Every cruise that starts or ends or even goes through Buenos Aires, inevitably also stops in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. That may seem redundant because Montevideo is just across the delta from Buenos Aires, a mere 150 miles. But there are many reasons everyone should visit Montevideo based on what Uruguay has created for itself…an example that might be as close to Utopia as any on earth. Uruguay, despite being one of South America’s…
While every day is a new adventure on this trip, the act of writing a new and (hopefully) interesting story every day about the trip certainly has its challenges. I generally draw from the activities of the day, but today I did another Arctic Cure scrub, and I already wrote about that interesting spa treatment. We are also going to eat in the onboard Italian restaurant, Manfredi’s tonight and I believe I’ve already discussed that.…
As we motor up the coast of Argentina, the Atlantic seas seem relatively calm compared to what we found around the Drake Passage or down the Pacific coast of Chile. There is still motion in the ship, which has largely become normalized to us by now. This is what sailors like to call “getting your sea legs”. Thankfully, even during the worst of the tough seas, neither Kim nor I succumbed to what we know…
Today we are in Puerto Madryn, a coastal harbor with good natural attributes about halfway down the length of Argentina. I think Viking has done a good job of finding a reciprocal stopping point in Argentina to what we visited on the Chilean side in Puerto Montt. Where Puerto Montt was founded by Germans, Puerto Madryn got its foothold here on the northern edge of the Patagonian Pampas through the arrival of a large Welsh…
We are cruising back towards the mainland of Argentina today. If we went east we would likely not hit anything until the beaches of Perth, Australia. That part of the planet between the Atlantic and Indian oceans never gets much play (except when a Malaysian airliner disappears there). I learned that the Malvinas sit at 52 South Latitude, which compares in the northern hemisphere to the Latitude of London, which sits at 52 North Latitude.…
We have determined that the natural wonders we are experiencing on this trip are its highlights, and nothing is more interesting in nature than the wildlife that inhabits it. Our most memorable part of riding through Tierra el Fuego Park was happening on a not-so-wild brown fox that was busy scamming the tourists for food. I’ve seen many a dog that looked just like that fox, but few dogs can draw tourist attention the way…
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…