ACHTUNG, SENOR

The Germans are coming!  The Germans are coming!

So, where the heck are we going on this cruise?  Glad you asked.

 

That’s the overview.  Down the west coast and up the east;  Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay.  14 nights, although the first one started at 7 pm at Valparaiso, and we spend 2 nights on board while in port at Buenos Aires.  Our first stop along the way is Puerto Montt, a city of 150,00 people, up from less than 100,000 only ten years ago.  It’s the fastest growing city in Chile on a percentage basis.  It’s located in a terrific harbor that affords great protection for ships.

Although several tribes inhabited Chile’s long coastal area for thousands of years, there were no settlements or villages in this area prior to the arrival of the Europeans, specifically, the Germans.  Germans?  It seems that a German naturalist visited the area in the late 1840’s, went home, and began proselytizing the place to the then-famine-and-civil-unrest-plagued Germans.  A bunch of mostly Bavarians made the trek and in 1853 founded the town, naming it after the then president of Chile, probably seeking to insure good relations with the government.  The pioneers were rewarded with land grants of around 500 acres per family, seemingly huge amounts.  But remember that the place was utterly deserted and they had to create everything from scratch. 

We had paid for a ship-organized day tour through P.Montt and then up to the Lakes Country to visit two small towns there.  The ship could not dock in Montt because of the shallow bay near the town, so we had to take tenders in and out.  These things are rated at 120 passengers when used as a tender, and 150 when used as a lifeboat!  It was tight enough with the tender allotment;  Another 30 would be sitting on laps.  And, I wouldn’t want to be on the top deck if the seas were rough.

The organization required to get 2,000 people off the ship in just a couple of hours is impressive.  You first meet in the auditorium/theater if you are signed up for a ship-organized tour.  Your ticket has a time to be there.  Once there, you take your tickets to the stage and are issued a sticker with a group number.  You wait in your seat until your group is called, and then follow a guide down a couple of decks to the gangway that leads to the tender.  If the sea is calm, easy as pie.  We’ll see what happens when we get to Punta Arenas, but here it was just fine.  If you are going ashore on your own, you go to another place on the ship to get a number and wait there.  Ship excursions get priority in loading, as you might expect.

These days, the town isn’t all that beautiful, except for the setting.  There are the ubiquitous tangles of power and phone wires, a church interesting for the fact it is built entirely of Chilean redwood, save for its copper cupola, and the usual rundown buildings scattered amongst the newer mid-rises.  Chile, of course, lies on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” and holds the undesired record for the strongest earthquake ever recorded by modern instruments – a 9.5 monster that occurred in 1960.  It destroyed the port areas and seafront streets of Puerto Montt and completely leveled the nearby city of Valdivia.  This same earthquake sent the tsunami racing across the Pacific at 200 mph that hit Onagawa, Japan, and left Hilo Hawai’i devastated. 

The little wooden church at lower right above is a Lutheran church, a legacy of the German settlors.  The descendants of the German families still own most of the large ranches and farms that surround the area, and the architecture of the two Lakes towns we were to see were straight out of Bavaria.  Add the huge, beautiful Lake Llanguihue, and the four volcanoes that are visible, and it’s an idyllic spot.  Our first stop was Puerto Vargas, on the southwest tip of the lake.

This is a resort and tourist town during the brief summer, but you still have to be lucky to get a sunny day like we were enjoying.  According to our guide, it rains here 220 days a year, and was raining for 7 straight days before today. The vacationers were sailing and paddling kayaks, and a few diehards were sunning on the black (volcanic) sand beach.  I was amused to see that gasoline in this remote place doesn’t cost a lot more than at home.  (About US$1.80/liter.)Across the lake can be seen the principal Osorno volcano that looks a lot like Mt. Fuji.  It makes for a spectacular view.

Aw, we can do better than that . . .

I couldn’t believe those sailboats lining up so perfectly for the shot.  I nearly dropped the camera in the drink scrambling to get it before they turned.  How would you like to get up each morning to this scene?  We only had a 50 minute stop here, so not much to report.  The bus stopped right in front of an “authentic artisan craft” store where a pair of musicians were playing the pan pipes while singing a Mexican love song.  The crafts were just about as authentic.  Still, Puerto Varas was a beautiful place.

Next stop was the even more German influenced town of Frutillar, about 2,000 year-round residents, bulging to 20,000 in the summer, according to our guide.  I don’t know where they all were, as the place was pretty quiet.  It sits halfway up the west side of the lake.  It has a small museum of 1800’s German dwellings, a water mill, gardens, etc.  Quite pretty.

We had a whole (!) hour here, so we raced through the museum, including this shot from the period house of the view towards town, with another volcano in the far background.

We took a walk around most of the town, which was pretty compact.  Again, not much to see other than the view of two of the volcanoes

and the incongruity of all the German architecture in remote Chile.

Our hour almost up, and it getting on 2:00 without any lunch, we hustled back to the bus, parked conveniently next to the driver’s cousin’s café.  They made what looked like scrumptious desserts, but we figured we’d better opt for a non-sweet and got a meat empanada instead. 

We ate it on the bus on the way back, taking in the great scenery that our guide, Javier, was describing.  He’s a great ambassador for his country, as he kept saying, and his pride of nation was infectious.  He’s a descendant of the Mapuche people, one of the three coastal indigenous groups, and the one that fought the Spanish the longest.  We took the Pan American highway back to Montt, instead of the local route we took on the way up.  Back down the dock ramp to the tender after skirting some very slow, infirm folks.  They really should route the infirm & wheelchair types down one ramp and leave the other for the more able-bodied.  It would greatly speed the loading process as the creaky folks are true roadblocks for everyone else.  I’m amazed at how many people there are who can barely move that go on cruises.  Bless ‘em all, but it can get reaally frustrating to be caught behind.

Anyway, the ship is beginning to look like “home,” and the setting is perfect.

Once aboard, well, one shared empanada isn’t enough to last the 3 hours to dinner, right?  So, off to the free ice cream bar for a scoop of peach on the starboard side, then over to the port side for the “afternoon snacks” bar and a peanut butter cookie and a scone with raspberry preserves and clotted cream, with Earl Grey tea to wash them down.  Dinner?

Well, of course there’s dinner. This was one of the 3 “formal” nights on the cruise.  Ideally, they’d like the guys to show up in tuxes, and quite a few did.  But most opted for suits or sports coats.  Our open dining plan landed us with four new dinner companions (this pic taken by the waitress with her finger over the popup flash).

  

L>R:  Skip, Ruth, Maryjo, and Charlie.  Skip and Maryjo are from Kansas City, Mo., one of the many places I have lived, so we had some conversation opener there.  Charlie and Ruth are from New Jersey, and she was a frequent visitor to Ocean City NJ, the place where my family vacationed for about 15 straight years.  Skip is an ex-Marine, and looks the part.  Charlie kept us fascinated with tales of his brush with baseball fame, having been tapped by the Yankees as the possible next replacement for Dimaggio in 1953.  Unfortunately for Charlie, he took batting practice behind another newbie, Mickey Mantle, and got drafted into the Army that same year.  So much for fame.  He was a coach, athletic director, vice-president, and president of colleges in the New York area.  We never did get what Skip did, but he must have done all right for himself with 7 kids and now doing a lot of traveling.  This open table option has turned out to be a great boon.  We’re meeting interesting folks and having a lively time at every meal.  I’m sure there will be a disaster some night, but I’ll take the odds.