When we launched from our dock in Valparaiso on Saturday evening, we were at dinner at the Manfredi’s Italian restaurant on the ship. We were all excited to see the ship wend its way out of the harbor as the tugboats turned our ocean liner around and we left the hills of Valparaiso behind us. As soon as we left the harbor we got the pleasant visual of the rugged Pacific Ocean under what was a sunny and blue sky until the Sun began to set off the starboard side. It was all very romantic, as are ocean voyages altogether. We even found the splash of the choppy waves a fun aspect. And then, by evening as we attended the welcome gathering in the theater, where we were introduced to the captain and his officer cadre, we started to feel the effects of the rocking and rolling of the sea. The crew told us it was good to get our sea legs early on, but they also admitted to us that this Pacific coast of Chile is one of the more turbulent seas they sail in. Don’t get me wrong, this was not a storm, or even inclement weather, this was just the effect of wind and lots of sloshing water that is trying to find its way around Cape Horn into the calmer Atlantic.
I’m not sure I realized that the Pacific was so non-pacific in this area. One tends to think of the doldrums of the South Pacific or poor little Kontiki inching its way across from Tahiti. But I have now been on six ocean voyages, including on the coast of Alaska, the North Sea around Norway and even across the stormy North Atlantic, and I’ve never felt as much rocking and rolling as we did yesterday working our way down the Chilean coastline. We all commented about the creaking and shifting of the staterooms at night while we tried to sleep. Lying down is much easier than trying to walk around, but the motion of the ocean, as they say, was certainly a factor in trying to get a sound nights sleep in an otherwise very comfortable cabin. Viking really knows what it’s doing with ship design and client comfort, but ships will be ships and the ocean does what it does.
Other than Yasuko, I don’t think any of us felt the need for Dramamine during the day and we did all sit and enjoy three meals together with too much noticeable interruption in appetite, but I think it’s safe to say we were all looking forward to turning into the fjord passageways near our first destination of Puerto Montt so that we were could reclaim calm waters once again. We spent our day in various chores of exercise, doing laundry, attending enrichment lectures, playing cards, and, in my case, sitting at a desk in the atrium cranking through my newly assigned expert witness case. I would probably have preferred not to have work to do during the trip, but sea days can be long and lacking purpose, so being able to earn back 1/3 the cost of the trip on one half of our first sea day did not feel like a bad use of my time.
After dinner last night in the World Cafe, where the sushi and sashimi addicts got their fill while I found interesting bits of Arabiata and Curried chicken to enjoy, we can now say we have eaten at all the food venues on board except The Chef’s Table, which we are reserved to try out tonight. Four of us went into the Wintergsrden pool lounge for a showing of the Lost City of Z, which made us glad we were touting Patagonia and not Amazonia. Viking has put in a state-of-the-art movie screen and DC kind system that made it quite a nice theater even with the occasional sloshing of the nearby swimming pool. It’s the early morning now and I’m up even though the ship is rocking and rolling much less as we near Puerto Montt.
Today we are sort of going in different directions. Ann & Chris are trying to fly in to belatedly join us at this first port of call (given that their original flight got cancelled). They have until 4:30pm to catch the last Tender to the ship. The rest of us will be eying that same last Tender as we find our way back from a volcano trek by Mike, Melisa, Faraj and Yasuko, and Kim and I wander around Emerald Lake where we will gawk up at the volcanos rather than down from them. Puerto Montt’s heritage was that it was populated in the mid-19th Century by immigrating Germans, so we expect to see lots of lovely European-like villages rather than indigenous dwellings. Patagonia actually has a good many indigenous tribes, but unlike in the northern Andes, where the mountains were the preferred area of habitation, the southern Patagonian indigenous people tended to be shore dwellers that carved their living out of the bounty of the sea or people like the Mapuche that are renowned horsemen of the Pampas. It’s like wondering why Eskimos live where they live. It’s hard for us to imagine choosing to live either at 12,000+ feet in the Andes or on the harsh and seemingly barren southern coastal islands of Patagonia. I’m guessing those German immigrants wondered the same thing while they built their timber and stucco homes on the banks of Llanquihue Lake and looking up at Mount Osorno and Calbuco Volcano. Say what you will about the sustainability and nobility of indigenous lifestyle, my European roots would cause me to do what the Germans did to carve a life for themselves out of this otherwise remote but beautiful landscape.
Once that last Tender hopefully renders us all onboard to clean ourselves up for our fine dining experience this evening, we will start wending our way through the archipelago to the Chilean fjords and glaciers that define this region most notably. Two sea days without a port of call but with presumably lots of great views and spectacular scenery should prepare us for the bottom of the earth experience that awaits us in Tierra Del Fuego, first at the last Chilean port of Punta Arenas and then the first Argentine port of Ushuaia. I would say that the six days from here to the Falkland Islands is what this whole voyage is about. Even though we will spend some time on treadmills, work desks, spa massage beds (I am looking forward to my Arctic Cure treatment, where dry brushing my top skin layer off and Gus Shaing my lymphatic system into obedience sounds interesting to tty), and going from restaurant to buffet, taking in the Patagonian sights is what we are here to do during this once-in-a-lifetime adventure. For now, just cutting through the early breakers of the South Pacific seems like quite the wonderful accomplishment.