2017-04-11 - TUESDAY-CRUISE DAY 1-BUENOS AIRES
As I gallop around on my anti-cruise high horse (fed, I admit, on total ignorance of cruise life), Norwegian Sun surprises us. Our bargain inside 'stateroom' is not in a lifeboat, but is on the ship. It is spacious, with twin beds, a couch as a third berth, a pull-down bunk as possible fourth berth, desk, acres of closet and drawer space, a desk, TV, and a bathroom of origami perfection, everything folded into a tiny space, compact, efficient, comfortable. There are multiples of all in the huge mirror that is our ersatz win…er, porthole. Stateroom 4110 is bigger than our guest room at home, with a private bathroom, and it will carry us to Tierra del Fuego and around the far tip of South America. Dr. Who, eat your heart out!!
This is our home for 15 days, today lolling in Buenos Aires, tomorrow in Uruguay, then out into the Atlantic.
Insistent rampaging lust to 'have a good time', is packaged, and presided over with diabetes-inducing cheerfulness by Cruise Director David, Aussie accent and voice launched into squealdom, sacrificing content to hyperbole. The Grand Canyon is awesome. The 'Drink of the Day' is not.
But, the efforts are inclusive. There are special mixers for people traveling alone and for LGBT passengers. I forgive the chirpiness.
Fellow passengers? Imagine our super-annuated Sunday matinee opera patrons. In bathing suits last trotted out several sizes ago. Bulging Hindenbergian is the look du jour. Judging from behavior at the food trough things will not improve on the cruise. The sights at the four bubbling hot tubs suggest cannibalistic treats might be sneaked onto the menu in the Specialty Restaurants. Boiled Behemoth?
We’re a multi-national and polyglot bunch. Announcements are made in Australian, German (this IS Argentina), Spanish, and Portuguese…the first and last totally unintelligible. There is potential for interesting conversation between bites.
We climb 7 flights up to the Alpine heights of the observation deck. We are many feet higher than we ever get in Florida. Dennis' many-functioned camera tells us we’re 52 feet below sea level, news indeed to the captain and the complacent sea licking our shipside stories below. I chalk it up to the effect of the Antipodes. If the point of a vacation is to escape from reality, the camera is leading the way.
We ignore instructions about how to have a good time, find a deck chair, sit in the sun, slip into 'dolce fa niente' mode. I slide off my high horse. I start to get this cruise thing.
We eat again (When in Rome, after all…), walk the decks, descend into the Stygian depths of Deck Four.
'Skopje? ' a smile tells me I have guessed right. Sweet-faced and handsome, Dragoan is from Macedonia (truth disclosure: Skopje is the only town I know in Macedonia, so it’s a lucky guess) and is our cabin steward, sprucing up Stateroom 4110 for us. Cruise-staffing is a major draw in Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, India, eastern Europe. Without Dragoan and his crew mates there would be no cruise, no cruise industry. It sails on the labor of migrants, refugees. Like us, he’ll live down here on Deck Four, a fellow troglodyte. Unlike us, he won’t get a chance at sunlight.
2017-04-11. BUENOS AIRES
Sex.
Entwined, entranced, the tango dancers dance their primal narrative of attraction. This is a sexiness deep below the obvious beauty of the dancers. They dance on. The tango stops being about sex. It is sex.
We are astonished. Any tango we’ve seen before has been diluted, purged, decorated, prettified, sanitized, trivialized, demeaned…reduced to the form, as pornography reduces the erotic to the obvious.
2017-04-12- MONTEVIDEO
We wander Montevideo’s old city, sea all around. At first, it’s a scratch and dent version of Old Buenos Aires. Dennis says it reminds him of photos of Cuba. Then the laid-back charm seeps in. There are no cars along the pietones only streets, and very few of us pietones. Wild latinate street art spills over the walls, animal fantasias, Che, Fidel, a magnificent owl, a supple and languid senorita. The art deco facades are not so much worn as lived in. They’re a bit like old aunties, watching over us pietones, and with make-up a bit askew.
2017-04-13 – AT SEA.
At sea, almost, we hug the coast of Argentina. South America is a blur to the West. We are slowly released from land and given to the sea. On board we wander the decks, now our home for the next 2 weeks. We join the lemmings on their march to the endless food on Deck 11. ‘Seven pounds a week' bubbles insufferable David, our Aussie Cruise Director, describing the effects of endless food on the typical cruiser. The crew are svelte, the passengers spherical. Many have opted for 'cruise wear', skimpy, tight, fluffy and decades too late. The Brits describe it perfectly: 'mutton dressed as lamb'.
2017-04-14 – PUERTO MADRYN
I love ports.
The ships draw me out across space to their home ports stenciled on their rusty rumps. Then they drag me back across time. I wonder: how long have humans sailed the seas? At least 40 to 60 thousand years it seems. That long ago our distant relatives, reaching the end of land in their great migration out of Africa launched into the seas between southeast Asia and Australia. It had to be in boats. There have never been land bridges linking Australia to Asia. And the Dingo Paddle is not an option.
2017-04-15-AT SEA
This morning Norwegian Sun carries us into the South Atlantic and out of sight of land. Our bearing is Southwest towards The Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas to Argentines), where we will awake at dawn. At this latitude, the ship can sail eastward around the world until it bumps into the other coast of South America. Some time tonight we will cross an invisible spot and be closer to Antarctica than to Buenos Aires.
All around us is sea and horizon, all blue, brighter in the sky, deeper beneath. We are alone on the surface of the sea.
Almost.
In the far distance Dennis spots, feathery columns erupting
from the sea: the deep breaths of spouting whales. Will they sing of us?
2017-04-16– FALKLAND ISLANDS
Easter Sunday
Remember Easter, the ancient fertility festival appropriated by Christians, who added some powerful rebirth symbolism, but now degraded to a holiday where we celebrate rabbits who lay colorful hard-boiled eggs that hatch into little chickens? We spend it anchored in Stanley.
Stanley, the only town on the Falklands puts up a brave front. Stanley-ites paint their houses in bright Easter egg colors, defiant rainbows against the grey world around them. The islands are miniscule bits of rock, windswept, cold and dreary. It’s hard to imagine why 2,000 people choose to live here. The Brits and Argentines fought a war over these bits, some say because Margaret Thatcher needed a 'cause' to prop up her falling ratings. As if the Brits needed more fog, rain, and cloud cover. Perhaps, like me, they like the adventure of being in wildness, far away, at the ‘end of the world'?
But, we board the Norwegian Sun anyway. Deck 11 calls, louder than the call of the wild.
2017-04-17 CAPE HORN
400 miles from Antarctica
At 18:11 we round Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America, leave the Atlantic Ocean and slip through the Drake Passage and over the waves into the Pacific Ocean. The water temperature is 48 degrees. Antarctica is 400 miles straight south.
The waters in this spot, where the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern Oceans meet are among the most turbulent, unpredictable, and dangerous on the planet, as each ocean wrenches currents into water mountains whipped by hurricane force winds.
The Bounty, of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, tried for 31 days to round the Horn into the Pacific, gave up, canvas sails defeated by water and wind, turned, and sailed back across the Atlantic and around Africa to the Pacific.
Today, great corkscrews replace sails.
We are lucky. We float on bare ripples, the winds only angry not vindictive. Our captain nudges Norwegian Sun into a 360 degree turn, a soft spin in the hard silver steel, son everyone on board gets to see Land’s End. There will be no more crossings this year.
2017-04-18- PATAGONIA
The Andes tumble into the Pacific in Patagonia, strewing archipelagos, great shards of rock capturing slips of ocean walled in stone. We thread the Strait of Magellan and the Beagle Channel, following the routes of Magellan and Darwin, journeys that changed how we perceive the world, Magellan tying the continents into one accessible whole, Darwin tying all living things into his Web of Life. I wonder if they saw the beauty here, even on a day like this, greyed and fogged. The sea is calm, hammered silver in the late afternoon light, smoothed by our wake. It ripples against pinnacles of black, their tips iced with sunlight caught by glaciers.
Three thousand kilometers (1900 miles) from Buenos Aires we dock in Ushuaia, southernmost city on the planet, gateway to Antarctica, two days sail straight south. It’s a lively place, a strip of color between Land’s End and no man’s land.
Delegated by travel buddy Luis to get the skivy about Antarctica trips, we luck out with TIERRA DEL FUEGO AVENTURA run by bouncy Solange and ridiculously handsome Patrizio. Yes, there are triple rooms, the best deal because they are low in the ships and so less affected by those roiling seas and sea sickness. Yes, the ships provide boots and clothing, or we can rent whole outfit for about $100. Solange takes a good look at us, listens to our travel tales, and adds: 'you know you can spend the night ON Antarctica in special sleeping bags’. BINGO! I’m hooked. Dennis? Not so much.
Norwegian Sun is the last cruise ship to round the Horn this Autumn and we’ve already turned north. No more ships will head south until November, leaving Antarctica to the cold, ice, wind, roiling seas, and darkness.
2017-04-19 – PUERTO ARENAS
'What did you buy?’
'Is there anything to buy?'
‘There’s nothing to buy.'
Overheard conversations don’t very much. It’s an old crowd, not much for adventure outside of the shops.
It’s national holiday, 'Census Day’ and most businesses are closed. Frustrated on shore, credit cards are voracious on board. Passengers stack up to buy gold, Columbian emeralds, 'art', …and most obvious, the $79 a day drink package: 'Drink anything, anytime, anywhere, as much as you like.'
The super-annuated '79ers' are everywhere, 'getting their money's worth', wine glasses, beer, or 'drinks of the day', in hand…. everywhere, all day, in corridors, elevators, on decks, and staircases. Immoderate imbibers, endless food, undulating floors, and Norwegian Sun' policy to hide bathrooms, make for some messy possibilities. Barf bags appear.
We stick to ice tea.
2017-04-20. PACIFIC OCEAN
Toto, we ARE in Kansas.
Fifty mile an hour crosswinds and 20 foot swells (aka 'moderate to heavy’) under metal grey skies rock 'n roll us out of the Straits of Magellan and north into the Pacific. The coast of Chile has slipped off the horizon, now a blur, hazy wisps of white caps holding it onto to the metallic sky.
Norwegian Sun dances on the waves. Topside, on decks 11 and 12, passengers careen, lurch, and stumble-bounce to the Maritime Mambo, always a step behind.
Eight decks below, stateroom 4110 is dead smack in the middle of the ship, in maritime Kansas, halfway between north and south (aka bow and stern) and halfway between east and west (aka port and starboard) and close to the water line and away from engines. Nothing extreme happens in our Kansas. Norwegian Sun rolls and pitches around us. 4110 remains unperturbed. Middle of the road, bottom of the heap, dirt cheap? Sign me up.
But, we keep barf bags handy just in case.
2017-04-21 to 23 CHILEAN FJORDS
To the east beyond the clouds, Chile rises into the Andes. To the west, the Pacific stretches to the horizon. In between, mountain and sea are zippered into one of the world’s great landscapes, the fjords of Chile. Heading northward, we go east, west, south around forested Andean chunks rising straight out of the sea, threading through the rock and water lace of the fjords.
Tiny Puerto Chacabuco, folded deep in the fjords, has the self-sufficient feel of a mountain town, but at sea level. It’s inaccessible by land or air. Dogs doze on the road. They ignore us. They all look related, variations of scruffy. The tiny café has empanadas, hot chocolate, iffy internet. Café Lady dispenses all and juggles calculations in Argentine Pesos, US Dollars and Euros. Chacabuco has 2,000 lucky inhabitants. Norwegian Sun adds 1900 cruisers. ‘There’s nothing here' says one. The soaring walls, untouched forest, pristine waters, refuse to grant her an echo.
Later the clouded skies and late afternoon light drain color from the sea and cliffs. The fjords flatten into a Chinese scroll, washed in endless shades of grey, unrolling into the soft white light of sunset. Nothing here? Really?
2017-04-24 LAST DAY IN CRUISISTAN
The big seal snorted at us out of his grandfatherly, myopic, and rumpled face and sank out of sight into the shallows ten feet away, just off the main market street of Puerto Montt. Lonely Planet's Chile Guide describes Puerto Montt as 'of minimal interest’. Hardly! Bustling and eye-engaging like all active fishing ports, it has an unwrapped vitality, Chile's best salmon and mussels, and resident seals offering commentary on passersby. We would have lingered, tasted the town for a day, or two, or three.
But, this is Cruisistan, home of 'Will of the Wisp', ephemeral travel. Lingering isn’t part of the deal. The voyage is the point, not the destination. The 900 native inhabitants welcome and manage us guests, all 1980 of us, with trained aplomb. They are delightful, friendly, accomplished, efficient, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural. The food is delicious, and omnipresent. The beds are magnificent, the showers hot and strong. Entertainment is nonstop. Opportunities to bleed money are everywhere, but are avoidable. Cruisistan provides a seamless, challenge-free, smooth, comfortable 15 days’ traverse of the tip of South America. We couldn’t do it any other way. And we’re glad we did. No complaints there. We’re just not Cruisistan types. We’re lingerers.
Lesson learned, but satisfied, we savor the voyage on our last day as we smooth sail north to Valparaiso, our final port of call, almost 5000 miles from Buenos Aires on the other side of South America. We have ‘rounded the Horn', and followed Magellan and Darwin, and in great comfort. Maybe sometimes the voyage is the point. I’m glad we didn’t have to swim. And there were hot showers…
No comments:
Post a Comment