Amalia Glacier – set in the rugged Patagonian fjords and mountains
Thursday 26 February
Another lovely day on the boat. Up at 7.30am for the aerobics class, a gym session during the day and then Geoff did some work and I knocked out the Puerto Varas blog. In between we enjoyed a delicious breakfast and lunch. But wait till I tell you about dinner…. it was Lobster Night at the buffet and Geoff was certainly not going to miss that, not only was there lobster, but most of the buffet was dedicated to fish…..mussels, ceviche, sea bream, scallops, salmon, a seafood salad and even the pasta was fish based – great for him, not so fabulous for me, but given the amount of food I am managing to eat every day (and that’s not counting the very more-ish oat and raisin biscuits that are readily available in every bar and café), I think I will survive. And let’s not forget, there is always the dessert buffet as a last resort! In case you are interested, Geoff had 5 grilled lobster tails as well as plenty of the other fish!
I got back to my room only to find I had problems with my laptop and was unable to access google chrome and type texts into my emails. It was so frustrating, especially as I am not good at technical stuff. But luckily for me, help was (almost) at my fingertips! Etienne, my amazing IT guy at Think Concepts in Auckland was my saviour! I text him a message to tell him the problem (and that we were almost at the bottom of the world – see the grey dot on the map below) and would you believe, despite the fact we were on a ship in the South Pacific Ocean, 1000 miles south of Valparaiso in the middle of the Chilean Fjords heading towards the Southern tip of South America and Cape Horn (see photo below) – he was able to remotely jump onto my laptop and instantly fix the problem! Technology, eh? Unbelievable!
Wednesday 27 February
After a night of rolling waves, more so for the passengers near the bow of the boat than us (that’s what happens when you travel with a sailor, he knows which cabins are the best to book – those near the stern, they don’t rock so much) we awoke to find ourselves cruising in to see the Amalia Glacier, which is part of Bernardo O’Higgins National Park. It skirts the northern rise of the Reclus volcano which is directly behind it. Amalia’s ice floe wound its way here a millennia ago from the Andes Mountains – a fractional segment of one of the world’s largest continuous ice fields, the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. This sheet of ice covered the entirety of southern Chile during the Ice Age.
So peaceful here as we slowly floated about taking it all in. The crew launched one of its motorboats and four of them went off to hook up some ice – you can see it in the front of their boat as they returned. We spotted a few dolphins in the distance – if you zoom in to the left on the photo with the crew, you can just make out the fin of one of them as it popped up out of the water! You’ll notice the photo of the thrusters on the boat looking like it is leaking diesel – in fact, the dark colour is the water from the seabed being brought up to the surface and disturbing the silt water on the top!
At 6pm we were invited to a caviar and champagne cocktail party with the crew – don’t mind if I do! The highlight of which was the unveiling of the ice, some thousands of years old, that was retrieved by the crew this morning – it was unveiled by our Captain with some ceremony and looked pretty awesome. As a side note, Geoff had retrieved ice when he was in Newfoundland and hopped into the dinghy to break some off with an oar, not realising how solid it was he had to return to Salanjo to get a hammer to do a better job. He said it was so compacted it lasted a few days without even being in a fridge!
Not sure I really want to be talking about shipwrecks given we are going around the notorious Cape Horn in three days, but The USS Riverside was a Bayfield-class attack transport ship in service with the US Navy from 1944-1946 and was sold into commercial service in Chile and renamed the Santa Leonor. On 31 March 1968 she ran aground by Isabel Island in the Smyth Channel. The story of its sinking and subsequent looting of the cargo, which included furniture and toilet bowls(!), by the local community is apparently much talked about in this area. And now she is bow first in the drink! However….despite being told we would be cruising past her on the port side at 6pm – with Geoff and I sitting on our balcony, iphone cameras poised waiting for the moment, we then updated that it would be nearer 7pm….so we sat….and we sat….and by 8pm, we decided to go to the buffet and have dinner before it closed, choosing a seat on the port side, still waiting for the moment..nothing! Our eyes were fixed on the water and we saw diddly squat. I went down to Guest Services at 9pm to ask if we had sailed past, and we had! So, it can’t be sitting that obviously above the water as we, and other passengers who were waiting for the big moment as well as us, all missed it!!! Sorry folks, no photos here – you’ll have to google it!