Dateline March 5, 2018, Chile and the Patagonian Fjords
After Peru we flew down to Chile, spent a night in Santiago, and took a morning bus tour around the city and out into the wine country. Our guide had a wry way about him. He began by saying there was not much news in Chile just then, since the national team had missed the World Cup and the election was over and the conservative had won; the vote that mattered, he told us, was a vote against becoming the next Venezuela, and to stay a democracy. Then, with Steve and Marilyn, we joined three thousand five hundred of our newest and dearest friends and boarded the Princess ship at San Antonio for fourteen days around the bottom of the continent.
The ship was lovely, and our room turned out to be an upgrade to a fine little mini-suite, with room enough to have folks in to watch the coast and the glaciers slide by. Our travel agent had put us on the port side, which gave us the scenic shore the whole way down.
Puerto Montt. The first stop was Puerto Montt. A group aboard had put together a small-bus tour and sent around an email looking for two more to fill it, so we signed on, and out we went to the Osorno Volcano, Petrohue Falls, and the town of Puerto Varas. The country was beautiful, and it was a lovely day; the pictures tell it better than we can.
The Amalia Glacier. Just ten thousand years ago the Southern Patagonian Ice Field covered the whole of southern Chile, and what it left behind is this maze of channels and islands and fjords running down the Pacific coast toward Tierra del Fuego and the Strait of Magellan. We took a scenic cruise up the Sarmiento Channel to the Amalia Glacier, a tidewater glacier in Bernardo O'Higgins National Park, and had it in perfect view right from our balcony.
Like the glaciers in Alaska, it is enormous, reaching far back into the country behind it.
Awesome is the only word for it. From here we turned south for the penguins and Cape Horn.
