasn’t going to beg from foreigners, and you could just see the thoughts behind the words. She thought he owed her because he had survived the collapse, and he thought that it was impossible to give to her and to everyone else who needed help because that would destroy him financially. I don’t know how it all turned out. Not well for anyone, I suppose.

Alas, what can I possibly tell you about the tango? To Argentineans who invented the dance and to Uruguayans who invented the dance (they both claim it), tango is like flamenco to the Spaniards. It is a national dance that expresses the soul of the culture, but still, it is something that one goes to look at rather than to perform. Yes, there are some tango clubs – known as milongas, but mostly, it is like a Greek American going to a Greek restaurant and, having dinner and watching a belly dancer.

Tango started as a dance between two men in whorehouses as they were waiting for their turn with the prostitutes. When I first heard that, I thought “gay”, but when I saw it danced out, it seems more like an alpha-dog competition to see who gets which partner etc. Eventually, tango went mainstream. It is still a really sexy dance. Deliberately so. A good tango dancer, male or female, can strut their sexuality in the dance the same way that Joe Montana could come onto the field in a 49ers football game when they were behind by 5 points with 1:45 to go.

Interestingly, a tango couple rarely looks at each other. There is this isolated separate quality to the dancing that creates some of the tension and keeps it a dance of sexuality rather than vulgarity.

That’s if for Buenos Aires. Next time, I’m getting on the ship, Celebrity’s Infinity.

Rick (& Nancy)

I finally posted my pictures from South America.

They can be found at http://ricktalcott.smugmug.com/Travel

You don't have to log in or give your email address etc.

No spam will come your way.

Comments are welcome and much appreciated.

Rick

Previously on the marathon travelogue….

That’s it for Buenos Aires. Next time, I’ll jump to getting on the ship, Celebrity’s Infinity.

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But wait, before we leave -- one thought that I will probably never be able to answer and that Nancy thinks (probably correctly) that I am projecting myself into…

I noticed that the Porteños I talked with really, really thought of themselves as Europeans living in South America. Buenos Aires is, to them, a suburb of Europe. They had pride in the architecture and in the acoustic qualities of the opera house etc. The questions that I had about that were:

1. How is that cultural self-image affected when the Europeans don’t give a damn? If just doesn’t matter to anyone in Europe, because Argentina isn’t on their thought horizon at all. Sort of the equivalent of a 10 year old on the other side of the fence wanting to be part of a cool in-crowd of 12 year olds.

2. Does the Argentine self-image of being European affect Argentina’s ability to interact with Chile? It is way too soon for me to even guess anything about Chile. I don’t know if Chileans think of themselves as European at all. From what I’ve read, Chileans and Argentines don’t particularly like each other.

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Anyway, on to the Celebrity Infinity where it costs 75 cents a minute to send email but they don’t charge you for computer time when you are not on the internet. That means you can compose for free and only pay to send.

80% of the passengers on cruise ships are Americans. The whole thing started back when there were cruise liners as opposed to cruise ships. (Liners went from one point to another. Mostly from Europe to America and back in the days before planes.)

When cruising began as a vacation in itself, some of the old ideas of class differential were carried over, and the cruise lines in the discreet American fashion catered to that. Except in the QE2 and the new Queen Mary 2, we don’t have portions of the ship ostentatiously separated off by wealth, and nowhere do we have them separated by birth. The only Lords and Ladies in American society are based on money, pure and simple. Old money can take their own damn boats.

To my thinking, when cruise ships became a mass-market vacation, they started off with the idea of showing the middle class how the rich folks lived. That is, you too can live like a rich guy for a week if you just pay the money for a cruise. The only trouble, if you want to define it as trouble, is that the market driven reality was that the companies supplied the consumers with their own dream of how the rich folks lived rather than the actuality of it. What you received was an upscale version of Denny’s.

Once the market found the bottom, say Carnival or a similar line, things began to differentiate. One of the fascinating things, to my mind, is how the vision of cruising has changed as folks became more sophisticated and discovered that (mostly) it was impossible to be treated as a rich guy. Princess Lines, for example, flat out admits that you won’t be treated as a king or queen. The most you get is to be second-tier royalty. Celebrity took another tack and decided that what folks wanted is to be treated like a movie star. That is, you are famous for a week and treated as a special person. You get more than 15 minutes of fame.

On Celebrity ships, this produces some odd quirks in the behavior of the crew. You get this weird mix of friendliness and service. For example, our cabin attendant shook hands with us as he introduced himself and put himself at our service. There is a tuxedo and white-gloved attendant at the head of the casual buffet restaurant who provides a cheerful “Good Morning” that is straight out of a Wal-Mart visit. Meanwhile, when you come out of the buffet line, there are waiters to carry your tray to your table.

In case I didn’t make it clear, Nancy & I have entered the upscale cruise market for this trip. It is a graduated society full of tiny increments of prestige attained at economic cost. Some are worth it. We have a balcony as opposed to an interior room or an outside room with only a non-opening window. That entitles us to eat in the upstairs portion of the dining room. We didn’t get the slightly larger balcony room, which we could have had for $200 more. Nor were we tempted by a suite or even the ultimate royal or presidential suites. I don’t remember what the super suites cost on the Infinity, but on the Holland America’s 106 day cruise around the world, the small balconies cost $21,000 and the super suite costs $241,000. Of course, the super suite comes with your very own private butler to wind up and do with as you please.

If you get tired of being a rich frog in a small pond, you can move up to the super-luxury cruise lines like Seabourn or Silver Sea. There is an overlap in that the prices for the more expensive rooms on our ship are in excess of the cheaper suites on the super-luxury liners. So the question is, “do you want to be top dog here, or a smaller dog in a richer yard?” Good question, and one that you are forced to grapple with when you decide to cruise. You must define yourself economically, or the marketing folks will take extra money from your failure to do so.

I don’t know when I have seen so many pushy rich folks in one place. It kind of reminds me of the Survivor television shows where the producers put 14 alpha dogs into a small space and watch them swirl around each other as they fight for superiority.

As one of many, many examples, Nancy got into an elevator at the hotel that required her to use her room card as a key to make the elevator go from floor to floor. There was another woman on the elevator who had already keyed in her card so that the elevator would take her to a floor higher than ours. The lady had a fit and wouldn’t let Nancy swipe her card and thereby create an intermediate stop.

You see that kind of stuff over and over again. It is great entertainment, but it can get hectic trying to get on the bus from the pier to town. Yesterday, it took us 4 buses before we could get on the shuttle due to the elbowing (almost always by ladies) at the entrance. My favorite of the day was the lady who elbowed her way on in front of me and then saved a seat for her husband. The bus driver took off for town when he had 32 people on the shuttle, and not one of them was her husband. The lady was still yelling at her husband out the bus window for not getting on, and she wouldn’t let the guy standing in the aisle sit down in the seat she had saved for her husband. If you can’t see that as entertainment, you don’t belong on an upscale cruise. The guy in the aisle and I had a delightful conversation (in Spanish) about whether her husband had deliberately missed the bus, and then about the Peron years in Argentina.

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The first night we cruised from Buenos Aires to Montevideo, maybe 200 miles across the mouth of the Rio de la Plata and a bit toward the ocean and managed to arrive late to port at 11:15 the following morning. I have no idea why it took so long. Probably due to Uruguayan port officials, but cruising is essentially theatre with a show being put on for us as the audience. We never quite know what is going on.

I have long list of small things that are not quite perfect with the ship. That is a bit disturbing only because perfect, exquisite, etc. etc. is the standard by which the cruise line claims to operate. For example, at the theater show on the first night, the MC bluntly stated that the goal of the cruise was to give us the best vacation of our entire lives.

I really had an amazing (and cautious) reaction to that. My first thought was that that was a stupid goal to set. Second, that for Celebrity to reach for that goal was less likely to make it happen. Third, there was this small little boy inside of me wanting to believe in Santa Claus (or God) saying “Gosh, if only I could believe it will happen.” Essentially, this voyage has become a question of faith, or maybe a trial of faith.

I am impressed that Celebrity has the moxie to try for it, and annoyed at the same time since it forces me to constantly judge whether or not things are measuring up. What a waste of psychic energy. Maybe, though, I’d be judging things all along only with the question, “Is this worth the extra money?” Perhaps, it is better to focus on whether this cruise is wonderful as opposed to whether it is worth the extra money.

More in the next installment.

Rick (& Nancy)

The second day of the cruise was spent touring Montevideo which has a small-town, friendly feel to it. If Buenos Aires is Chicago, then Montevideo is Rockford, Illinois.

The bus driver of our Montevideo tour and I got into a conversation about maté, the tea that Argentineans and Uruguayans drink. As our Uruguayan guide sniffed (incorrectly, from what I saw), the Argentineans drink their maté from cups while the Uruguayans follow the traditional route of using a hollowed out gourd. Maté looks a lot like a chopped up chamomile tea. The gourd is loosely filled with the tea, and boiling hot water is poured into the gourd. The tea is drunk from a spoon-shaped tool that has a screen over the bowl of the spoon and tube in the handle that acts like a straw.

It is a social drink, and the gourd with its single straw is passed around the group of friends or acquaintances. Maté produces matteine, which is roughly equivalent to caffeine. The taste reminded me of over-steeped green tea that had been over-packed into a used ashtray. I’m told it is an acquired taste.

I really, really liked Uruguay. I freely admit it might have been that we had a wonderful tour guide – we bought the drive around town excursion – but it might also have been that Montevideo is a pretty cool place. We think of cruises as times when we “scout the territory” for a possible return visit. You just have to love a place where the tour guide tells you in a “common-sense” tone of voice that the prostitutes are eligible for public health benefits, but of course, they are exempt from the value added tax. Very tongue in cheek.

After leaving Montevideo, we spent two days sailing south on the way to Puerto Madryn, which is about half way down the Argentine coast. When we were part way there, the captain came on the public address system to announce that the starboard thruster was showing signs of abnormal wear, and that we would have to cut our speed. Two engineers were being flown in to look at the motor, but in any event, the Falkland Islands portion of the trip was being cancelled and maybe Puerto Montt in Chile as well. They promise to make it up to us, somehow, at the end of the trip. Much more on that later.

Sea nights are usually formal nights. Tux or dark suits. Other nights alternate between informal – jacket and slacks and casual. The whole dress up thing is something that Nancy takes a great deal of pleasure in, so I go along with it almost willingly.

This cruise, there are fewer passengers refusing to conform to the dress code. Maybe that is because there are now casual cruises, and maybe it’s because rich people find it important to dress for dinner. I noticed that at my father-in-law’s country club as well. There are certain standards that one must maintain.

Every night we get a show in the main theatre. Alternating nights the shows feature a chorus line, singers and a 7 piece orchestra. The other nights we get guest entertainers. I have to admit the shows are pretty good. They have managed to present a lot of South American material from tango dancing, songs and gaucho. “Gaucho” is the Argentinean equivalent of the American cowboy.

Puerto Madryn was a bit of a bust. The area is part of what the Argentineans (or the cruise ship marketers) call “Patagonia.” To me it looked like flat California scrub with few, it any, trees.

So far, the cruising on the ship has been good, but the ports only so-so. The excursions are hugely overpriced (which Celebrity tells you in their materials even as they sell them to you. If I were doing this cruise all over again, I’d fly to Tierra del Fuego and take one of the smaller cruise ships that stay in those waters. Nancy would veto that, however. She likes the shows and the dress up of fancy cruising, and, more importantly, the bigger the ship, the less it is rocked by waves and the less seasick she feels.

Before I go, I wanted to tell you that I achieved another 15 minutes of fame. The first night at sea, I went up to the bow of the ship and climbed up the odd assortment of stairways to deck 14 which is the out of the way deck that permits topless sunbathing. (Gotta admit, though, given the age of my fellow shipmates, there isn’t a lot of temptation to drop by on a sunny afternoon.) Anyway, the deck is so out of the way that it is fairly dark at night, and I thought it would be a good place to look at the stars.

When I got up there, there was one other guy with a palm pilot that had star charts. All you had to do was tell the palm pilot where you were and where in the sky the moon was at that particular moment, and the palm pilot would draw a star map for you. Together we figured out where the Southern Cross was. It’s funny, seeing the Southern Cross meant more to me than crossing the equator or landing in Buenos Aires. To me, it was proof that I had arrived in the southern half of the world.

The Southern Cross can be found by looking for two pointer stars in the constellation of Centaurus. It is just like finding Polaris, the star over the North Pole by lining up the outside edge of the Big Dipper. What is really neat about the two pointer stars in Centaurus is that one or the other of them is Alpha Centauri, the closest star to Earth (other than the Sun). There I am, science fiction buff for 40+ years, looking at where we are going to go on our first trip out of the neighborhood. Wow.

Much to my surprise, I also discovered that you can see Orion from Argentina, but it is rotated by more than 90 degrees clockwise. The sword points down; the belt is vertical; and the head is below the foot. That too, told me I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. I finally figured out that Orion is tilted over because (dummy) the Earth is round. Orion hadn’t rotated, I was standing at a different angle to it (so that my feet would still point towards the center of the Earth) and that was creating the difference in perspective.

Later that night, I went to the official star lecture, but the lecturer didn't show up. Rather than having a bunch of people be disappointed, I went ahead and told everybody what we had figured out. I still get 3 or 4 people a day stopping me and telling me how much they liked my star lecture.

Rick (& Nancy)

Really enjoy your log about your cruise. We are doing South America in reverse next year starting at Santiago, Chile. The then the second cruise does Rio for Carinvale. Let me ask you, Did you do only Celeberity Excursions while on the cruise portion, or did you hire some people for private excursions. Which ones are not to be missed, which ones to avoid

Many thanks

Norma

We left Puerto Madryn and headed south towards Cape Hope and, due to our previous engine problems, not towards the Falkland Islands. It’s been 2 and a half days of steady sailing (or steaming, neither of which accurately describe our propulsion system). We are leaving the sun behind in the north – at noon, the sun is in the north down here – and sailing steadily towards the end of the earth. The average temperature outside is dropping about 10 degrees per day, so we have gone from a high of 85 in Buenos Aires to a high today of 51 degrees.

We sailed south beyond the sight of land. I don’t know if that was a navigational choice or in an effort to find calmer seas or to stay in international waters so that the casino could remain open. The waves are coming from Africa i.e. the east, so they strike the ship parallel to its line of travel and create a sideways squishy sort of roll that is more pronounced than meeting the waves bow on. I love having a motion to the ship. To me, it feels like being rocked in your mother’s arms; like nature has announced both her presence and her indifference to the tiny chip of metal and wood that bobs away on the waves.

Nancy, feeling somewhat less poetic than me, spent the afternoon throwing up in the sink. She finally took a nap and slept past dinner time. Tonight was a formal night, so I was spared putting on the suit, and she was deprived of whatever spectacular outfit she had planned to wear.

Instead we went upstairs (updeck?) to the alternative casual dining room and had a casual dinner looking out at a sunset over Tierra del Fuego. What hardships we endure.

I woke up at 6 the next morning, just in time to claim one of the last deck chairs on the other side of the ship. Yes, the deck chairs are still there, and people are still in them, but now we are bundled up in blankets and jackets rather than bathing suits and towels. The reason I got up so early was that we were rounding Cape Horn from 7 to 8 am. It turns out that Cape Horn is not a cape after all, but an island south of Tierra del Fuego. It has a population of 3, not counting the dog and the cat that reside with the Chilean family – or naval officers who alternate with them. You can’t even say that we are in the middle of nowhere. We are beyond that: we are at the end of the world. Take that feeling and multiply it by 50, and you can quite understand how the early sailors must have felt when they worried about dropping off the edge.

We had relatively good weather. Cape Horn drifted in and out of the fog, but the waves were somewhat calm, and the wind never went above 60 miles per hour. The gusts of wind were strong enough to shear off the tops of the waves and blow the spray 40 or 50 yards downwind. We did have one problem with the waves. The ship rocked so much that the water in the pools started having its own waves and exploding 15 feet in the air when they met the sides of the pool. When the pitching of the ship worsened, the hot tubs overflowed and we started having hot water sloshing around the deck as we were trying to watch the cape. What hardships we endure. Bear in mind, however, that this is good weather for Cape Horn.

In fact, the weather was so good that our Chilean pilot (our captain emphasized Chilean, and his voice made it sound like it was required that we recognize that these are Chilean waters, and it is only a Chilean pilot could safely guide us around the Cape) steered the ship all the way around the island and even came within 800 meters from the shore at the inhabited end of the island.

The southernmost point on Cape Horn is roughly 800 miles from the edge of Antarctica. You can’t quite see it, nor can you feel it the way that you can feel the North Pole, even in Iowa, on a wintry day when the winds sweep down and announce the existence of ice and snow. For that, you have to take one of the smaller cruise ships that actually go to Antarctica.

I bought a cap that says Cape Horn on it just so that I could remind myself that I was actually here. It is interesting to me. I’ve lived in Japan; I’ve visited Sri Lanka off the coast of India, yet neither of those places feels “far away” like Cape Horn does. Granted that Sri Lanka is hours, days, months away from home, depending upon your mode of transportation, but those places don’t have the “edge of the world” feeling that Cape Horn does. That is one of the things that makes the trip worth while.

Rick (& Nancy)

...Let me ask you, Did you do only Celeberity Excursions while on the cruise portion, or did you hire some people for private excursions. Which ones are not to be missed, which ones to avoid...

Hey Norma -

Please let me tell you my excursions in the order we did them. I want to make sure I don’t miss anything.

We saw Buenos Aires ourselves since we were there for 3 days before the cruise started. For goodness sake, take the around town excursion however you can get it. We booked ours (for $10 US) through our hotel. I talked to some folks who took the tango evening tours, and they enjoyed that as well.

In Montevideo, we took the Montevideo highlights tour and loved it. Perhaps because of our guide but most likely because Montevideo is worth seeing. I never did get reports about the other tours.

One of the things you have to do is see the penguins. All is lost if you don’t do that. Basically, we had three choices: Puerto Madryn Argentina, Punta Arenas Chile and an island off Punta Arenas.

The Puerto Madryn excursions were 2 and a half ours each way over a dirt road to see lots of penguins. We didn’t bother. The folks we talked to weren’t enthusiastic about what they had seen. We just walked around Puerto Madryn. If I had to do it all over again, I still wouldn’t buy an excursion in Puerto Madryn. Two of our tablemates found a private tour over the internet and had a lovely time. Sorry, but I don’t know who they used or where they found them.

We never got to Port Stanley, so I have no first hand information. Most everybody I talked to said that the place is so tiny that you can walk to see everything.

In Ushuaia, Argentina you can take a cab up to the glacier above town. Everyone who did that loved it. We booked the Beagle Channel Navigation & National Park tour. Nancy & I got separated in the departure lounge; so she ended up doing the boat ride first and the park second. She hated it, and I thought it was one of the best excursions I have ever been on. The boat ride was rough and all we saw were the same rocks and tiny islands that you could go see from the ship. True, two of these islands had cormorants and seals on them, but I’ve seen seals around San Francisco, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. Inside the National Park, right at the boarding (or landing) dock for the channel boats, there is side trial to a vista point. It is worth taking. Here is the view:

http://ricktalcott.smugmug.com/gallery/241469/8/3757098

I think the reason my excursion was so much better than Nancy’s was that we went through the park in the opposite direction than Nancy did, and the camera angles were better. Also, we weren’t pushed for time in the park since we did that first.

FWIW, our bus ride into the park went right along side most of the “Train Ride at the End of the World” route that people paid $98 for and hated.

The summary on Ushuaia is that if you like landscapes, take the park tour having made sure that the park part occurs before the boat ride. The entire excursion is worth it even if the boat ride isn’t. If you aren’t wild about landscapes, then hire a cab to take you up to the glacier.

In Punta Arenas Chile, you have two options to see the penguins, and both are excellent. Basically, you have to decide if you want to really get into penguins. Lots and lots of penguins and lots of info about penguins. If you are that kind of person, then by all means, take the

Magdalena Island Natural Penguin Reserve excursion. We didn’t, mostly because it was booked, but our tablemates who did had a great time. The one we took was called the

Penguin Caves . We saw fewer penguins, had more of a walk getting to them, but had a nice bus ride through town and out into the countryside. Either trip is great. It depends on whether you want to see rhea as well as penguins.

As part of my research, I discovered Torres del Paine National Park. One of the upscale cruise lines (Seabourn?) offered an $800 day event to T del P from Punta Arenas. Celebrity did not. Since you are starting from Santiago, I’d recommend getting to Chile maybe 3 days in advance and seeing Torres del Paine National Park. You’ll send me Christmas cards for the rest of your life thanking me for the suggestion.

In Puerto Montt, we hired a taxi with another couple and took ourselves to Petrohue Falls & the Chilean Lake District It cost us less money than the tours, but not a whole lot less since the taxis on the dock were regulated. All in all, there is nothing you have to do in Puerto Montt. If you aren't interested in any of the excursions, by all means skip them.

We stayed over a couple of days in Viña del Mar, just north of Valparaiso. If you have an extra day, it is pretty and the horse drawn tour is nice. Also, and this is a big deal, at least to me, a museum in Viña del Mar has the only Easter Island statue that is located off the island. It is worth going to see. It is outside, so don't worry about museum days of hours.

Hope this helps some.

Rick

After we rounded Cape Horn, we went to the three separate places that claim to be southernmost.

Puerto Williams is a town and is the southernmost inhabited place that isn’t in Antarctica. We had to drop off our Chilean pilot there. Then we were off to Ushuaia, which is the southernmost city (population 40,000) and is located on the southern edge of Tierra del Fuego.

We were traversing the Beagle Channel, which is named – obviously, one hopes – after the HMS Beagle of Charles Darwin’s voyage. Basically, to get around the tip of South America, you can cut through the Straights of Magellan that separate the continent from Tierra del Fuego, or you can go south of Tierra del Fuego and pick the Beagle Channel that winds through the islands south of Tierra del Fuego. I have no idea of the relative merits of the two choices.

Ushuaia is in Argentina’s part of Tierra del Fuego. As you can see from the pictures,

http://ricktalcott.smugmug.com/gallery/241469/7/3757496

Ushuaia is a small city with steep mountains immediately behind it. Above the town are three shelf glaciers that look forever like they might drop one or more chunks of ice down onto the town.

++++++++++++++++

Time for a somewhat long digression on glaciers:

First off, if you want to see them, go to Alaska.

I thought this trip was going to be like Alaska in the southern hemisphere, but guess what, the equator does not create a mirror image of phenomena from one hemisphere to the other. The southern hemisphere has land at the pole (Antarctica), has little land at the end of the continents – South America narrows to a tip and Africa is further away from the pole and is narrower compared to the massive land formations of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia. Furthermore, there is a belt of open water that runs all the way around the world between the bottom of the continents and Antarctica that, coupled with the 14 foot differential in ocean heights between the Atlantic and the Pacific, really lets the sea act up.

All of these factors impede the formation of large glaciers in South America. The glaciers look like large sheets of snow on the mountains. Real glaciers are more than large snow or ice fields. They are so big and so deep that the sheer weight of the ice causes the ice to flow (very slooooowly). To get a real feeling of glaciers in action, you need to do two things. First, spend some time at the bottom of a glacier where it meets the sea. There, you can hear the ice chunks – sometimes as large as a house or more – breaking off and crashing into the water. Second, you need to pay a couple of hundred dollars to fly in a small airplane above a glacier. From that perspective, you can see that a glacier is an enormous conveyer belt that grinds rock dust off the side of a mountain and, over the course of 10,000 years or so, conveys the rock dust down to the end of the glacier and dumps it into the sea. (That is how Long Island was formed, by the way.) Looking at a glacier from that perspective is like being able to look backwards in time for 10,000 years.

Anyway, the glaciers that were in the mountains over Ushuaia were called “shelf glaciers” because they don’t go all the way to the sea. They start in the mountains and the end of the glacier is at a cliff in the mountains so that they drop ice and dust over the cliff as they break off.

++++++++++++++++++

More on glaciers later. In Ushuaia, we arrived at 6:00 pm and had time to wander around for the evening. Ushuaia, that evening, seemed filled with teenagers with nowhere to go and nothing to do. We tourists could, at least, wander around and pretend to shop. Truthfully, there wasn’t much to shop for. There were tenedor libre restaurants – literally “free forks” – all you can eat lamb restaurants that had one or more whole butterflied lambs opened up on skewers and roasting over a fire pit in the window. Nancy and I settled for coffee and ice cream.

Ushuaia turned out to be a port where it would have been an excellent idea to rent a taxi on your own for sightseeing. Some ports are like that, but you can bet that the cruise ships will never tell you which ones. Jamaica, which we went to last trip, and Puerto Montt, which we went to on this trip, had locked up port areas, where you could only take a company taxi and an exorbitant rate. I haven’t been able to find that sort of information on the internet.

The next morning we took our $106 each excursion. All in all, the excursions were expensive and offered less than comparable excursions in Alaska or the Caribbean. There was one brief disclaimer on the ship TV channel that mentioned that the excursions weren’t “compatible” with excursions on other voyages, but that sure didn’t stop Celebrity from marketing them as though they were.

All in all, I enjoyed the excursion, or at least the part of it that went through town and through Tierra del Fuego National Park. Nice scenery and nice descriptions of how folks live on Tierra del Fuego. I gather that Argentina subsidizes the folks who live in Tierra del Fuego. They must feel a need to have the island inhabited. I think that is partially due to the need to have people living on the land that the government is claiming, and also due to the fact that there is oil there. In any event there were military stations and everyone was very conscious of where the border was.

I wanted to put in a brief plug for digital cameras. Mine is an Olympus c-740. I am extremely happy with it. It has a 10x zoom -- equivalent to a 310 mm lens on the old film cameras. Moreover, it is small enough to carry around in a fanny pack. Not pocket size, but pretty good. I bought a bunch of memory cards, 1 gig, and that sure came in handy on this trip on two separate occasions - The Beagle Channel and the Chilean Fjords. It was just marvelous to be able to stand there and take picture after picture without ever feeling the pinch of needing to save some film in case something better turned up later. Marvelous.

Rick (& Nancy)

After leaving Ushuaia, we traveled west along the Beagle Channel and then cut north between some of the smaller islands to the Straights of Magellan and Punta Arenas. I couldn’t find many good maps on the internet, and the ones that I did either showed just Chile or just Argentina. At first I thought that was just another example of the lingering hostility between the two countries, but then I remembered the weather maps shown on Good Morning America where Canada is a blank space without weather or cities, plus giving you the impression that Alaska and Hawaii are both south of Arizona where I swore there used to be another country.

On one of the maps that I used, I noticed that the Falkland Islands are still shown as the Islas Malvinas (Arg.) with the main city of Puerto Argentino rather than Port Stanley. There is a lot going on in both Argentina and Chile that doesn’t get talked about with tourists and, probably, doesn’t get mentioned explicitly between Argentineans either. After all, if we are still talking about Freedom Fighters and Freedom Fries, maybe denial is one of those universal cultural traits.

Along the way from Ushuaia to Punta Arenas, (you can see the white spots on the maps) are 6 different glaciers that are near to the channel, and in one case actually comes all the way down to the water. I guess I’m a bit miffed at Celebrity. They timed the passing of the glaciers to be right in the middle of dinner. Over and over, I kept thinking that the trip could have used an editor. It wasn’t that the trip was bad, but rather that it could have been better. Mind you, the entertainment did connect with the voyage, but the food didn’t, and the lectures didn’t. At times, I was left with the feeling that Celebrity nonchalantly flung the Infinity at South America because they didn’t know what else to do with it.

So anyway, we arrived in Punta Arenas. Unlike Ushuaia, which started out as a penal colony, Punta Arenas is a real city. 130,000 of the 150,000 inhabitants of this region of Chile live in Punta Arenas. PA was the city on the route around South America since the Straights of Magellan were the main passage up until the opening of the Panama Canal.

Like most places in Chile, Punta Arenas is just a city. Yes, there is a statue of Magellan in the central park, but architecturally, the buildings of the city have all the charm of Toledo (Ohio, not Spain).

In Punta Arenas, we went on our penguin tour. If you go on this cruise, you have to go see the penguins. Nancy & I choose the land trip to the beach at Seno Otway – northwest of PA – rather than the boat trip to the island out in the Straight of Magellan. The island people loved their trip since they learned far more about penguins than we did. They saw somewhere around 10,000 of them while our site had only maybe 150. All in all, however, we both thought our trip was better for us since we received the city tour and had time to talk about life in Punta Arenas as well as looking at Patagonia – the treeless steppes – along the way. We went by coal mines, sheep ranches, wild rhea birds, gray foxes and so on.

If you are going to this part of the world, make sure to see the penguins walk. It is worth it.

Rick (& Nancy)

As I guess I indicated earlier, the starboard thruster malfunctioned and we missed Port Stanley. I wrote a letter to the captain at the time and to Celerity when we got back. They never responded, which I found distressing but unsurprising.

++++++++++++++++++

Greetings:

I wrote a similar letter to the Captain of the Infinity after the starboard thruster bearing malfunctioned on our trip from Buenos Aires to Santiago, but never heard a response from anyone. I was left unhappy about the missed port of call and the parsimonious (to me, anyway) "good will" gesture offered to the passengers. If you would like to respond, I would be interested in Celebrity's view of what happened.

During the voyage of the Infinity Feb 29 to March 14 from Buenos Aires to Santiago when the starboard thruster bearing broke, we lost our stop at the Falkland Islands. I was incensed when Celebrity gave us $150 per cabin plus a free drink after canceling the Falkland Islands stop on our cruise. To me, that was woefully inadequate. I did notice in Cruise News Daily, however, that the passengers on the Norwegian Dream only got $50 for two missed ports. Maybe I shouldn't have been so angry.

What is a missed port actually worth to you all? On our cruise, we passengers estimated that the savings on port charges at Port Stanley and the fuel savings due to the shorter distance to travel at a reduced speed probably equaled the $150 "good will" gesture that Celebrity made. To us, we lost one sixth of our ports of call, and, viewed from another perspective, for us to recreate the 6 hours in Port Stanley would require 5 days of our time -- 4 flying and 1 visiting -- plus the additional air fare. That was definitely a loss of more than $150 per cabin plus a free drink.

To me, it makes a difference whether the problem is due to weather or due to a mechanical problem. I don't expect Celebrity to guarantee the weather, but I do expect them to put seaworthy ships afloat, and to make it up to the customers when one of their ships suffers a mechanical malfunction.

When I read in Cruise News Daily that the Norwegian Star suffered the same sort of breakdown, that left that left me wondering:

1. Are the thrusters safe?

2. Are the thrusters reliable?

3. Is the maintenance routine for the thrusters adequate?

Our captain on the Infinity knew enough to cut back to 18 knots, as did the Norwegian Star. That would seem to me that there is an established protocol for thruster bearing malfunctions, thus indicating a recurring problem. That raises the interesting questions of

4. What is the actual problem?

5. How big is the problem? and

6. How long has this problem been around (without being resolved)?

7. Are the passengers getting screwed?

The last question is a bit pejorative in the phrasing, but it is an honest question nonetheless. I was left wondering if Celebrity was gambling on problematic technology that could have put passengers at risk. You certainly had a financial incentive to gamble in that the downside of the gamble -- this time, anyway -- simply cost you the money actually saved in port charges and fuel. The risks that weren't factored in were 1) the irritation of the passengers who were subjected to the gamble, and 2) what would have happened if we had had horrible weather at Cape Horn and need that missing power to maintain the ship?

+++++++++++++++++++

As I said, they never responded. In hindsight, Nancy loved the food at the "health" restaurant near the indoor pool, but the staff always left me feeling like I had only been given a one-day pass to the country club, and I was being judged as to whether or not I fit in. I guess I didn't or wouldn't.

I liked the Princess staff better even though they almost killed us in a tender off Cabo (another story), and I liked Holland America's food far better than either Celebrity or Princess.

I guess I would go on Celebrity again, but it would entirely depend on the destination rather than anything else.

From what I heard, the trip on from Valparaiso to Fort Lauderdale was unspectacular to say the least.

Rick,

Thanks so much for the excellent info. Your pictures are great! We're cruising Infinity from Santiago to Buenos Aires in January and your suggestions are very helpful.

Linda

Rick,

 

Thanks so much for the excellent info. Your pictures are great! We're cruising Infinity from Santiago to Buenos Aires in January and your suggestions are very helpful.

 

Linda

If you still have a choice of rooms, port-side is better in your direction and starboard going the other way. The ship did not spin to expose both sides to the views, like RC did in Alaska. If you don't have a good view, get one of the deck chairs early on the "view" days.

I'm glad I could help. I just loved that trip.

Rick

I feel as if I've just made the voyage! This was so much fun. The note about penguins was very helpful. It gives me a chance to sort out what kind of experience we really want. More of the area or just "pet the birds" kind of event. It also presented some ideas for what to concentrate on in other excursions versus having fun hanging around the ship.

Now I am going to print it all for DH to enjoy....with a map and travel guide by his side. I already have a large map of S.A. on the wall for reference. Oh will also print out the pictures.

BTW, the asides and humor hint that you have been a writer for some time. Any other travels you've commented upon? Best to your DW. How else would we know which itinerary would work best, if you hadn't had the mix-up. I can see the movie already abut the couple whose wife held the seat. What great chapters may have followed.

I realize sudden death is a shock, but once when working inthe E. R. we had to tell a wife that her husband, who had been mowing the lawn while she was shopping, apparently had a massive and fatal heart attack. She gasped, hunched her shoulders and clenched her fists. We stood frozen...ready for action. She dropped her arms, pushed out her chin and declared..."He can't do this to me!" Well, he did.

Blessings,

Gail

Hey Linda -

Now that I'm no longer such a newbie, would you mind telling me how one goes about getting a count-down clock to your next cruise inside of a signature?

I haven't the faintest idea of where to go or how to pull it off.

Thanks

Rick

BTW, the asides and humor hint that you have been a writer for some time. Any other travels you've commented upon?

As an almost retired lawyer, you could say that I have been writing asides and fiction for 28 years, but travel stories is new. I've sent out descriptions of vacations for years, so maybe that is where I found my voice. I was going to write up our last 2 crusies as they happened, but then discovered that Princess and Holland America charged for computer time, not just internet time. Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to pay 75 cents a minute to compose.

Rumor has it, that the UPS box delivered yesterday contains my birthday present which just might be a notebook computer with a Wi-Fi connection gizmo so that I can compose off line and just pay the cruise ships for sending email. Can't wait.

Rick

Punta Arenas into the Chilean Fjords

We left Punta Arenas in the dead of night and sailed out into the Straights of Magellan towards Australia. Unfortunately, just before dawn, we gave up on Australia and turned north into the Chilean fjords. Fortunately, I was awake for that little manoeuvre, and have the photos to prove it.

http://ricktalcott.smugmug.com/gallery/241469/10/3759186

Before we get to the fjords, let me digress a bit about the ship in general. The usual things: great gym, a decent supply of non-plastic deck chairs and the usual odds and ends. What we really liked was the – for want of a better word – “tiny” entertainment venues. There was a decent chamber music group that played in one of the lounges, a harpist who played at dinner. You haven’t had a great meal until you have had a formal dinner with a full moon just above the horizon and a harpist playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata just around the corner from where you are sitting (on the upper dining room level as befitting our status as balcony cruisers).

Everyone else at our table and in the whole dining room just kept going on with whatever their conversations concerned, and I was just sitting there in silence taking in the joy of having one of those absolutely perfect travelling moments, and they never saw/heard it at all.

The food in the dining room was perfectly adequate (sniff), but both Nancy & I can cook better. My mom can’t, but that is another story. The buffet lines were worse for lunch and breakfast. Holland America’s buffet lines were far better. One of the secret discoveries I made was that the little bakery on the 5th deck across from the cappuccino bar had fresh made chocolate croissants every morning. They were really well made, with good ingredients and served right out of the oven while the chocolate was still warm. You couldn’t get these anywhere else on the ship. Elsewhere, they would give you the equivalent of “grocery store box croissants.” I never understood why there needed to be secrets, but hey, tell that to Princess where the avocados are secretly stashed underneath the counter and only available on request.

Celebrity had a sushi bar in the evenings in place of one part of the buffet line. It isn’t great sushi, nor does it even try to pretend to be great sushi, but it certainly is a lot better than no raw fish at all. We made it a habit to stop by and have an appetiser before dinner. I mean, you gotta eat before you eat, right? We would take a small plate of sushi out on the rear deck and listen to the flamenco guitar player who must have been hired to play just for us in the twilight.

So anyway, back to the fjords. The Chilean fjords aren’t. The Oxford dictionary defines “fjord” as a long, narrow, deep inlet of the sea between high cliffs. There actually is a real fjord near Puerto Montt, but you won’t get there unless you hire a taxi and skip all the other sights (of which their aren’t many).

What they really are, are islands (islets?) like the inside passage on the way to Alaska from Vancouver, except that these islets are rocky and three-dimensional. The fjords have an entirely different feeling from the Beagle Channel that we went through between Cape Horn and Ushuaia. The Beagle Channel has an “end of the earth feeling” about it, coupled with smaller flatter islands and the definite feeling of a channel of water going somewhere. The fjords are closer to a loose maze of scattered islands. You don’t’ really have to weave through them any more than you do through Alaska’s inner passage, but still…

Here are comparison photos:

Beagle Channel:

http://ricktalcott.smugmug.com/gallery/241469/6/3755685

and a repeat of the view from the Ushuaia tour

http://ricktalcott.smugmug.com/gallery/241469/8/3757098

Chilean Fjords:

http://ricktalcott.smugmug.com/gallery/241469/11/3759903

http://ricktalcott.smugmug.com/gallery/241469/10/3759183

Now that I am thinking about it, I am wondering which direction is better for this trip: Santiago to Buenos Aires or BA to Santiago? We did the BA to Santiago run, but thinking it over, I’d be inclined to recommend going in the direction from Santiago to BA.

A big part of the cruise, for me anyway, was the feeling that I was actually going somewhere rather than making a round trip to and from Fort Lauderdale. Getting to Cape Horn involved a lot of water and sometimes you could see the east shore of Tierra del Fuego (“Fire Land,” as one of our tour guides translated it). In hindsight, I’m left wondering if traveling through the fjords on the way to the Beagle Channel and Cape Horn wouldn’t make it seem all the more like you were traveling to the end of the earth.

Give me some feedback on this one.

Rick (& Nancy)

A day on the ship when bored,

My English education I deplored,

Oh what: oh dear

‘tis hopeless I fear

I’ll never find a word to rhyme with “fjord.”

ricktalcott

Reference thrusters, yes, they are safe. They have been in use on passenger ships since at least the early 1960s (first ship I recall having them was Oriana of Orient Line, later part of P&O). The former Orient Line is no relation to the current Orient Line which operates the Marco Polo.

The bearings for the thrusters do take a lot of stress, and are fairly high maintenance, but certainly have proven more reliable than the bearings on azipod propulsion systems in use on some the newer ships.

If a ship loses its thrusters for some reason, they can still dock, with assitance of tugs, for they still have the use of propulsion power for keeping seaway and maneuvering.

If an azipod bearing goes out, the ship loses all movement and sea keeping abilities, and will be dead in the water until tugs come for a tow.

Many of the newbuilds continue to have shaft/prop rather than the unreliable azipod system.

> Reference thrusters:

Thanks Michael. I appreciate learning that.

Rick

Notice I didn't ask about the candles on the cake....am just intrigued by the "box". You will have to let us know. Is the next installment ready?

Blessings and Happy Birthday,

Gail

 

Now that I am thinking about it, I am wondering which direction is better for this trip: Santiago to Buenos Aires or BA to Santiago? We did the BA to Santiago run, but thinking it over, I’d be inclined to recommend going in the direction from Santiago to BA.

 

We looked at the 2006 itineraries and they showed Cape Horn only for the BA to Valparaiso trip and an extra day in port in BA for the reverse. I asked the salesperson onboard the constellation about this and she said that give the tides or sea currents or whatever, Cape Horn is easier to do in one direction than the other.

Hence we booked a starboard balcony for Jan 22.

Why would you recommend the opposite direction?

We looked at the 2006 itineraries and they showed Cape Horn only for the BA to Valparaiso trip and an extra day in port in BA for the reverse. I asked the salesperson onboard the constellation about this and she said that give the tides or sea currents or whatever, Cape Horn is easier to do in one direction than the other.

 

Hence we booked a starboard balcony for Jan 22.

 

Why would you recommend the opposite direction?

We looked at the 2006 itineraries and they showed Cape Horn only for the BA to Valparaiso trip and an extra day in port in BA for the reverse. I asked the salesperson onboard the constellation about this and she said that give the tides or sea currents or whatever, Cape Horn is easier to do in one direction than the other.

 

Hence we booked a starboard balcony for Jan 22.

 

Why would you recommend the opposite direction?

Hey dileep -

Nice to talk to another Bay Area person. We are in Berkeley. Wow, did Nancy & I ever get lucky. It never occurred to me that the eastbound cruise would be different from the westbound one. Since you got me curious, I checked out the Santiago to BA and BA to Santiago cruises. Much to my surprise, Cape Horn is a hit or miss proposition.

This year, Celebrity and Seabourn go to Cape Horn only on cruises to the west i.e. from Buenos Aires to Santiago. NCL and Oceania don't go to Cape Horn at all. Silversea, yes for eastbound, but misses both Cape Horn and Ushuaia westbound.

The Regal Princess, Holland America and the QM2 stop by eastbound. Parenthetically, I did discover a neat cruise that tempts me: Holland America has a 20 day cruise on the Rotterdam VI starting 1/11/06 that goes both around the Horn and to the Antartic islands.

I was musing about taking the cruise eastbound because I wondered if the feeling of sailing to the end of the earth would have been stronger if we had sailed through the Chilean fjords on the way to Cape Horn.

When we came from Buenos Aires to Cape Horn, I loved the feeling of "going somewhere" but the going somewhere involved a lot sea days, sometimes with the land visible to starboard and sometimes not.

I just don't know which way would be better. It had never occurred to me that one way was better than the other until I started writing this, and I am curious what others think.

I'll bet you will be happy with the balcony.

There was a lot of elbowing for camera space on deck.

Rick

Notice I didn't ask about the candles on the cake....am just intrigued by the "box". You will have to let us know. Is the next installment ready?

 

Blessings and Happy Birthday,

 

 

Gail

Thanks Gail. I wasn't sure anyone was listening -- a problem I have all the time with judges: the glazed-over-eyes look.

Another box arrived today which is some kind of color printer that Nancy had to buy inorder to get a larger than the cost of the printer rebate. It is a net profit to buy the printer and throw it away -- ain't America grand -- but an even bigger net profit to sell the printer on eBay -- ain't America grander. On the other hand, maybe it is one of those revenge hoaxes like a new toaster inside of a Christian Dior box that might have been given previously.

The next installment will be Puerto Montt where I will try to describe eating barnacles (no, I wasn't keelhauled) and Germantic Chile -- which sounds like a great dish from Texas. After that, Valparaiso which I didn't see much of and Vina del Mar which I did.

Rick

Lonely Planet’s web site, which is a bit backpacker for my age group, says: “there is no reason to go to Pto. Montt unless you wish to visit Chiloe Island.” Well, there weren‘t any Celebrity excursions to Chiloe, which is just to the southeast. That would seem to imply that us non-backpackers should simply stay on the ship content to shuffleboard and/or play shipboard trivia.

It wasn’t that bad, but it is hard to recommend Puerto Montt. It was nice, however, to stop somewhere, anywhere and get off the ship for a couple of hours. Another way to put it, is that Puerto Montt is better than Puerto Madryn, Argentina, but it doesn’t matter. The choice between the two towns is more of which one is worse rather than which one is better.

Puerto Montt is a tender stop. The harbor is sheltered and calm, so the tender isn’t a problem unless the weather is really bizarre. The pier area on shore is a locked facility so that only “approved” taxi’s can get in to hustle the tourists. Consequently, the taxi rides aren’t much cheaper than the tours. You will see a bit more with a taxi because you’ll have control over intervening stops, and you won’t have to wait for stragglers returning to the buses, however. Plan on renting a taxi for 3 maybe 4 hours. That is plenty of time. We went first thing in the morning and had the taxi drop us off for lunch in Angelmo. After lunch we sauntered back to the pier, shopping at the tacky souvenir stands as we went. We made it back to the pier in plenty of time, but without enough time to make it into Puerto Montt itself.

If you do elect to take a taxi, I’d recommend shopping first and sightseeing later if the weather is overcast. Puerto Montt is like San Francisco – cloudy or foggy in the morning and clearing in the middle of the day. The excursions will leave early, however, and if it’s cloudy, you won’t be able to see the vistas well. Nancy & I never did catch a glimpse of the volcanoes, and we had trouble taking pictures at Petrohue Falls due to the fog. The pictures at

http://ricktalcott.smugmug.com/gallery/241469/12/3761641

had a lot of help from Photoshop Elements in reducing the impact of the foggy day.

All in all, it is a fairly long drive out to the falls, but a nice enough place once you finally get there. The countryside on the way is okay – pretty much like rural Wisconsin only German in flavor. I doubt that we would ever go back, but if we did, I would be tempted to rent a taxi and set out to explore one of Chile’s true fjords, a narrow long inlet stabbing into the mainland that is southeast of Puerto Montt. I have no idea if it is worth seeing at all, but I love getting off the beaten track. If anyone goes, please let me know if it was worth it.

The tender pier is on the west side of town. A bit farther west of town, maybe a half a mile along the shore road, is Angelmo, another tourist town with a bunch of restaurants. 4 of us spent $84 for lunch at the most upscale of the restaurants. We though we knew what we were doing, but we were still stunned by the bill. We tried everything we could that was local, so I guess it was worth it. Barnacles, by the way, taste like crab only softer.

http://ricktalcott.smugmug.com/gallery/241469/12/3761637

+++++++++++++++

I’m not sure if this is a brief aside or a roundabout way of getting to where I’m going, but I think the greatest travel planning tool in the world is a Tivo. Our cruise started Feb 29, and the previous May, we told the Tivo to look for any travel show about Argentina or Chile (we forgot to tell it to look for Uruguay as well). The Tivo scoured the odd channels and the odd times and every once in a while it would present us with a surprise program. One of the best was Michael Palin’s Around the Pacific series that was excellent. It got us into the excitement of the journey months ahead of time.

Anyway, one of the things that I saw on Palin’s show on Chile was a Curranto feast on Chiloe Island near Puerto Montt. Curranto is the Chilean version of a New England clam fest with a pit dug in the ground loaded with clams and mussels and sausage and chicken and shrimp and everything else in the world. Sounds wonderful.

+++++++++++++++++

A curranto feast in Puerto Montt is nothing like what you might have heard of on Chiloe Island. In Angelmo, where we were, it consisted of a bucket of water on a stove into which a bunch of stuff has been dumped and boiled. It is cheap, but it is what drove us to the expensive restaurant where we spent $84 for lunch.

If you are traveling west from BA to Santiago, Puerto Montt is your last place to buy trinkets, tourist junk and so on. If you are going east to Buenos Aires only buy something specific that you will really regret passing up. There are better places to shop later on.

Rick (&Nancy)

And is this all there is to paraphase Peggy Lee?

I was looking forward to every single word of the journey and feel cheated to have missed your impressions of Val and Vina Del Mar and also the trip back home!

This was one of the most interesting and enjoyable reads that I've read on CruiseCritics (or anywhere) and I just hated to see it come to an end.

My DH and I are going on Jan 20 on Insignia to many of the same places you visited and I have made some notes from this trip report that will enhance *our* experience, so the least I can do is say a "Thank You".

Carol