Chilean Fjords

Tuesday (Feb 21st) did not have good weather.  Nonetheless, a catamaran picked us up from our anchored ship and we sailed for an hour in heavy rain to Laguna San Rafael where we stopped at the San Valentino Glacier. 

We went out on the deck and stood in the rain for about 20 minutes in awe of the beautiful blue ice floes that were breaking off the glacier.  As you can see Betty was dry by the time we went to dinner.

After another day of sailing in the fjords we stopped on Thursday by the huge Amalia Glacier in the Sarmiento Channel.  This had not been a scheduled stop but we thank the Captain for this little extra. 

On the return we sailed by a shipwreck from 1969.  Apparently the American Captain said to his crew, as he passed some dangerous waters: "we're alright".  Unfortunately, what they heard was "turn right" and that was the end of that ship.

Friday was a great day.  We docked in Punta Arenas, a city of over 100,000.  Punta Arenas is extremely isolated and the next town/city is a 32-hour bus ride away.  From Punta Arenas we had a tour across the pampas (prairie) to visit Estancia (ranch) Olga Teresa.  This ranch has 7,000 acres, 3,000 sheep, 1,000 cattle and 6 working dogs.  We had a demonstration of sheep herding, a demonstration of sheep shearing, and then a lovely lamb bar-b-que.

Each evening (in addition to chocolates on our pillows) we receive a 4-page "newspaper" which summarizes news stories from Canada.  On Wednesday we were pleasantly surprised to find an article on our son Matthew.

Our very first cruise was in 2008 when we travelled around the bottom of South America on a Celebrity ship (from Bueno Aires to Valparaiso).  We thought that this trip would be essentially a repeat, but to our surprise, almost none of our stops are in the same places.  This is neither good nor bad as we are seeing some very interesting places that we didn't see before, but are not seeing places that we fondly remember.  We have friends who will be taking this journey on an Oceania ship next winter.  I am now most interested in examining their specific itinerary.