Lima, Peru to Buenos Aires, Argentina

Lima, Peru to Buenos Aires, Argentina

We rejoined the ship in Pisco, Peru where Glen and Ginny Glass and Wally and Sandy Theiss were already on board, having arrived in Lima after their pre-cruise extension to Machu Picchu.  It was great to see them and we are looking forward to spending the next 3 weeks with them. 

Well we didn’t realize this but Peru has the driest desert in the world, and from south of Lima to Coquimbo, Chile we felt like we were in a moonscape.  There are NO TREES at all, just hard dry packed rock, sand and dirt…forever!  What a surprise.  It has a certain stark beauty and the shades of color in the rolling hills are beautiful pinks, oranges, peaches and tans.  Anyway, we had a couple hours’ drive to Arequipa through this scenery, where we toured the Santa Catalina Monastery that was founded in the 1500s for the 2^nd –born daughters of wealthy families.  The families paid $2000 for the girls to go there, they took their servant/slave with them and lived in their own house within the walls.  There are still 15 nuns there today, but they are there voluntarily!  It’s a really large monastery, a city within a city, with streets and lanes, houses, church, meeting hall, work areas, kitchens and more.  Lots of photo ops going on, brightly colored plaster walls, pretty doorways, cobblestones and so on.  It was raining by the time we got there so we didn’t get to see the volcano that apparently looms above the town, but we wandered around the beautiful town square lined with 2-story arched porticoes on 3 sides and a large church forming the 4^th side. 

We were still in this strange desert at Iquique, Peru, where we drove out to an abandoned nitrate mining town, called Humberstone.  It’s a total ghost town, built to house the miners and provide everything they needed.  It felt like a movie set (with a lot of rust!) for a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western.   Everything was there – residences, a church, hotel, shopping mall, food market, school, social club, theater, even a swimming pool!  For 3000 people!  These kinds of communities were all over this area, but this one is the most intact.  Then they were all just abandoned when the market for nitrate collapsed in 1907.  On the way back to Iquique we passed a huge packed sand formation that was about a mile long which looked like the spine of a dragon – beautiful!  It’s the second largest sand dune in the world.  In town, we visited the town square and then a Moorish-style social club - wow on the décor – for Pisco Sours and empanadas.  Tasty!

At Coquimbo the terrain started to change from desert to low rocky hills.  We visited a small market, then drove out into the Elqui Valley, a pretty agricultural area with papaya groves and many many vineyards.  We stopped at the Capel Winery where they showed us the process for making Pisco wine, which is really a strong brandy, then visited Vicuna town where we had refreshments at a hotel.  Not much that was memorable about this stop.  But we did notice a significant change for the better in the cleanliness and quality of the housing and other buildings as soon as we landed in Chile, in contrast to Peru and Ecuador.  Much much better!

Valparaiso is in a beautiful setting, climbing up hills that curl around the bay.  It’s so hilly that the city has a system of funiculars spaced out along the hills to help people get around.  We took 3 or 4 of them as we walked around the UNESCO heritage area called Concepcion.  The buildings here are all painted in pastels colors, having many years ago used whatever leftover paint they could get from ships that docked.  In addition to the rainbow of colors on the houses, there is a culture here that encourages street art, or graffiti, which is everywhere and specifically considered a part of this UNESCO site.  Large walls, even huge 2 and 3 story walls, are beautifully painted works of art.  There is no end to the variety of the artwork.  It was really very different and interesting.  The funiculars are really old and rickety, but they operate on pulleys I think and balance the opposing weight of the up versus down trams, so I don’t think we were in too much danger of machinery stopping or anything.  The rides were a little nerve-wracking though. 

There’s a beautiful National Park at Puerto Montt where we hiked out to a waterfall and a lagoon.  The water is the milky green/blue color of glacial-fed waters and was beautiful against the black lava rock it flowed through.  There are volcanoes all around a big beautiful lake but there were clouds today so we didn’t get to see them.  After the Park we had lunch in Puerto Varas which is a resort town right on the lake.  The Chilean take on pizza was delicious!   The town was busy with hikers and bikers and campers.  It was a very nice day!

It’s starting to get cooler the further south we get.  Puerto Chacabuco was considerably colder and windy.  This stop is a starting place for exploring Patagonia, so the scenery sailing in was gorgeous and the National Park here is too.  We took a short hike in the Park to a waterfall and saw some really unusual vegetation.  Think rhubarb on steroids!  Wow!  We went to a Quincho, which is like a party room, after our hike and had Pisco Sours again and some really delicious snacks, along with some local entertainment.  There were about 6 sheep carcasses staked out around a huge bonfire in the center of the room, slowly roasting for another group that was having sheep for dinner later.  It was all very colorful and entertaining.

So now we are cruising the Chilean Fjords for a couple of days.  It doesn’t matter which side of the ship your room is on because the scenery is on both sides, very close.  It is gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous!  Green and rocky both, and waterfalls and glaciers are everywhere you look. It’s a little like Norway but the fjords are not as narrow and the mountains aren’t as high and steep. It goes on and on and on.  It’s also very empty - no one lives anywhere in here.  It’s mostly vast National Park lands and very protected.  On the second day we had a close-up visit to a really large glacier, Amalia, where the Captain took the ship in very close and rotated for port and starboard sides to see.  He sent out one of the ship’s zodiacs to collect some chunks of glacier ice floating in the water and bring it back to the ship.  It was displayed on the pool deck for a day or so.  It’s pretty cold now so we bundle up if we go out on deck.  We are loving Patagonia!

We had a really early wake-up call in Puntarenas, Chile for our 5:30am flight to another part of Patagonia, Torres Del Paine National Park.  We have rolled the dice because the weather is often a problem and this is an expensive trip.  But we were lucky – mostly sunny skies!  The drive to the park is one of these that builds and builds to the great moment.  We kept seeing the torres in the distance, stopping for various photo ops all along the way, and then we were close enough to distinguish the great massif in the middle with the torres to the right.  They’re such a contrast.  The massif is large, spreading, snow-capped and has glaciers on it, and the torres are shorter and sheer-sided with distinctive black sediment caps over the dark grey granite.   It’s the only place in the world where this occurs.  Everywhere else the granite is on top of the sediment, but here the upthrust was so strong that the rock actually flipped completely over.  As we passed around the left side, the torres slip behind the massif and the cuernos become visible, which are similar to the torres but a little shorter.  We had beautiful views everywhere with large glacial lakes to the front or sides of the formations and a glacial river rushing past with beautiful falls.  Our lunch was at a lake front hotel with the perfect view of the whole formation.  What a day!  Worth every penny and definitely one of the top 10 or maybe even 5 things we have ever done!  You gotta go! 

En route to Ushuaia, Argentina, we were still traveling through beautiful fjords, actually the Beagle Channel, and we saw many more large glaciers coming right down to the water’s edge or hanging down the mountain sides with waterfalls trailing off the ends.  It is just so beautiful down here!  We arrived in the bay where Ushuaia sits, very picturesque with snow-capped mountains ringing it all around.  After lunch we went out to see Tierra del Fuego National Park!  Yes!  The end of the world!  It’s called land of fire because of all the campfires the natives had burning all over when explorers saw it for the first time, not because of active volcanoes or anything.  The forest here is dense, mostly deciduous trees, which is different from what we’ve been seeing.  In 6 weeks their leaves will all be turning colors and falling off.  We had beautiful views of mountains surrounding the bays and inlets of Tierra del Fuego Island.  We stopped at the sign post which is at the end of the Pan American Highway and shows 17000 miles to Fairbanks, which is at the northern end of that Highway.  We thought about it and realized we were actually at each end in the last 6 months, since we were in Fairbanks last August!  Wow, that’s covering some ground, right?  Pretty neat.  We wandered around Ushuaia for a while, but a lot of businesses were closed because it was Carnivale.  There was a little parade (little), colorful and noisy, which we saw and heard briefly, before returning to the ship.  So now we’ve seen an Argentinian version of Patagonia.  It’s all beautiful.

We had some rocking seas on the way to The Falkland Islands after rounding Cape Horn.  Seamen have evidently always called this area the roaring 40s (for the latitude) and it wasn’t terrible but a lot of people were sick.  We felt a little uneasy, but nothing more.  The Captain changed to a more northerly heading and the side-to-side rolling abated some.  That’s what was making everyone sick. 

Talk about a contrast in cultures!  The Falklands is, of course, British in all ways and Stanley is a very typical small British village.  It almost felt strange after all the Spanish and black hair we’ve had from the beginning of the trip.  We picked an excursion here which has won international acclaim as one of the top tours anywhere, and it was great.  We piled on a small bus which took us to our 4x4 Land Rovers in which we were driven cross-country to a penguin colony on the shore.  There have only been roads in The Falklands since the 1982 invasion by Argentina.  Before that, all travel was across peat bogs and over dirt tracks.  Since the invasion, Britain maintains a military base here and so has put in some gravel tracks out a little ways into the island, but still, most of the driving is just across their sheep farms in these Land Rovers.  They seem to love driving around that way!  Our driver turned out to be the owner of four 1200-ton fishing boats that stay out all year, and a 43,000 acre sheep farm with 11,000 sheep and fifty four horses. He’s had 3 wives and his four children are all educated in Chilean boarding schools and then England.  He spends 6 months in The Falklands and 6 months in England driving around in exotic cars.  He was just doing this little excursion because they needed some extra help.  Do you tip someone like that???  One of his daughters was driving one of the other vehicles and they seemed to have some kind of a race going on.  Anyway, we got to the penguins at Blue Cove after a really bouncy off-road trip.  They are hilarious!  There were about 10 King penguins with 3 babies, 1 week old, 5 weeks old, and 7 weeks old.  They’re still hanging out in the mom’s sac a lot, but we saw them come out.  The rest of the penguins were Gentoos, hundreds of them.  Most of the adults were out fishing all day and wouldn’t return until about dusk to regurgitate the food for their young.  Most of those remaining were juveniles that were laying completely motionless on the sand sleeping. The park warden said, ‘think teenager”.  We all got it.   They are very curious and unafraid of people, just watching and staring, and then suddenly needing to get somewhere else with a flurry of wing-flapping and waddling to…wherever!  The wardens say they often sleep most of a day, then get up, move about 5 feet,  and go back to sleep.  Eventually, after a year or 16 – 18 months, they lose all their down and can go out fishing with the adults.  They’re not waterproof until they get real feathers.  It was very fun and amusing, then we were invited into a small café for tea and homemade cakes that were delicious.  After another jouncing ride in the 4x4s we went back to town for a walk around the hilly streets.  There are few shops and restaurants and we tried 3 places for fish and chips but had no luck.  The last pub had it but it was about 90 degrees in there so we didn’t stay.  In the harbor we saw about 6 large fishing boats with lots of long narrow metal baskets (like caskets!) set up all around the outside edges.  They’re squid jiggers – most of the calamari of the world is caught in the waters around The Falklands.  The ships’ Captains have to come into Stanley and apply for a license to fish the waters.  They make about $35 million every year selling licenses!

We stopped in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Al went alone on a day trip out to Colonia del Sacramento.  I had gotten a pretty bad cold so didn’t go along.  It’s a resort popular with Uruguayans and Argentinians both, and is the original Spanish colony in Uruguay.  It’s about a 2 ½ hour drive from Montevideo through rich farmland but located on the River Plate, an almost 180 mile wide river, a picturesque and laid-back place where people like to get away from the hectic and crowded life in the cities.  It has both modern and historical sections.  There was a walking tour and lunch in the older section with many colorful Spanish-style structures, including a city wall and gate.  The streets are lined with large sycamores that arch over the streets, something we saw in Montevideo as well.

Arrived in Buenos Aires and took a look around the city for a while, taking in some beautiful residential neighborhoods and the main square, Plaza de Mayo, with the colonial Presidential Office and the large basilica where Pope Francis presided when he was there.  It’s really a very beautiful church, and there was a ceremony of some kind going on with a number of celebrants and a large group in matching T-shirts.  We drove along very wide boulevards lined with tall sycamore trees and lots of European-looking buildings.  Very cosmopolitan feeling here.  We visited a cemetery, of all things, because it was all above-ground mausoleums lining numerous narrow streets, very elaborate with statues and carvings and altars inside.  The graves are all family ‘plots’ and the bodies can be 7 – 10 deep!  It was kind of like a city of the dead.  Eva Peron is buried there in a mausoleum that’s owned by some family (Duarte) not her own.  Later we stopped at the La Boca neighborhood where all the buildings are rainbow-colored tin with carved mannequins looking down from balconies.  The streets are full of shops and restaurants and there are lots of couples giving tango demonstrations in the fronts of cafes.  Very colorful place – they said it’s the most popular area of the city.  Lots of parillas where they are cooking beef, pork, chicken, sausages, and vegetables which are popular here.  Returning to the ship we passed a lot of long old red brick buildings which were former warehouses for the docks but are now very expensive restaurants and offices.  It’s a very lively, modern city with near-frantic activity all the time, according to our guide. 

We left the next day to fly to Iguazu Falls for a couple of days.  The ship stays in Buenos Aires for both the days we’re gone, so we just re-join the ship there.  Everything went perfectly, and right after lunch we were already walking the boardwalks above the falls.  Oh, my gosh, these are unbelievably beautiful!  Higher and twice as long (1.7 miles) as Niagara, they form a rough horseshoe shape and straddle the Brazil/Argentina border.  We were on the Argentine side.  We had amazing close-up views, looking out from just above the waters on this walk.  It felt like Shangri-La or Eden or something.  They’re so long and there’s so much water, but the green of the jungle vegetation punctuates the white crashing waters here and there all across the span, so there’s great contrast.   We had blue skies for most of the time so it was simply a breathtaking sight.  Later, we walked the lower boardwalk which gave us a different perspective, and then at the river level below the falls, we got on zodiacs to travel up close to the base of the falls.  And then under the falls!  We were completely drenched!  Of course this is on purpose and we knew it was coming, but they actually take you into the water crashing down.  Most people wore swimsuits.  It was amazing. 

After this we went to our hotel, Loi Suites, which is an eco hotel in the jungle, the buildings connected by swinging bridges.  There are 3 very large infinity-edge pools which look like the water is falling off into the jungle.  It was really lovely.  The next morning we took a train out to see the Brazilian side up close.  The largest section of the falls are on that side, called Devil’s Throat, and we could see the spray from far off while we were walking the boardwalk to get there.  On the way, we kept crossing huge expanses of the Iguazu River, divided by lots of islands.  The Devil’s Throat is gorgeous and massive and the water just surges down – vast amounts, thundering and pounding.  There’s so much spray we were pretty wet again, but SO beautiful!!!  This trip is right up there at the very top of all the things we’ve ever done and seen.  And once again, we were incredibly lucky with the weather, since the forecast was 100% chance of rain while we were there.  Wow, you’ve got to go!

We had to bid farewell to the Theisses and the Glasses here since their cruise ended and they were returning home after Iguazu Falls.  It was so fun to have them on board for the last 3 weeks!