A common thought I keep turning over in my mind since we left Valparaiso is why people would choose to live in Puerto Montt or Punta Arenas or Ushuaia or, now, Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands. I understand the general argument that everybody has to live somewhere and even that some people prefer wide open spaces to urban or even suburban over-crowding, but isn’t man a gregarious beast by nature and doesn’t isolation feel…
The town of Ushuaia, which calls itself the end of the world (Fin del Mondo) has its origins as a penal colony. This follows in the tradition of many countries that sent the most desperate prisoners for incarceration to lands as distant as they could find at the borders of or beyond the reaches of their boundaries. One of my favorite movies has always been Papillon, starring Dustin Hoffman, and Steve McQueen as French prisoners…
This is the fourth time we have taken a cruise on Viking. Three of those times have been on ocean cruises where one was on a river cruise. If you look at the map, we started with a river cruise in Eastern Europe doing the Blue Danube run from Budapest to Nuremberg. Then we did the Baltic Cruise starting in Iceland and going from Stockholm to St. Petersburg and back to Denmark, hitting Finland, Estonia,…
One of the busiest and most diversely demanding jobs on this ship is clearly that of the client service officer. To begin with, imagine that guy on the Progressive commercials who has the job of training people not to act like and turn into their parents. Whoever invented that commercial deserves an all-time achievement award for understanding the modern human psyche of aging and general human nature. What that person probably doesn’t even realize is…
When I signed up for this cruise, I knew I would be saying to people that it was sailing around Cape Horn, but I didn’t really know what that meant in detail. As this cruise has progressed, I spent more time looking at the map, familiarizing myself with the Chilean Tierra del Fuego Archipelago, and still, I wasn’t sure what sailing around Cape Horn meant. I did figure that after leaving Ushuaia and before heading…
As much as it may sound like I’m about to go off on another liberal rant about the destruction of all we know and hold dear, this is not a story about Donald Trump or even Elon Musk, as much as they each fully deserve every disapprobation any of us can muster. One of the unexpected pleasures of being on this cruise is that, despite Viking Live TV having all the news services from Fox…
I am sitting in the World Cafe of the Viking Jupiter Ocean Liner as we steam our way through the fjords of Southern Chile towards Punta Arenas, our last stop on our Chile train. We will arrive there tomorrow morning as we wend our way through this complex archipelago of Southern Chile, dipping in and out of the Pacific Ocean as the width of the passages requires. The good news for us neophytes at this…
Today was about the largest national park in Chile called Vicente Perez Rosalez Parque in honor of the Chilean who turned this remote area into a well-known tourism and agricultural zone. It was supposed to be a sunny day that was going to stay cool in the 50s for most of the day, but the weather gods had a different idea and as we tried to board the tender from the ship into the port…
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…
I have touted the wonders of Chile for forty years. From 1985 – 2000 I traveled here so much for work that I lost count somewhere along the way. But I don’t recall ever coming to spend time in Valparaiso. Whenever I would come to Santiago and some wealthy counterparty or client would want to show me the sights (other than for skiing in the Andes Mountains), we would go to the lovely resort town…