Well, so far so good. Loni’s pressure bands seem to be doing the trick. We had some bumpy seas the first night, but not too bad since then. Actually, mostly smooth sailing. We have two days at sea before we get to our next port, Punta Arenas. Thursday (today, as I write this) we wind amongst the Chilean fjords.
We overnighted in the open sea, and entered the fjords at about 5:30 this morning, but we failed to get up until nearly seven, so we missed some of the nifty stuff. The clouds have moved in, so when we did get on deck the skies were dark and we got pelted with the occasional brief shower. Sort of like the inland passage up from Seattle to Alaska, the waters are calmer in these waterways and, of course, the scenery is spectacular.
The width of the passage varies, and sometimes the mountainsides that form the glacial valley are quite close. Thank goodness for GPS navigation, as we do some of this stuff at night. Hey! The red coat returns!
Above is the outside pool. It hasn’t gotten a lot of use thus far, but it will probably pick up once we get to the Argentine side. The forecast is for 80’s to 90’s there. There’s also an indoor (greenhouse) hydro-pool area which is getting a lot of takers, mostly human cetaceans from corn belt areas. There are a couple of whirlpools and a larger pool with a zillion jets, and the whole place is sauna-like even in these latitudes. We haven’t yet tried it.
With all these clouds, the photography might as well be black-and-white, but it’s still way cool stuff.
After an hour of that I was more than ready to come back indoors and get down to the real reason for cruising: eating. As I said, we’ve been having a lot of fun meeting people at mealtimes. It always starts out the same. The waiter leads us to a table where there already are two other couple. I do a quick mental appraisal and, plagued by preconceptions built solely on visual cues, inevitably say “oooh, boy, this is going to be tough.” Happy to say I’m batting 0.000. Wednesday we sat down to hear the couple to my right speaking French, and the couple across from us seemingly so old as not to speak at all. Hit me with the dumb hammer. We had a delightful hour and a half.
The couple with the glasses to my right are from Montreal, and immediately shifted to English when we started talking. He’s a music composer, doing work for movies, t.v. shows, commercials, etc. I’ll have to listen more carefully the next time CNN comes on, as he’s done most of the intro music they use for their segments. He does a lot of work in L.A., but goes all over, most recently spending a lot of time in China on some project. The old(er) couple are well up in their late 80’s, been married 66 years, and are German natives born in Berlin. They now are into eternal summer; for the last 15 years, each year they spend the October-March months in Santiago and the rest in Berlin. They had us in stitches recounting their excursion in the 80’s on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Beijing, especially the feral camels racing the train in Mongolia. Memo to self: don’t judge by appearances, dummy. There’s a story in everyone.
The quail are what I had for lunch (!) today, on a bed of beet Carpaccio and Mandarin oranges. At this table were four older oriental folk when we sat down, and I was sure we were at last going to come up a cropper. Hammer, again, please. Two of the ladies turned out to be Malaysian sisters, one of whom lived in Singapore and the other in Switzerland. Both spoke good English, only saw each other on rare occasions like this, and needled each other throughout lunch. The other couple was originally Singaporean, but had lived the last thirty years in Australia and were citizens there. Except for the Aussie accent, their English was flawless. And somehow we had a great conversation with them all.
Lunch over, we wandered up a deck to the ice-carving competition (above), which was over in a flash – that guy was fast! Loni then went to a lecture on whales, and I strayed over to a team trivia contest. They’d already started, but I listened in. I got about 6 of the 15 questions right; the teams averaged 7 correct answers. The moderator was from Columbia, and fractured his English syntax. The questions were worded similarly, so I question where he got some of the answers. It actually looked like fun, so I might try it later in the cruise. Hey, it’s cold outside right now!
Let’s see, lunch ended at 2:00, and the lecture/trivia were over at 3, so what’s on the schedule? Ah, a 3:30 afternoon “fancy tea.” Well, all right! It’s been an hour and a half since we ate. Shameless. Utterly shameless. But, honest, I only had these two desserts, a mini shrimp sandwich, and a scone with jam and cream. Honest.
We had one couple and a woman at our table for this. The couple was from Lisbon, Portugal, and the woman was a Toronto resident originally from Israel. Yup, everyone spoke excellent English. The Portuguese learn it in school starting at age 4. Sigh. Just think of our education system. Anyway, another 90 minute gab fest about education, dogs in Santiago, and traveling around Portugal. The world gets smaller and smaller. Guess I should explain about the dogs. The Israeli woman’s guide in Santiago clued her in when she commented on the thousands of dogs she saw roaming the streets, seemingly not bothering anybody. He said at least 60% are household dogs whose owners let them out each morning to roam as they please along with the “street” dogs. Apparently, this socialization does wonders for the dog psyche, and they rarely fight and don’t bother anyone. Santiago’s municipal cleaners make sure there’s no dog poop left about, and more than one person on this trip has commented on how startlingly clean the downtown area is. And this in a city of 13 million! At night, the dogs dutifully come home to be fed and pampered by their owners. Crazy. Chile gets more and more interesting.
One last panorama from the stern deck. The line on the right is an antenna; that’s a snow-covered mountain in the center, not a cloud.
OK. Gotta close this down. After all, it’s only an hour until dinner. Give me strength.
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