Circle South America
[This isn't the best, if you would like a properly formatted trip report .pdf, please email me at nunderi@gmail.com]
1.
Tue 10 Jan; 14:30
As
seems to be usual at the beginning of our long trips, we had a disrupted
departure, finding that the office of Atlas car hire at Tugun where we had
intended to pick up our hire car at 12:00 on Saturday, for the drive to
Brisbane on Sunday morning, was closed. What sort of company contracts to
provide a service which they know beforehand they will be unable to fulfil?
After a few phone calls we were able to get another vehicle from Hertz at
Coolangatta airport for another $35 over the Atlas rate.
The actual arrival at the Brisbane Cruise terminal at
Hamilton was all ease – drive in, drop off the four suitcases which Kay looked
after while I drove to the airport to drop off the car, cab back to Hamilton,
and we were on board and settled in to our cabin by 14:00. Unlike our last two
cruises, this time there was no port security vessel patrolling around the
ship; the security level was obviously a lot lower. In fact, we took on board
two bottles of wine and two steel flasks of water, which were allowed without
inspection.
The
scheduled 16:00 departure didn’t get underway until about 16:30, but then it
was nice cruise down the Brisbane River and through Moreton Bay, rounding
Comboyooro Point at the northern end of Moreton Island and heading ENE out to
sea.
The
ship is full of a young holiday crowd on board for only the three days to
Sydney, and there’s lots of booze and action around the pools. A lot of
tattooed bogans, frankly. The ship’s demographic mix will change significantly
in Sydney when we drop that lot off and pick up all those like us, on for the
long haul around South America.
The
other six people at our dinner table were all of similar age, and good company;
we will drop off the English couple from Bradford when we reach Sydney but
Vivienne & Bruce from Darwin, and Kerry & Barry from the Sunshine coast
and our Cruise Critic group, The Seafarers, are on for the long haul.
On
Monday morning when I fired up the GPS we were still heading east, with a bit
of north in it, and we didn’t turn onto a SW course until around 10:00 when we
were at least 250km offshore. There was no sight of Mt Warning, or any of the
NSW coastline as we head down to Sydney at a leisurely 25kph [13.5kn].
Even
now, Tuesday afternoon, with the Manning River abeam, we are still well offshore
with no coastline in sight.
Thu 12 Jan; 10:30
Pilot boat alongside, 05:00 11 Jan
The
ship berthed in Sydney at Circular Quay, opposite the Opera House, a little
early at 06:45 yesterday. We were off by 08:30 
and heading up George St to find a pair of binoculars
to replace the pair we had to throw out. The plastic of which they were made
had gone soft and sticky from the heat in the Landcruiser where we kept them.
We finally found what we were after at Ted’s Cameras in Pitt St near Bathurst
St.
and heading up George St to find a pair of binoculars
to replace the pair we had to throw out. The plastic of which they were made
had gone soft and sticky from the heat in the Landcruiser where we kept them.
We finally found what we were after at Ted’s Cameras in Pitt St near Bathurst
St.
The
Sydney CBD is looking very decrepit: empty shop fronts, crowds of hurrying
people, like Henry Lawson’s hunted ‘faces in the street’, the whole impression
not at all relived by the construction of another ‘rail to nowhere’ white
elephant which has completely closed George St. to any and all traffic.
By
10:50 we were in Manly, after spending $2.50 off our Senior’s Opal Card for the
ferry trip, where we had lunch with Mark, Rebecca and Nirvana at a faux German
rip off ‘Bier’ joint on Manly Wharf. Nirvana tackled a hot dog that was as big
as she was, and managed to eat the sausage, at least.
After lunch we walked up the Corso to some shopping, amongst
what seemed to be most of the youth of the far western suburbs of Sydney, all
half naked – a not very inspiring experience.
We were back on board by 15:00 and the ship departed
on time at 18:45, steaming down the harbour in a 40-45kn southerly which had
arrived to alleviate the steamy and uncomfortable 38°C which had prevailed for most of the day.
As I write at the moment, we’re heading ESE to
Auckland, it’s overcast and mildly wet, but not particularly rough, although the
sick ‘bags have been out’ on the stair rails on all decks since last night.
Wed 18 Jan; 14:00
After steaming north ENE for a considerable distance
to escape the worst of a low pressure system south of NZ, the passage across
the Tasman was calm and dignified, under overcast skies for most of the
distance, and we docked as scheduled in Auckland at 07:00 on Sunday, 15 Jan.
Auckland is a pretty city but its seaward entrance is
marred by the Port of Auckland wharves and container cranes, and hectares of newly
imported vehicles, all directly in front of the downtown CBD.
We did the Hoho [Hop on, hop off] bus tours, the
Auckland Museum and the Maritime Museum. The Auckland Museum has three floors
with Maori culture on the first, the South Pacific and some general cultural
exhibitions on the second and NZ’s wars, internal and external, on the third.
The experience was a bit wearing and confusing, mainly I think because of poor
lighting, and no continuity between each gallery and theme. The Maritime Museum
is largely given over to Polynesian outrigger canoes of various types and
sizes, and NZ’s 10 year battle for the America’s Cup, which remains an
obsession [of very rich men], it seems.
After departing Auckland at 19:00, we steamed north
through calm seas and overcast skies towards Tonga, our next port.
We are members of an online group of 160 or so
passengers doing this cruise who got together on the Cruise Critic website. A
majority voted in an online poll to call themselves Seadrifters, and on Monday all 160 got together for the first time
in a so-called Meet ‘n Greet. We all now have Seadrifters name badges and Seadrifters
logoed stickers for our cabin doors and a scheduled lunch get together every
Monday when at sea. Unlike antisocial us, some of these people work very, very
hard at being sociable and many spend up to nine months or more a year
cruising.
Today, Wednesday 18 Jan, we berthed at 08:30 in front
of the main town of Nuku’alofa on the main island of Tongatapu. Of a total
population of 103,000, 70% live on Tongatapu.
Tonga is the only Pacific nation to maintain its
sovereignty. The first European contact was the Dutch ship Eendracht under Willem Schouten in 1616. The missionaries commenced
arriving in 1779, the most obviously potent being the Wesleyan Methodist Walter
Lowry in 1822, and now Wesleyan Methodism is the state religion [36%] followed
by the LDS [18%]. One missionary, the Rev Shirley Baker, became Prime Minister
of the country in 1885.
The
country is very flat. Mt Zion in Nuku’alofa is 15m ASL
There
is strong democratisation pressure, from within and externally, principally from
Australia and NZ, and in 2006 there were major riots in Nuku’alofa inspired
partly by Chinese immigration and by pro-democracy advocates, in which 60% of
the downtown area was destroyed.
Tonga’s
economy is heavily dependent on remittances from over 200,000 Tongans who live
abroad. The royal family largely own the monetary sector of the economy, such
as communications and satellite services. Attempts to attract foreign exchange
have included: becoming a nuclear waste dump; selling Tongan Protected Persons
passports [hence the Chinese influx from Hong Kong after 1999]; a foreign ship
registry; sale of geo-orbital satellite slots; cigarette manufacture for China
export; and a long term charter of an unusable Boeing 757, leading to the
demise of Royal Tongan Airlines. Tonga is ranked as the sixth most corrupt
country; and as we witnessed, has the second highest mean BMI.
We
have just returned from an informal three hour walking tour to take in the
sights of Nuku’alofa with another six Seadrifters
who asked to join us.
Eight
decrepit Seadrifters
Everything
is fairly depressed and decrepit, even including the central market which I
found unusual in a market town like this. Tonga is a bit of a world outcast at
the moment, the only evidence we saw of international aid being some road works
funded by Australia, and an office building being constructed by China.
An
interesting story concerns the former British High Commissioner’s residence on
the water front, now a Tongan Government function centre [the UK closed its High
Commission in 2006]. On display in the grounds are four carronades taken from a
British ship Port au Prince in 1806
which the Tongans captured and burned, and then bludgeoned to death all the
crew except one. In 1950 they presented the cannons to the UK as a gesture of
friendship.
Tonga Royal Palace Nuku’alofa
Thu 19 Jan; 15:00
After leaving Nuku’alofa Tonga we crossed the
International Date Line and so had another bit of Tuesday 17 Jan and then
another Wednesday 18 Jan during which we continued NE towards Pago Pago, the
capital of American Samoa where we berthed this morning at 08:00.
Kay
had a sore throat last night but this morning it’s a fully-fledged cold, which
we’re Turkey tails $9.75 a pound
treating
with the standard cold medications. Nevertheless she decided to coma along on
this morning’s walk, along with ten other Seadrifters
who wanted to tag along with us.
This US territory has a population of 55,500, most of
who seem to work for the government. It has the highest rate of military
enlistment of any US state or territory. Apart from military recruits, the main
export is tuna to the US, from two canneries on the main island [Seakist and
Chicken of the Seas] which almost exclusively use imported labour from Samoa,
Tonga and Fiji. The American Samoans are typical Americans, in the sense that
they also import cheap labour from surrounding countries. They may also be
considered typical because they are very big, possibly beating Tonga in the BMI
stakes. But they are very friendly, and the world’s most courteous drivers,
stopping if you even look like wanting to cross the road.
The first European contacts was a Dutchmen, Jacob
Roggeveen in 1722, followed by Bougainville in 1768, and then combat with La
Perouse in 1787, from which the Samoans developed a deserved reputation for
savagery. The missionaries began arriving in the 1830s, initially from the
London Missionary Society.
In
the Tripartite Convention of 1899, the US gained the eastern island group
[Tutuila Islands], Germany gained the western group which the UK gave up in
exchange for rights in Tonga, Solomon Islands and West Africa. The US Navy took
possession on behalf of the US and expanded the existing coaling station at
Pago Pago into a full naval base. Many of the old naval 
US Governor’s residence on the right
buildings, now repurposed, are impressive, stately old
wooden structures which wouldn’t have looked out of place in the antebellum
Deep South of the US.
US Navy
Commander and now Governor’s residence
During the world wide flu epidemic of 1918 the US Navy
governor quarantined American Samoa with the result that it was one of only
three places in the world where there were no deaths; Western Samoa, then under
NZ administration, had a 30% death toll in adult men.
Mt
Rainmaker
American
Samoa is a bit peeved because the independent nation of Western Samoa has become
just Samoa. Somerset Maugham’s Sadie Thompson is well remembered in Pago Pago,
with a hotel named after her and the Sadie Thompson Inn where Maugham stayed in
1916 when he wrote Rain, is still
going strong.
We
spent about 2½hrs strolling through the town taking in these sights, and
talking to a few locals, and losing four of our compatriots who found the heat
too oppressive, then took a taxi for an hour’s drive out to the eastern end of
the island. Our driver talked about the tsunami in 2009 which killed many in
Samoa, American Samoa and elsewhere in the Pacific.
2.
Sat 21 Jan; 09:00
It
was interesting that, while there were many large and very large tuna fishing
boats in Pago pago harbour which supply the two canneries, unlike other Pacific
ports, there were no outrigger canoes, or small tinnies or any evidence that
anyone fished privately, for food or recreation. Our taxi driver [from Samoa]
suggested it was because American Samoans would now rather buy their fish in a
can, or preferred turkey tails and didn’t eat fish at all.
Mon 23 Jan; 14:30
Kay
has been religiously taking her Night ‘n Day and her cold seems to be on the
wane.
After
leaving Pago pago at 17:00 on Thursday, we turned from our previous NNE course
since Auckland and Captain Gennaro pointed the bow east towards Tahiti and its
capital Pape’ete.
As
you can imagine, the Costa Concordia incident didn’t help engender too much
confidence in an Italian captain, but Captain Gennaro Arma has been excellent,
at least in his attempts to keep all passengers informed about where we are,
what’s happening and why. In that regard he has been much better than British
captains we have encountered on previous cruises with Princess. Although some
of his pronunciations in his routine midday [8 bells] announcement and
otherwise have prompted a few grins.
There
were two full sea days on Friday and Saturday. Our typical day at sea goes
something like this: around 06:30 our deck 9 steward brings tea and juice,
ordered the previous evening by hanging a filled out form on the cabin door
before we go to bed. When he arrives, sometimes we’re awake and sometimes not,
particularly if the clocks have gone forward overnight. In the latter event it
can’t be a pretty sight which confronts him when I eventually open the door,
but he manages to hide any revulsion.
Around
07:00 or so I [Max] do three fast laps of the Promenade Deck, which equals a
mile, and Kay [until the picked up her cold] does 20min or so on a treadmill in
the gym. Depending on how we feel, breakfast is either in the buffet Horizon
Court on deck 14, with great views [at sea, the horizon is around 3.6
or 20km at 33m above sea level], or in the
formal dining room on deck 6. By the time we’ve finished breakfast our fairly
gay Filipino cabin steward Jack has made the bed, tidied the cabin and provided
fresh towels.
or 20km at 33m above sea level], or in the
formal dining room on deck 6. By the time we’ve finished breakfast our fairly
gay Filipino cabin steward Jack has made the bed, tidied the cabin and provided
fresh towels.
Kay
then goes off to a Knitters and Natters group for 3hrs or so while I either do
some work in the cabin on one of the seven or eight projects I’ve taken along
to work on, or go to a lecture, which could be about the next port we’re to
visit, or a so-called ‘enrichment lecture’ which have so far included a series
on WW2 in the Pacific, elements of science, and human health, all of which have
been presented by experts in the field. The last one is particularly apt given
the median age of the passengers – I’m a young fella.
After
lunch about 13:00, either in the deck 14 buffet, the formal dining room, the
pizza bar or the outdoor grill on deck 12, we may watch a movie, play trivia,
read or work on projects, and often have what we’ve been told to call a short
SCAN [Senior Citizens Afternoon Nap], or watch a bit of TV. On-board TV
includes Murdoch’s Sky Australia ‘Australia Channel’ which is broadcast by the
government to South East Asia and, you may remember, under Abbott’s inspired
leadership, replaced the ABC’s international TV channel. It’s bloody awful, embarrassing
for Australia’s image, and not unlike the US Fox, with a mish mash of Mark
Latham, Alan Jones, some Stan Zemanek clone called Paul Murray, and a host of
other right wing Sky commentators. But we do get some Australian news, filtered
though it is.
After
another mile around deck 7 or on the treadmill, it’s sundowner drinks on the
balcony or in one of the bars, followed by dinner. Unlike the old days when
cheap, duty free booze used to be served on ships, the booze is expensive, so
quite a few people have taken to smuggling bottles of wine or spirits on-board
at each port. Everything is scanned on return to the ship, but even though it’s
against ship’s regulations, no one that we know of has yet been pulled up.
There’s also a two for one happy hour from 15:00 to 16:00 when throngs walk out
of the bar laden with booze they’re taking back to their cabins. We haven’t
resorted to either ploy yet, … yet?
Dinner
is either a dress-up affair with our six other permanent and quite acceptable table
companions in the formal dining room from 19:45, or in sandals and shorts
whenever suits us in the buffet, which often has grill to order, while you
watch, fish or steak. We may then go to a late show or more often, direct to
bed to read for a while.
Through
driving rain, we arrived in Pape’ete at 12:00 yesterday, Sunday, to find there
was a major civil emergency unfolding, with major flooding and landslides.
Consequently emergency services throughout the island and in the capital were
overloaded, Les Frogs refused to accept more people on the island, and despite
all Captain Gennaro’s Italian charm and pleading [he said], we were refused
permission to go ashore. But never mind, we’re back here in 10 weeks or so, on
a Saturday then, when things will be open.
Nevertheless,
we did manage to offload two passengers who needed to be hospitalised. Every
few days on-board there is a call over the PA for the ‘medical emergency’ team.
One
consequence of the flooding was a lack of power, so our bunkering operation
took four hours longer than anticipated and we didn’t leave until 03:30 today,
Monday. Another was the closure of the international airport which meant
entertainers for the period from here to Valparaiso couldn’t join the ship, so
we’re to be under-entertained, and forced to watch reruns of ‘Hacksaw Ridge’. We’re
now steaming east through intermittent rain to Pitcairn Island, and then on to
Easter Island
Today,
Monday, our 200 strong Cruise Critic group had its first Monday lunch at tables
of six or eight, which afforded the opportunity to chat with a whole new group
of geriatricsJ.
Sat 29 Jan; 10:00 [Time zone GMT-5]
Good
morning all. Kay is still getting over her cold which is now an annoying cough.
Pitcairn
Except
for two hours steaming twice around Pitcairn Island on Thursday morning, we’ve
now been sailing ESE at around 19kn for six days through long comfortable
swells which seem to have upset no one, and expect to be at Easter Island
tomorrow [Sun] morning at 07:00. The island is in time zone GMT-5 during summer
and we have been putting the clock forward an hour for most nights during the last
six days since leaving Pape’ete, which was in time zone GMT-10. Our body clocks
are thus way out and we’re both having difficulty getting to sleep.
NW
point of Pitcairn - Mummy and Daddy rocks
Most
everyone knows intellectually that the Pacific Ocean is big but actually
sailing though it like this gives a visceral understanding of its size. And
it’s deep. There’s a lot of water out here, thank God for gravity. Sailing
through it 400 years ago was really a leap into the unknown. And how anyone
could believe the world was flat after chasing the endless and unbroken circle
of the horizon for months on end is a tribute to the power and influence of the
priests.
The
Pitcairn Islands [Pitcairn (volcanic, 4.6km2), Henderson (uplifted
coral atoll, 37.3km2), Ducie (atoll, 0.7km2) and Oeno
(atoll, 0.65km2)} are the only British Overseas territory in the
Pacific. Only Pitcairn, the second largest with an E-W length of 3.6km, is
inhabited by descendants of the Bounty mutineers and the Tahitians who
accompanied them. The islands were named after15yo Midshipman Robert Pitcairn
of the British sloop HMS Swallow [Capt Philip Carteret] who was the first on
the ship to sight them on 3 Jul 1767.
In
1790 nine mutineers and six Tahitian men, eleven women and a baby girl from the
Bounty settled on the uninhabited Pitcairn Island. Confrontation soon followed
about access to the Tahitian women, who the Europeans attempted to reserve for
themselves. Alcohol, murder and disease soon killed off all the men except John
Adams.
In 1856 all 193 Pitcairners sailed for Norfolk Island,
but 19 soon returned, followed later by a further 27. The population peaked in
1937 at 233 but has since fallen with migration, particularly to NZ, to 53, with
only two children born in the 21 years to 2012 – extinction is looming for Pitcairners.
Almost all islanders are SDAs, and ministers from NZ come for a two
Adamstown, Pitcairn Island
year
stay.
Pitcairn
bees are disease free and exceptionally docile, and the island exports honey to
the UK and NZ. It’s sold by Fortnum & Mason and is said to be a favourite
of the Queen and Prince Charles.
As
you’re probably aware, the Pitcairn Islanders is another society who believe
their culture is fixed and immutable, and continues to allow sexual relations
with minors. The British government didn’t agree and in 2004 charged and
convicted 13 of the male islanders, and gaoled six of them. In 2010 the mayor
was charged with possession of child pornography images and videos. The UK
government won’t allow any of their staff to bring their children onto the
island. Amazingly many people, and a few newspapers in the UK, continue to
criticise the government’s actions on the grounds that ‘they’ve always done
it’, culture trumps all.
Bounty
Bay
We’re
told that the islanders used to come out to cruise ships in their longboat and
sell craft items on board while the ship was circling the island, but this
doesn’t happen now [or didn’t this time, anyway] – we saw one resident on a
quad bike for about 30sec.
Australia
Day was raucously celebrated on-board, with lots of flags, thong throwing, pie
and pavlova eating, and all types of jingo – one guy in a green crocodile hat,
a rather large woman dressed as a big jar of Vegemite – you don’t want to see
the photographs.
Captain Gennaro continues to
give good value – we’re still afloat, and we had a drink each courtesy of him
on Thursday evening, and last night was the Captain’s cocktail party on the
open Riviera deck 12, which however had to be postponed because of rain. And
his noon report is worth listening to, ‘from the beautiful and friendly …. Sea Princess’, and, for example, what’s
the origin of the phrase: ‘show a leg’ – many women used to stow away on old
Royal Navy sailing ships and when the watch was roused, anyone still in their
hammocks was required to ‘show a leg’ to prove they weren’t [male] crew; and ‘son
of a gun’ – a male child born [on the gun deck] to a female stowaway during a
voyage was entered into the ships log as a ‘son of a gun’ if the father was unknown.
Adjacent guns were often fired to ‘facilitate the birth’. We were given no
information on female children.
3.
Tue 31 Jan; 11:00
This
is our second day steaming ESE to Valparaiso after leaving Easter Island; we’re
now in time zone GMT-4 after clocks went a further hour forward last night. The
only excitement has been a small fire in a pizza oven, which had the crew at
emergency stations for a short time late in the evening, but didn’t affect us
except that we were woken by the stand down PA broadcast. Otherwise it has been
our standard daily shipboard routine since leaving Pitcairn at around 10:00 on
Thursday, with intermittent rain, intermittent sun, and a relatively calm,
short 1½m swell which doesn’t cause any significant pitch or roll of this ship.
Sunday
29 Jan saw us at Easter Island by 07:00 but unfortunately the Chilean
authorities were late on-board and no one got off the ship until after 09:00.
It’s a tender port but the berth is small and confined so it took quite a while
for all passengers to be landed, even with three 105 person capacity tenders in
service. We were in one of the early tenders and were ashore by 09:30 after
waiting for nearly two hours. The ship gives tender priority to those doing
ship sponsored tours, and we weren’t.
But we were doubly lucky – what they don’t tell you in
the brochures is that only between one in five and one in ten cruise ships
arrive when swell conditions are low enough to put passengers ashore in the
tender boats. There are passengers on-board who have been here up to six times
and never got ashore. And secondly because the tour we’d arranged with Easter
Island Spirit was exceptional. The company is owned by a high born Scot and ex
British Army Grenadier Guard named Grant-Peterkin who lives on the island, and
our guide was a passionate and very knowledgeable American called Dale Simpson,
very willing and happy to share his knowledge, who has also lived on the island
for 16yrs, is married to a Rapa Nui woman, and is completing a PhD on island
geomorphology and geology through the University of Qld. He also has his own
History Channel TV show. As Kay says, ‘Today I ticked off something I hadn’t
realised was on my bucket list. Not only did we go ashore against the odds but
we lucked out with our tour guide as well. Seriously it couldn’t have been a
better experience.’ We didn’t get back to the ship until 18:00 and I was
sunburnt and thirsty – a few beers were very welcome.
Port
at Rapa Nui with tender unloading. VASI light towers in background
A little bit about Easter
Island [Rapa Nui in
Polynesian and Isla da Pascua in Spanish]. Of 164km2, it is a
special territory of Chile consisting of three extinct coalesced volcanoes. The
nearest inhabited land is Pitcairn Island, 2,075km west and the nearest
reasonable size town is Rikitea on the French Polynesian island of Mangareva,
2,605km west. Since 1995 it has been a UNESCO world heritage site because of
the 887 extant statues called moai created by the early Rapa Nui people. Most
of the island is, and most of the moai are in, Rapa Nui National Park, and the
park entry fee is a hefty USD80 per person.
Radio-carbon dating of artefacts suggest the island was settled by
Polynesian people around 1200CE, towards the end of the Polynesian
trans-Pacific migration. It’s estimated that by the beginning of the 17th
century the island population was around 15,000 but by the time the first
European, Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen arrived on 1 Apr 1722 [Easter Sunday], the
population had dropped to around 2,500 due to overpopulation, deforestation,
the introduction of the Polynesian rat and the extinction of natural resources
[21 tree species, all land bird species]. Jared Diamond asserts that the Rapa
Nui became cannibals after the extreme deforestation disrupted an already
precarious ecosystem, although there seems to be no tangible evidence for this
assertion.
Peruvian slave raiding in 1862, and the
subsequent introduction of European diseases created devastating epidemics.
Missionaries and sheep farmers arriving soon after began buying up much of the
island, and in 1871 the missionaries removed all but 171 Rapa Nui to French
Polynesia. By 1877 there were only 111 inhabitants. Alexander Salmon, son of an
English Jewish merchant and a Tahitian princess, bought up the entire island,
except the Catholic mission area in the town of Hanga Roa, and repatriated many
of the Rapa Nui from his Polynesian copra plantations to work on the island. He
effectively ruled the island from 1878 until his all-encompassing Maison
Brander [after Scotsman John Brander, Salmon’s brother-in-law] sheep station
holdings were sold to Chile on 2 Jan 1888. Chile subsequently annexed the
island on 9 Sep 1888.
Rano
Kau crater. Water in crater is 50m deep, top of saddle is 50m above water in
crater and 80m ASL, top of crater wall is 130m ASL.
Until 1953
the Rapa Nui were confined to Hanga Roa town and the island was rented to Williamson
Balfour Co of the UK as a sheep station. It then became a Chilean Navy base
until 1966, when it was reopened to public access and the Rapa Nui given
Chilean citizenship. The Easter Island airport [Mataveri International] runway
was extended by the US from 423m to 3,353m in 1987 as an alternative landing
site for the NASA space shuttles, but has never been used for this purpose.
The indigenous Rapa Nui have lately begun to protest at their
treatment by Chile, surely with a fair degree of justification, claiming that
their ancestors had been cheated into giving up their land. There doesn’t seem
to be any strong and legal land tenure system even now. Only in the last ten
years or so, our 
The
joys of cruising with 2,500 people. The queue waiting for a tender back to the ship.
There was a bit of aggro against the ship’s officers, which prompted a strong
but fair rebuke from Captain Gennaro the next day.
guide said,
a Chilean corporation ejected indigenous ‘owners’ and took over land near the
port for a major hotel: the hotel was occupied by the indigenous protestors in
2010, who were then ejected by Chilean cops with rubber bullet guns; there is
now a permanent demonstration outside the hotel.
It is thought the moai, erected on stone platforms
called ahu, represent ancestors and those with completed eye sockets look
inland over their descendants. There are nearly 1,000 moai but most were never
erected, and by 1825 a British ship reported seeing no standing statues. Thor
Heyerdahl was responsible for the re-erection of the first in 1955 and around
50 have now been re-erected.
Sometime between the
mid-16th and mid-18th centuries the moai ancestor cult
was overtaken by a Birdman cult similar to that in Hawaii. Every year at the
coming of the Sooty Terns to a small islet 3km off the coast, a competition was
held where warriors competed to run and swim from within the cone of the
extinct volcano Rano Kau to Motu Nui islet, collect an egg and bring it back to
land. Curiously, the chief for the coming year was the person given the first
egg, and not the warrior who brought the first one back. The missionaries put a
stop to the cult in the 1860s.
[Max:
G’day Tess & Tony – glad to hear we’ve now got Alex Mitchell in the fold.
It’s also good to know there is a physical limit to the size of an analogue
clock; it’s been a worry that’s been keeping me awake for years.] [Kay: Thank
you Rebecca, for the Sukin body scrub and cream. I’ve brought them with me and
uses them regularly. Lovely products.]
Sat 4 Feb; 12:00
And
the time is 12 noon. You find us heading SW down the coast of Chile to our next
port, Puerto Montt where we’re due to arrive at 07:00 tomorrow. Another cruise
ship, Silver Spirit out of Nassau, is
presently on our port beam and is due in Puerto Montt at the same time
tomorrow, so Captain Gennaro has just told us he’s aiming to get there first to
bag the best mooring position, nearest the tender jetty, for Sea Princess. My GPS which I fired up
this morning says our heading is 201° and we’re steaming at 34km/hr.
In
all of the passage across the Pacific, only two vessels were sighted, a yacht
and a small cargo ship. But we did see a large group of what we think were sea
otters travelling beside us for a while, days sailing from anywhere. Yesterday
we finally reached South America, and ¯Valparaiso and the horn¯, and spent a great, but fairly exhausting day with eight other
Seafarers on a five hour walking tour of the city, led by our very
knowledgeable guide Danae, a porteňo but she has a Greek name.
Spain had conquered and colonised Chile in the mid-16th
century, replacing Inca rule. The Straits of Magellan which form the southern
boundary of the country were first used by Ferdinand Magellan, exploring on
behalf of Spain, in 1520. The conquest of Chile by Pedro de Valdivia, one of
Francisco Pizarro’s lieutenants, began in earnest in 1540. It became one of the
most militarised of Spain’s South American possessions, cut off from the other
colonies by the Atacama Desert in the north, the Andes and the unsubdued
indigenous Mapuche in the south, and menaced by the Dutch and British – Sir
Francis Drake raided Valparaiso in 1578.
Napoleon’s replacement of the Spanish king with his
brother Joseph in 1808 prompted revolution throughout Spain’s colonial
possessions in South America. In Chile a junta loyal to Ferdinand, the heir to
the deposed king proclaimed in 18 Sep 1810 led to a movement for total
independence under José
Miguel Carrera and his two brothers. A Spanish reconquista ensued but the new
Chile triumphed, led by Bernardo O’Higgins who challenged Carrera’s leadership,
and 
José de St Martin, the leader of Argentina’s war of
independence, who crossed the Andes and defeated the royalists. Chile became an
independent republic on 12 Feb 1818, although its national day is celebrated on
18 Sep.
A boundary treaty in 1881 gave Chile sovereignty over
the Straits of Magellan, and the War of the Pacific with Peru and Bolivia
between 1879 and 1883 
expanded Chile’s territory northward by almost a
third, ending Bolivia’s access to the Pacific Ocean. 
Valparaiso Bay was first entered by the Spanish in
1536 and remained a small village with a church until a merchant reclaimed
wharves and built mu
ch of the town between 1810 and 1830. In 1818 after
independence the town became the main base of the new Chilean Navy, and so
remains, and between 1828 and 1837 it was also a major Royal Navy base in the
eastern Pacific Ocean. The town soon became the stopover for ships rounding
Cape Horn, particularly during the California gold rush from 1848 to 1858, and
remained a significant port until the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914,
when Valparaiso lost its vital role as the major stopping point for shipping
going from the north Atlantic to the north Pacific via the Magellan Straits.
However there has been a significant renaissance in the last 20 years, and parts
of the city became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003.
The city has been subject
to major natural catastrophes: devastating earthquakes in Nov 1822, Aug 1906
and Feb 2010, and a major bushfire in Apr 2014.
One
of Chile’s heroes of the independence wars against Spain is Admiral Thomas
Cochrane of the Royal Navy, on whom Patrick O’Brien’s Jack Aubrey is partly
based. Cochrane established and led the Chilean Navy for four years from 1818.
Valparaiso
is a city of brightly coloured houses, graffiti, murals and lots of mangy stray
dogs, and yesterday lots of drunken rock fans who were there for a week long
free music festival. The business district is on the reclaimed waterfront land
and the people live in precarious houses and flats on the steep, crumbling
hillsides, and use ascensores
[funiculars or elevators] to get to and from their homes.
Kay
has just returned from her Knitters and Natters craft group with the news that
yesterday a passenger died under a trolley bus and anther, one of the craft
group, died in the cruise terminal. Attrition.
Tue 7 Feb; 12:30
The
interesting news is that, rumour has it, a number of passengers were put ashore
at Valparaiso for abusive behaviour towards crew members, in the queue at
Easter Island and in the dining room where, it’s said, a waiter copped some
food and a plate. Can’t vouch for the truth of it but there’s no doubt there
are some arrogant, self-entitled pigs aboard.
There was one sea day between Valparaiso and our next
port of Puerto Montt on Sunday 5 Feb. The city, named after Manuel Montt,
Chilean President from 1851 to 1861, is at the northern end of the Reloncavi
sound, and began life in 1853 with the German colonisation of southern Chile.
It’s the hub of the second largest salmon aquaculture
Frutillar
industry
in the world but suffered severe economic loss in the late 2000s as a result of
disease.
We did a so-so bus tour through the area with a so-so
guide; highlights were:
· Puerto Varas on Lake Llanquihue, the city of roses
founded by German immigrants in 1853, with the conical Osorno volcano and the
snow-capped peaks of Mt Calbuco and Mt Tronador clearly visible from the shore.
· Petrohué [petro-way] Falls.
· Frutillar on Lake Llanquihue founded by German immigrants
in 1856.
This area of Chile is a lot like the Alaskan coast
with lots of islands and fjords which penetrate a long way inland, and it’s
possible to sail within sheltered intra-coastal waterways, as we did. I had fun
watching our tortuous progress on the GPS.
Monday was Puerto Chacabuco
in Aysén
Fjord. Puerto Aysén at the head of the fjord is 15km from Puerto Chacabuco.
¯Chile no sereno¯ Puerto Varas
It was settled around 1914 and became a city in 1928,
serving the 
region’s cattle stations. Fishing
and salmon farming are now the leading economic activities. Until 1955 it was
the region’s main port but bushfires caused widespread deforestation and
erosion which effectively silted up the harbour. As a result, the port was
moved downstream to Puerto Chacabuco, to which it is linked via a suspension
bridge, which has been translated from Spanish as a ‘hung’ bridge.
Along with eight others, we caught local buses
from Puerto Chacabuco to Puerto Aysén and a further 65km to Coyhaique, at the confluence
of the RÃo Simpson and RÃo Coyhaique. Founded in 1929 and now with a population of over 50,000, it’s
known as the ‘cow town’ that kept on
growing, mainly now servicing adventure sports and white river rafting. It is
only 25km to the Argentine border. The driver of the bus was kind enough to
point out and slow down so the tourists on board [us ten] got to look at all
the sights. Our tour cost us USD5 each; an exactly similar tour organised
directly by the ship was $220 each.
It’s now a cold 6°C as we head still further south for Punta
Arenas where we’re due to anchor at 06:00 on Thursday.
Sat 11 Feb; 10:00
After leaving Purto Chacabuco on Monday evening, we
threaded south through the fjord passages of the Patagonian coast of Chile
towards our next port, Punta Arenas, stopping on Wednesday morning for a look
at the Amalia or Skua Glacier on
Amalia
Glacier
the
Sarmiento Channel. This tidewater glacier, which originates in the southern
Patagonian icefield, has receded over 7km in recent years. Later that day we
entered the Magellan Straits from the Smyth Channel, the southward extension of
the Sarmiento Channel, rounded Cape Froward which is the southernmost point of
mainland South America, and arrived in Punta Arenas, another tender port, on
Thursday morning at 06:00.
 |
|
Magellan Straits; Punta Arenas
|
Most
of the Patagonian coast of Chile and the Straits of Magellan are closely
associated with Australia because they were largely surveyed by Captain Phillip
Parker King RN, the son of Philip Gidley King who was governor of Norfolk
Island and then of NSW. Parker King surveyed much of the Australian coast from
Tasmania around through the Kimberley coast to Torres Strait in HMS Mermaid and HMS Bathurst between 1817 and 1822. He was then given command of HMS Adventure, with HMS Beagle also under his command, and spent five years surveying
the Patagonian coast from 1826 to 1830. He died in Sydney in 1856, a Rear
Admiral and member of the NSW Legislative Council.
HMS Beagle, with Robert FitzRoy in command and Charles Darwin as
supernumary, continued the surveys during a second voyage from 1831 to 1836. HMS Beagle must have had a curse on it
–FitzRoy became commander because the previous commander shot himself in a fit
of depression, and after a storied career including governor of NZ, FitzRoy cut
his own throat.
Punta Arenas [aka Sandy
Point], founded as a penal colony, is an interesting place. We first took a
taxi out to a great maritime museum, Museo Nao Victoria, with full size
replicas of Magellan’s ship Nao Victoria and Shackleton’s whale boat,
among others. Not being able to get a taxi, we took a local bus back into town
and visited two mansions in town, Palacio Braun- Magellan’s ship Nao
Victoria
Menendez which is now a museum; and Palacio Sarah
Braun which is now partly a museum, partly a hotel and partly a great bar, the
Shackleton Bar, the association being that Shackleton
induced
the people of Punta Arenas to help him fund and, after three attempts, recover
the other members of his polar expedition who he had left marooned on South
Georgia Island [?].
In
the main square of the city, Plaza Muňoz
HMS
Beagle
Garmera,
is a warlike statue of Ferdinand Magellan with a local, now extinct, Tehuelche
indian at his feet – legend has it that if you rub his big toe you’ll come back
to Punta Arenas, so we can expect to see Kay heading off again at some time.
The mansions were originally the homes of families
who, for 50 years to around 1918, were the centre of the Patagonian wool
industry, owners of enormous sheep stations, such as Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego, controlling
over 10,000km2 which extended over both Chile and Argentina, and who
lived in Punta Arenas in fabulous luxury. The city’s
Ferdinand
Magellan [note shiny big toe]
economy
is now based on tourism and Tierra del Fuego oil.
The ship left Punta Arenas at 19:00 on Thursday and
sailed south, back down the Beagle Channel and the Magdalena Channel and then
west along the Cockburn Channel to the open sea. This was about 02:00 on Friday
morning, and we could feel the wind and swell in the cabin for 45min or so
before we again turned east into sheltered waters, heading along the Ballenero
& O’Brien Channels and the Brazo Noroeste to the Beagle Channel, passing
another five glaciers coming off the Patagonian ice sheet, and on to Ushuaia on
Argentina’s smaller portion of Tierra del Fuego.Ushuaia
was established as penal colony and we took a ride on a restored section of the
wood lines railway which took the prisoners out to cut wood for heating and
power for the prison and growing town. It’s not the best planned city but is
fairly speccy with the multi-coloured houses and roofs spreading up into the
mountain valleys behind the shoreline. There were three Antarctic cruise ships
in the port on the day we were there. The Argentine naval base at Ushuaia was
the home port of the cruiser General Belgrano, sunk by a British submarine in
1982.
Beaver dam
The
rest of our day in Ushuaia was spent on a guided tour of the Tierra del Fuego National
Park. Of interest was the damage from beavers which were imported in the 50’s
from Canada, along
Seafarers with Tierra
del Fuego flag; white giant wandering Albatross, southern cross on a blue [sky]
background, fires of Tierra del Fuego
with
mink and muskrat. The idea was to establish a fur trade but since it’s not as
cold in Ushuaia as it is/was where the animals came from originally, the pelt
didn’t grow as thick and consequently had no value as a fur. But the beavers
have been busy doing what beavers do, fornicating, multiplying enormously and
building extensive dams which have killed trees, turned creeks into swamps, and
caused much damage. I suggested they import cane toads to fix the problem, but it
didn’t go over well.
Chilean
naval station on Horn Island with Hall Island in background
After
leaving Ushuaia at 20:00 yesterday, we headed east and south out of the Beagle
Channel, then west, doing a full anti-clockwise transit around Horn Island
about 07:30 this morning,
Changeable weather around Cape
Horn – approaching rain squall, then rainbow, then sunny
passing
Cape Horn on our port side [our cabin is on the port side] and crossing from
the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans through Drake Passage, between the island
and Antarctica. Our Garmin GPS recorded it. During the transit we closed to
less than 900m from the island in gale force 7-8 winds [45kn]. However, the
swell conditions were disappointingly calm.
Traditionally,
those who have rounded the Horn are entitled to wear a gold loop earring — in
the left ear, the one which had faced the Horn in a typical eastbound passage —
and to dine with one foot on the table; or two feet on the table if they have
also rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Max has done both.
Surprisingly,
despite the ice, wind and wave hazards of the open waters of Drake Passage,
most sailing vessels have and continue Albatross monument on Horn
Island to sailors who have lost their lives rounding the Horn
to use Drake Passage because the
narrow sheltered waters of the Magellan Straits and the Beagle Channel are
subject to treacherous winds, called williwaws, and the high probability of
being driven onto a lee shore.
We’re now heading ENE for
Stanley and the Falkland Islands [Las Malvinas for our Argentine friends], with
sunny skies, single figure temperatures and through surprisingly calm seas for
the South Atlantic.
Wed 15 Feb:
10:30
Well, you’ll be pleased to
know we are now both back on our walking routines after finally getting over
the colds we’ve both picked up, Kay then Max. It’s going through the ship, with
some insisting it is now the dreaded URTI lurgy requiring a full range of
antibiotic treatments. And to make matters worse, poor Captain Gennaro lost his
bow thrusters yesterday in what he described as a ‘technical failure’. I can’t
enlighten you as to how that’s different to an unqualified ‘failure’.
Nevertheless, his technical team worked hard and found ‘em again by the end of
the day.
A few more items that
keep life on board interesting – the walking machines which Kay uses are in the
gym on Deck 12 aft, over cabins on deck 11, which consequently are some of the
cheaper cabins. (Cheaper cabins are often ones that passengers have been assigned
or upgraded to, for a cheaper price because they are subject to noise or light,
rather than one the passenger chooses directly. It’s a bit like buying a
cheaper house near the airport and complaining about the noise). That hasn’t
stopped complaints from those in the cabins, who have now managed to get gym
hours reduced by two, to the irritation of Kay and other fitness fanatics.
Passengers are divided into
classes depending on how many days they have cruised with Princess or its
sister companies like Carnival, P&O etc. And many people have managed to
upgrade their class by delving into their old records and showing they had
previously travelled with P&O, back in the 60s, for example and well before
it was a part of Carnival Lines. We are in the second tier class, Platinum,
which gets us 500min each of free Wifi access per cruise section, which isn’t
insignificant when Wifi access costs $20 for 30min and it’s S L
O W. But I digress. The top class
Elite, gets free laundry and priority in embarkation and disembarkation queues.
They’re not happy because there are too many of them on this cruise, and the
ship won’t honour the commitment they think their entitled to, to jump queues
on embarkation or disembarkation.
Princess Cruises do a lot
of things well but despite having to get many people on and off their many ships
at many ports every day, their crowd management skills remain almost totally non-existent.
Re-embarking at Stanley, where there was a minimum 1hr return tender trip, ended
up a fiasco towards the end of the day, with long queues on the jetty, because all
of the four operating tenders were taken out of service at the same time for
refuelling. Yesterday at Puerto Madryn, near departure time when everyone
arrives back, they seem to have forgotten that oceans have tides, and had to suddenly
take one of the gangways out of service for over an hour to reposition it, with
an enormous queue as a result. We were on board and overlooking the action from
our balcony – it was more entertaining than watching people put up a large
complicated tent for the first time. Although it wasn’t so good for some of the
frail and elderly who had to negotiate a steep, cleated gangway with no steps.
As usual so far, the
weather and sea state remained perfect for our passage ENE from Cape Horn to
Stanley in the Falkland Islands where we dropped anchor at 08:00 on Sunday 8
Feb. I drove Kay mad quoting Oliver Hardy’s constant refrain ‘This is another
fine mess you’ve got me into, Stanley’.
We
hadn’t felt like sitting in the back of a 4WD for six hours in order to drive
out on an expensive [$400+], rough and bumpy shore excursion to see some
penguins so we spent the day with eight others who joined us, walking through
Stanley, the one and only town. The population of the islands is 4,500; but
2,000 are British service personnel and all but 400 live in Stanley. About 85%
are British, with the remainder mainly from St Helena and Chile. The official,
hard to believe blurb, says that except for defence, the islands are
self-governing and self-financing.
Like Gibraltar, with whom
the islanders have a close affinity, the atmosphere is ‘more British than the
British’, because both are claimed fairly vociferously by a large neighbouring
country, and it is not certain that the UK will forever
support their remaining as a part of the UK, even though frequent referendums
always have something like 98 per cent of the population voting to remain. In
any case, notwithstanding UN protocols about the ‘will of the people’, I’m not
sure the UK now has the will or 
military [naval] resources to respond like Margaret
Thatcher, if it went bad in Argentina again and they decided to invade like
they did in 1982, to take the people’s minds off the country’s ills. It remains
a strongly emotional issue in Argentina. Despite being advised to not wear any
clothing/etc bearing Falkland Islands logo, we expect to see it happen in BA on
Friday and Saturday. We’re not cynical, we’re realists with experience.
it is not certain that the UK will forever
support their remaining as a part of the UK, even though frequent referendums
always have something like 98 per cent of the population voting to remain. In
any case, notwithstanding UN protocols about the ‘will of the people’, I’m not
sure the UK now has the will or military [naval] resources to respond like Margaret
Thatcher, if it went bad in Argentina again and they decided to invade like
they did in 1982, to take the people’s minds off the country’s ills. It remains
a strongly emotional issue in Argentina. Despite being advised to not wear any
clothing/etc bearing Falkland Islands logo, we expect to see it happen in BA on
Friday and Saturday. We’re not cynical, we’re realists with experience.I’ve
always been interested in the islands since 1982, and have read many of the
books which have been written on that war, so even though it was only for a day
and we couldn’t get out to any of the battlefield sites, I really enjoyed our
visit. So did Kay, but probably not for the all the same reasons.
Government
House, Stanley
We had a full day at sea after the Falklands, and
arrived at 07:00 on Tuesday at our next port, Puerto Madryn in Patagonian
Argentina. It’s a town of about 120,000 population on the Golfo Nuevo, founded
in 1865 by Welsh immigrants and named after the Welsh estate of their Baron,
Sir Love Jones-Parry. They were part of a concerted push by the Argentine
government to attract immigrants from Europe to populate Patagonia after the
government had systematically exterminated all
Guanaco
the indigenous Indians.
Rhea
One of those immigrants was
the Australian poet Dame Mary Gilmore who spent a few years on a southern Patagonian
sheep station, of which there are many, with her shearer husband. She had
arrived from Australia as a radical young woman to participate in William
Lane’s utopian settlement New Australia
in Uruguay, but moved on to Argentina when utopia fell apart. Patagonia is a
lot like The Nullarbor, low acacia shrubs, no trees, dry and plenty of sheep.
Apart
from sheep and a large Aluar aluminium refinery which takes its refined bauxite
mainly from Australia, Puerto Madryn has tourism because it is adjacent to
Peninsula Valdez which is a Patrimonio de Humanidad [UNESCO World Heritage
site], full of protected guanaco, rhea, armadillo, Magellanic penguins, sea
lions, elephant seals and orcas, among others. We spent a full day driving by
small bus through the arid landscape, which supports 16 sheep estancias,
stopping at various spots to look at the animals – or let them look at us; I
wasn’t sure by the end.
At present we’re on
our way to Montevideo, sailing through thick fog, as we have been since leaving
Stanley. We normally sleep with the balcony door open, and have it open during
the day too, to avoid too much air conditioning – last night and this morning have been very noisy, with
the ship sounding its big boofy fog horn for 5sec every minute.
morning have been very noisy, with
the ship sounding its big boofy fog horn for 5sec every minute.
As you probably know, it
was just outside Montevideo where Capt Hans Langsdorff scuttled the German battleship
Admiral Graf von Spee after the Battle of the River Plate with the Royal Navy
and Royal NZ Navy in Dec 1939. Stanley, where we were yesterday, was the site
of the battle of the Falklands in 1915 when a Royal Navy squadron under Admiral
Sir Doveton Sturdee sunk Admiral Graf von Spee and the ships under his command,
including the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.
Hope you are all enjoying
the Follies de Trump from Washington.
We are seeing more than desired of Donald on MSNBC, which is one of a very thin
choice of TV channels. We lost Australian Sky News weeks ago.
Mon 20 Feb; 16:00
We’ve
now been on this ship for 43 days and have a further 46 to go – not even half
way and we’ve now blown all our gratis on-board credit; that means, from now on
we‘re paying for our own drinks. We’re also now well out of the colder climes
and the temperatures are heating up - 30°C is now normal during the day.
Did you know that you can be with us,
vicariously at least, by going to the Princess Cruises website, going to the
Sea Princess page and clicking on our bow web cam which updates in real-time
every 5min or so. You should get some good views as we transit the Panama Canal
between 06:00 and 16:30 on 8 March. We’re in time zone GMT-3 so you’ll need to
add 14 hours to these times and dates.
On Thursday the ship was berthed and cleared by the
Uruguayan authorities in Montevideo earlier than planned and we were able to
disembark by 09:45, 15min earlier than the scheduled berthing time. This was
good because I had a party of 24 Seadrifters to lead into the heart of the city
to meet our free walking tour guide in Plaza Independencia, and some of ‘em
aren’t the fastest walkers. Nevertheless, it was only a 20min walk from the
port anyway, and we all made it in good time. The 3hr walking tour was very,
very good, mainly [completely] due to the 27yo guide Valentin who had just the
right mix of knowledge, humour, irony and a finely honed absurdity.
Uruguay
is rather unusual in South America, and indeed in the world, and Valentin proudly
pointed out why. It was founded and has been run, at least until 30 or so years
ago, by Freemasons who have implanted their lucky number beliefs into names,
buildings and political systems. Like Australia, the country has been sued by
Phillip Morris [who lost] for requiring cigarettes to be sold in plain
packaging with confronting photographs. Abortion, the growing, sale and
consumption of marijuana are all legal; hospitals, medical treatment and
education are all government funded; and to become a Uruguayan citizen requires
one to walk 1½ blocks from Plaza Independencia to the Immigration Dept, with
only a birth certificate and USD6.
The
country has a population of 3.4M which has changed hardly at all in the last
thirty years because, Valentin insisted, women in Uruguay would rather be
educated and work than have a lot of kids. But there are 3.8 cows per person,
and ‘to control the bovine population’ they eat a lot of beef – it is said that
being gay is perfectly acceptable, in the army or anywhere else, but being vegetarian
attracts extreme social ostracism. Vegetarian restaurants are not allowed to
exist on the main streets, and have to be tucked in back alleys.
In
fact, Uruguayans think so little of marriage as an institution that, just for
the party value, they hold faux marriages where the paying guests go into a
ballot for the leading parts such as bridegroom, etc; Valentin told of an
occasion when he was the ‘best man’ and the ‘mother-in-law’ was younger than
the ‘bride’, who was geriatric.
It
is the most secular country in South America, and possibly the world – less
than 20 per cent profess to belong to an organised religion, and the main
Anglican cathedral opens on only three days per year. Altogether, it is a
refreshingly social-liberal country, with a high per capita GDP, similar to the
Scandinavian countries. It’s now on the top of my list of countries we’ve
visited on this trip that I’d like to spend much more time in than the 9hrs we
had.
Refreshingly
a big public holiday beach party is traditionally followed the next day by the
party goers returning to the scene of the crime to clean up. We wonder how many
of the citizens of Sydney would turn up at Bondi or elsewhere after New Year’s
celebrations.
After
the tour we joined a young Brit for lunch in a parilla café in the markets, and
shared a bottle of the excellent local Norteňa cerveza which, incidentally, is another good reason
to come back for a longer stay. Damien, the Brit, was an interesting young man,
working for Google in Germany, and holidaying in Uruguay with his workmate and
girlfriend [?], staying with her parents in Montevideo. He did the tour while
she was elsewhere on the day.
Buenos
Aires, our next port, is only slightly more than a stone’s throw from the north
shore to the south shore of the Rio de la Plata, but it was an eventful night.
About 21:00, two hours or so after our departure from Montevideo, the ship was
caught by a very strong wind gust which rolled her heavily onto the port beam –
a wine glass in our cabin fell and shattered and a few wine bottles and a
bottle of Campari also fell off our bar fridge cabinet but luckily didn’t
break. Upstairs in the al fresco restaurant there was apparently chaos with
food and crockery scattered everywhere. The swimming pools on the open deck 12
escaped their surrounding bunds and flooded down the stairs into public spaces
and accommodation, and the fountain in the atrium on Deck 5 flooded the
carpets. A bit of a mess all round. The crew required all passengers to remain
seated for an hour or so to clean up spilt food and broken glass. We heard
through the grapevine of more than a few injuries throughout the ship. Captain
Gennaro was very apologetic and disconcerted.
The
strong winds over the estuary had a further consequence – an MSC cruise ship in
BA couldn’t get off its berth, and was late leaving. Because deep draught
cruise ships can’t pass each other in the relatively shallow depths of the
dredged channel into the port, Sea Princess had to anchor for four hours until
the MSC ship had passed.
BA
doesn’t have a cruise terminal as such [we berthed at an old abandoned bulk
terminal and had to get to the terminal gate by shuttle bus through the cranes
and containers of the busy port]. Getting shuttle tickets added another half
hour on to our late arrival, at 12:00 instead of 08:00 on Friday, which meant
we missed out on a free walking tour we had booked but, more drastically, quite
a few passengers missed their flight connections for an overnight trip to Iguazu.
Many others were leaving the ship for good and would also have missed their
flights. A harrowing and graphic account of the problems is in boryssnorc.com, a blog by one of the nicer and younger passengers,
Robyn Boyer, who’s travelling with her mother and with whom we are doing a few
trips later in the cruise.
Having
been to BA a few times over the years for lengthy stays, and with no booked
commercial shore excursions, we weren’t worried about the delay. Max went
ashore for an hour or so on Friday and we spent Saturday wandering the city
[Casa Rosada, Plaza de Mayo, Florida, San Telmo, etc], having a parilla lunch,
washed down with some Quilmes cerveza, before getting back on board by 15:00
for a 16:00 departure.
A few observations about BA
after our last visit of ten days or so, 13 years ago, and my earlier visit of 2½
months in the late ‘80s:
·
There are now
many people sleeping in the streets, something that I can’t remember seeing
anywhere or at any time before, and there is much more graffiti, most of it strongly
political.
·
The city is now
much more westernised, with McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks and all the rest of the
US fast food and other company logos now evident. The contrast doesn’t bode
well for a strong and stable middle class.
·
While the feral
overhead telephone and power wires aren’t so evident, the city is much dirtier
and public services are evidently deteriorating.
We’ve
been heading up the coast in slight seas and a low swell, [seems that’s the
only sea state we are going to get – boring], for the last two days since
leaving BA and tomorrow, Tuesday, we’re scheduled to arrive in Rio at 07:00. We’ll
be up early to enjoy the sights of Copacabana, Ipanema, Corcovado and Sugar
Loaf and arrival into Guanabara Bay. It’s supposed to be one of the spectacular
ports of the world, like Cape Town, Sydney, San Francisco and Hong Kong.
Wed 22 Feb; 16:00
We
were up at 06:00 for our arrival in Rio and were alongside a bit late, at 08:00
because of adverse currents, so Gennaro says. It really is a speccy port to
enter, with the high rises of the beach suburbs of Copocabana and Ipanema on
the port side, and Nitros on the starboard side, interspersed with rocky mounts
rising from the sea, and the high and ragged mountains behind where the favelas
stretch up from the rich peoples shoreside playgrounds – and ‘Christ the
Redeemer’ with arms outstretched over all. The entrance to Guanabara Bay is
narrow with an old Portuguese fort low on each rocky point, the rows of black
open gun ports like rotten teeth in the cream stone. The ship rounds the main
Brazilian naval base, with a carrier and an insidiously lethal looking black
sub particularly evident, and then the city itself opens up before you.
Since
we’d been here before, we didn’t see any need to queue with all the hordes at
Corcovado and Sugar Loaf, but instead did a ‘free’ walking tour through the old
city. The 2½hr tour was good, but nowhere near the stellar level of that in
Montevideo. We tipped 50 Real, about USD8 each. With our companions Annette
& Ray and Kel & Joyce, we all must have walked 17km or so from 09:00 until
we returned to the ship at 16:00.
good, but nowhere near the stellar level of that in
Montevideo. We tipped 50 Real, about USD8 each. With our companions Annette
& Ray and Kel & Joyce, we all must have walked 17km or so from 09:00 until
we returned to the ship at 16:00.
Kay
and I had considered going out to a slap up churrascario dinner in the city
which is its home, but age (not unreasonable
Christ the Redeemer above Copacabana
given
our exertions today) got to us and we settled for dinner on the ship. But the
local beer we shared with our little group went down very well and allowed for
a much welcome break before walking back to the ship.
As you
can see, the citizens are fighting back; those are all bullet holes, some of
them through 12mm plate
The
city government is contemplating selling [privatising] the public utilities of
water and sewage and there were major demonstrations outside the state
government building against the proposal, as there should be. What was
fascinating was the extraordinary number of cops and military and armoured cars
congregated around the building and the adjacent streets; all in vicious
looking riot gear with shields, heavily armed with automatic rifles, pistols
and truncheons, just to keep the citizens under control. I counted five
different police services, along with the military and the military police.
This clearly wasn’t the arm of the law; it was the fist of the state.
But
the militarisation of the civil police is a familiar trend we’ve all seen
elsewhere around the world, or observed in detail at any civil protest in
Australia in the last 15 years. I know that, for safety, one should keep clear
of demonstrations in foreign cities but, like wanting to get closer to a big
fire, they have a compelling fascination.
Still
in Rio, today we headed uptown again to buy Scotch and wine, and then spent a
few hours in the new and architecturally spectacular Museu do Amanhã
[Museum of Tomorrow, museudoamanha.org.br/en]
which had potential we thought, and which
Kay liked but I found was a disappointment, all loud noises and flash computer
graphics, with no depth. Part of the disappointment was the language barrier.
There were some English language signs but not enough for us to take full
advantage of the museum. Nevertheless I can’t complain too much because it was
free – for mature people. Similarly, all public transport is also free for
mature [>60yo] people of any nationality. For us boomers who now have to fight the
x, y, and z et al generations to retain our simple pleasures, such as ‘60s
music or the ABC as it was, it was refreshing to encounter so much respect and
indulgence for us mature people.
museudoamanha.org.br/en]
which had potential we thought, and which
Kay liked but I found was a disappointment, all loud noises and flash computer
graphics, with no depth. Part of the disappointment was the language barrier.
There were some English language signs but not enough for us to take full
advantage of the museum. Nevertheless I can’t complain too much because it was
free – for mature people. Similarly, all public transport is also free for
mature [>60yo] people of any nationality. For us boomers who now have to fight the
x, y, and z et al generations to retain our simple pleasures, such as ‘60s
music or the ABC as it was, it was refreshing to encounter so much respect and
indulgence for us mature people.(I should note that our on-board ‘destinations
expert’, yankee [B]Hutch, who is there to supposedly tell us all there is to
know, ‘information-wise’, about the next port, didn’t tell us about this, or
anything else of any value ‘information-wise’.)But frankly and ultimately, in my opinion Rio is a
great city, big, clean and spectacular, and the people and the racial mixes
they embody are very classy [particularly the ladies]. I can understand that if
you had to run away from the law or responsibility, and had money, Rio would be
the place to run to As Ronnie Biggs did].
We
came off the berth today at 14:00 and are currently heading on easterly courses
along the coast to Cabo Frio, where we turn north to our next port, Salvador.
Kay is sipping her new Johnny Walker (distilled, blended and bottled in
Scotland for $USD 35 for a litre) and soda, and I’m sipping a Campari and soda,
and we’re about to repair to the balcony for a ½hr before a shower and then dinner.
It’s a hard life, but someone has to do it.
Sat 25 Feb; 09:00
After
an uneventful day at sea on Thursday, yesterday we docked in Salvador da Bahia
at 11:00, two hours behind schedule.
Sea
Gannet taking advantage of our uplift and bow wave
The
delay is ascribed to more ‘technical problems’ with a generator [the ship has
four diesel generators which power two electric motors which power the
propellers], and to the presence of an adverse Brazilian current of 2kn or so.
Although it has been encountered by mariners navigating the Brazilian coast for
over 600 years, who knew? We’re informed that the ‘current and technical
problem will make us a day late into our next port, Fortaleza, but won’t affect
arrival times at later ports, which is good because our next port after
Fortaleza is Barbados where we have a full day exclusive shorex booked.
Salvador
is the capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia and was founded by the
Portuguese in 1549 as the capital of Brazil and was the first and largest slave
port, and is still the centre of Afro-Brazilian culture in the country. The
newer lower town on the shore is separated from the old upper town, named
Pelourinho and a UNESCO World Heritage site, by a steep escarpment connected by
an old funicular and a 72m high elevado built in 1873, 15 centavos a ride.
Carnival
week had just begun when we arrived and everything was closed, and boarded up
against the depredations of the
The
replica body parts of Bonfim
revellers,
so after some adventures, Barry, Kerry, Kay and Max sat in the main square and
watched the action for a few hours, over a beer or two.
Before that, with Max leading, we had caught a cab east
to the nautical museum on the point, which was supposed to have a great view,
in addition to having most interesting exhibits. Unfortunately however, our cab
driver who had initially professed ‘no trouble’ and ‘OK’ turned out to have no
English and no idea, so after some animated confrontations, we abandoned him
and his cab, unpaid. His reaction was to also abandon his cab, in the middle of
a busy road, and follow us pleading ‘my friend’. Eventually he gave up. Luckily
we had left our man in a marina [which he maintained was our intended
destination] and the two very nice and helpful girls in reception straightened
us out, calling to confirm that the museum was closed because of carnival, so
we caught another cab west to the imposing Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim on
the other point of the bay, which in addition to its architecture and speccy
interior, has for some reason which escaped us heathens, among other a display
of replica body parts hanging in the vestry. The cab had waited, and we
returned to the elevado near the
ship, and went up to higher ground, or rose to a higher plane as you might say.
Another
interesting aspect of our visit was the unusual fendering arrangements, where
two floating pontoons, about 4m x 4m, kept the side of the ship off the quay,
and thus in sufficient water depth for our draught of 8.5m. We sailed out of
Salvador at 18:00 last night and are now heading around the bulge of South
America to Fortaleza.
Some statistics for the run
from Sydney to Rio are: we’ve burned 4,760 metric tons of diesel to sail
25,160km: that’s 5.3m/l; gone through 18,920 rolls of toilet paper; 4,750
individual serves of vegemite; 12.370 bottles of wine and 27,235 cans/bottles
of beer; 132,000 eggs; and made 17,530 tonnes of fresh water. In addition,
we’ve put our clocks forward by an hour 10 times, going from GMT+11 to GMT-3,
when our crossing of the International Date Line is taken into account –
11+10-24 = -3.
Your
friendly Salvador cops
and
Bombeiros [firefighters]
Thu
2 Mar: 15:00
You find us today
heading NW along the coast of Surinam, having rounded the eastern bump of South
America and now heading at 19kn/h for Barbados, which we expect to reach
tomorrow, berthing in Bridgetown at 08:00. There have been a few showers over
the last few days, unusual on this cruise but refreshing for all that, but the
swell and sea conditions have remained boringly benign and I suppose the only
item of ‘news’ is that we now have an outbreak of norovirus on board, and
strict food and cleanliness protocols are in place.
Carnival in Salvador
On
Tuesday there were 11 people in isolation in their cabins, the number climbed
to 21 yesterday, and today it is 15. Norovirus is the most widespread form of
viral diarrhoea and is supposed to be fairly debilitating while it lasts, which
isn’t all that long, one to three days. Everyone is exhorted to frequently wash
their hands ‘for 20sec minimum’ and to use the hand sanitiser which has
proliferated in dispensers throughout the ship. All food is now served by crew
and is no longer self-serve in the Horizon Court buffet restaurant, there are
now no salt and pepper shakers at any table and you have to take the little
sachets individually, cutlery is now issued rather than laid out at each table
as it was, and there is a now veritable horde of cleaners continually
sanitising all handrails and door handles. I’m not surprised at the outbreak, there
are some fairly feral people on board – a while ago, before the outbreak, Kay
and I came across a woman selecting her peach by picking each one up, giving it
a squeeze, then putting it back until she was satisfied, and this despite a
prominent notice saying don’t handle them.
Captain
Gennaro leaves us tomorrow, to be replaced by another Italian, which, since the
ship was built in Italy [in 1998 by Fincantieri], is fair enough I suppose. He
continues with his little marine homilies, anecdotes and superstitions
delivered at the end of each midday report, and I think this one, supposedly
from a 10yo British boy, is worth passing on:
Fortaleza
Fortaleza art; by
Picasso’s younger brother?
Why I want to be a captain
‘I want to be a
captain when I grow up because it’s a cool job that’s easy to do. Captains
don’t have to go to school for a long time, they only need to learn figures so
they can read instruments. I think they also have to learn to read maps so they
don’t get lost when they sail.
Captains have to
be brave so they don’t get scared when it’s so foggy they can’t see, and when
the propeller falls off they have to know what to do about it. Captains have to
have eyes that can see through the clouds and they mustn’t be afraid of thunder
and lightning which they have closer to them than we have.
The Captain’s
wages is another thing I like. They earn more than they can spend. That’s
because most people think it’s dangerous to drive a boat, except captains,
because they know how easy it is.
There is not much
I don’t like, except that girls like Captains. All the girls want to marry a Captain,
so Captains are always having to chase them away to get some peace.
I hope I don’t
get seasick, because if I get seasick I can’t be a Captain and I’ll have to
start working.’
Today
is our third day at sea since we departed from our last port, Fortaleza in
Brazil, at 16:00 on Monday. It was another carnival day there and everything
was closed and the locals nearly non-existent, presumably getting over the
night before and preparing for the night ahead. Unlike Salvador, there was no
carnival atmosphere.
Fortaleza
[Portuguese for fort] is a big city [2.7M people], colonised from 1603 by the
Portuguese, but unusually it was held by the Dutch for 25 years from 1630,
although there is little evidence of either Dutch or early Portuguese
architecture now, and the cities tourist claim to fame are its beaches, which
were surprisingly clean and inviting, and attract Brazilian tourists from all
over the north east of the country.
The
ship berthed over 7km outside the city centre so we shared a cab
Typical
Brazilians in Fortaleza
into
town with another couple, and kept it for a two hour trip through the sights,
before returning to the ship about 13:00.
The
1½m swell in the harbour made the departure interesting, and I think also made
Captain Gennaro sweat a bit. Another two passengers were offloaded to hospital
before we sailed.
Mon
6 Mar: 17:00
It’s
late in the afternoon and we’re heading west across the southern Caribbean
towards our next port, Cartagena in Colombia where we expect to berth early
tomorrow at 07:00. While the weather is overcast, as it seems to have been on
and off for a few weeks, wave conditions are still benign, with a comfortable
roll and minor pitching. However, the latest weather chart, which is updated
and displayed at 08:00 and 16:00 daily and shows predicted significant wave
heights, wind bars and isobaric contours, now has an angry red patch on our
proposed track from Cartagena, where wave heights exceeding 5m are predicted.
We’ll see if the fun eventuates, but the sickbags are already out!
On
Saturday our norovirus isolation cases had dropped to six, but today they’re up
to 18, the second highest we’ve had, so our necessary but frustratingly
intrusive Level 3 protocols [the highest], which often cause delay and queues,
are still in place. Touch wood, normal internal operations are still the case
with Kay and me.
Last Friday, 3 Mar, saw us docked in Bridgetown
Barbados by 08:00, behind an enormous P&O cruise ship, Azura, which has a
passenger capacity of about 4,000 and had come direct from Southampton. There
were also two other smaller cruise ships in port. With all these
St James parish church Barbados [1627]
cruise
ship passengers, and an enormous number of hotels and resorts for the more up
market British who prefer and can afford the Caribbean to the Spanish Costa del
Sol and North Americans, the island, which is only 34km long by 23km at its
widest point was, not to put too fine a point on it, ‘chokkas’.
It also meant that us Sea Princess passengers had to take a shuttle bus from the ship,
through the working cargo port, to the cruise terminal, a frequent requirement
also at previous ports. The procedure is clumsily managed on this ship by a
numbered shuttle ticket system, usually requiring a long wait in one of the
unused dining rooms until your number is called to
Parliament
building cloisters, Bridgetown
go
on the next available shuttle.
We
had booked a full personalised island tour for the two of us with someone
called Skinny Carson who was well recommended on Trip Advisor and, from my
several email exchanges with him, including a very friendly and civilised
exchange of Christmas greetings, seemed to be very professional and accommodating.
But by the time we finally got to the cruise terminal at 09:15 there was no
sign of the promised sign for ‘Mr Max Willoughby’, or of Skinny himself. Kay
now calls him Shifty Carson and we will have a few words about him when we get
home, as well as posting a more appropriately negative report on Trip Advisor.
We weren’t the only passengers [suckers] subjected to Shifty’s style of
business.
We hadn’t paid up front, so only slightly fazed, we
negotiated a similar six hour shorex, ‘on the run’ you might say, with a taxi
driver, and for USD20 less than we’d agreed with Shifty.
Barbados has been British since 1625 and the first
permanent settlers arrived from England in 1627. It’s been an independent state
within the British Commonwealth since 1966, but is still very British. Until
the start of the sugar cane industry in the 1640s, which depended
overwhelmingly on imported slaves from Africa, the major
Barbados from Gun Hill, our ship behind Azura
crops were tobacco, cotton, ginger and indigo farmed mainly
by the labour of POWs from the English Civil War [Barbados rejected Cromwell
and remained loyal to Charles II], and illicitly kidnapped and forcibly
transported people, mainly Irish. The upheaval wrought by the introduction by
Sephardic Jews of sugar cane from Dutch Brazil was enormous: in 1644 the
population was 30,000 of which only 800 were of African descent, but by 1700 it
was 65,000, of which 50,000 were black slaves – the white population was
decimated. Slavery was abolished in 1833, and now those of African ethnicity
make up 93% of the population.
It’s interesting that Barbados was the main supplier
of labour for the US construction of the Panama Canal at the beginning of the
20th century. The dependence on sugar is now fairly small and the
main components of the economy are light manufacturing, tourism and offshore
banking. The country has a high GDP, being in the top 60 or so worldwide, but
there’s been none of the much promoted ‘trickledown’ – 20 per cent live in
poverty and 10 per cent can’t feed themselves. This two tier economy was
glaringly evident even from our six hours touring the island. Even so, it ranks
equal 17th with Ireland and the US in Transparency International’s
World Corruption perceptions index.
The sheltered west side of the island is full of high
end hotels and resorts and homes which wouldn’t be out of place in the best
parts of Los Angeles [Rhianna’s place on the beach was extremely OTT];
Bridgetown and surrounds has all the top end shops you’d expect in a town full
of offshore bank HQ’s [Mr Turnbull, who has his money in similar banks, only in
the Cayman Islands and not Barbados, wouldn’t feel at all out of place]; while
the east coast, exposed to the Atlantic, is fairly down market poor. The east
coast is also subject to dust storms driven across the Atlantic from
sub-Saharan Africa.
Obviously, cricket is a big deal, and there is a new and
architecturally impressive Sir Garfield Sobers stand at the Kensington Oval cricket
ground in Bridgetown. Barbados is actually in the North Atlantic Ocean, an
island of the Lesser Antilles and 100km east of the Windward Islands chain and
the Caribbean Sea. Even so, it’s a member of the West Indies cricket board
which also includes Jamaica, over a thousand miles to the west, the Windward
Islands, Guyana in South America and the adjacent islands of Trinidad and
Tobago. Barbados has and may well again form a political union with the last
three.
I was expecting a lot more evidence of the island’s
long history, but apart from the 1627 St James Parish Church and Gun Hill
signal station, one of a chain of semaphore stations which operated on the
island, there was little. But we did see a turtle on the beach where we had
lunch at a fish shack.
[No Chris, no black stuff boiling up around the
Falklands, as far we could see. There were lots of penguins, but no rock hopper
rigs.]
We left Barbados at 17:00 without Captain Gennaro, but
with our new Captain Paolo Ravera from Spezia in northern Italy, and a much
more experienced man. He makes even more of an effort than Gennaro did to keep
passengers informed of the what, when and importantly for us, the why.
Saturday 4 Mar was spent at sea en-route to our next
port, Willemstad on the Dutch island of Curacao, where we arrived around 08:00
on Sunday. The island, in the Lesser Antilles chain and only 60km from the
Venezuelan coast, is even smaller than Barbados, and has a very dry climate –
the largest vegetation is cacti of all types. All potable water comes from
reverse osmosis desalination.
The
‘Swinging Old Lady’
Curacao was also built on the slave trade, being a
major transhipment and sale point between Africa and South America,
particularly Brazil. The locals talk about their ‘plantations’ where the slaves
worked, but the plantations were actually artificial salt flats – Curacao was a
major exporter of salt into Europe during the 16th and 17th
centuries. Being Dutch, it took them a further 30 years after the British in
Barbados to ban slavery, in 1863 when Lincoln was also doing something about it
in the US.
These days, apart from Curacao liquor, the main
components of the economy are offshore banking, tourism, oil refining, a big
dry dock, and cement manufactured from the limestone which forms most of the
island. Prostitution also gets a guernsey as a big earner.
The oil refinery story is interesting. It was built in
1915 by Royal Dutch Shell to process Venezuelan crude, was sold to the Curacao
government for one guilder in -1985 and it is currently leased to the Venezuelan
government oil company. Apparently, Venezuela believes it is so unstable that
it has to refine its crude offshore. The lease ends next year and there is no
new lessee in sight, so Curacao may be in for an economic downturn,
particularly given Venezuela’s current instabilities..
It
has been said that the Dutch have few morals, and fewer principles.
Prostitution is legal for non-nationals and so, although we didn’t see it, down
by the international airport there is a large and legal open air brothel
staffed by over 500 women who are given temporary work permits by the
government. The government is supposed to regulate it too, but the US State
Dept claims that women from Peru, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and
Haiti are trafficked to the island for the sex trade. And yes, the airport
incorporates a US Air Force base, supposedly directed against the drug trade.Curacao
liquor is concocted from orange peel oil and alcohol, and artificially coloured
blue. There are now several flavours beside the traditional orange, the latest
of which is tamarind. Go figure – tamarind flavoured curacao.
We had a guided tour lined up, organised by Robin
Boyer, which sounded a lot better than it was, especially since we were jammed
into an overloaded small bus. Nevertheless, the 1½hr snorkelling along a 90m
drop off, with artificial reef units at the edge to attract tropical fish, was
enjoyable, as was the beer, dog and great papas frites taken in the open air
bar with a beautiful view of the ocean complete with a delightful sea breeze.
Willemstad is a World Heritage Site and a picturesque
little city [no building can be white], although mostly full of offshore
banking HQs. It has a narrow deep channel up the middle which opens out into a
large, protected deep harbour. The channel, the Schottegat is spanned by the
high level Queen Juliana Bridge and by a multi-pontoon swing bridge, with one
shore side pontoon hinged and the opposite shore side pontoon propeller driven.
It’s the Queen Emma bridge but known locally as the ‘Swinging Old Lady’.
Wed 8 Mar; 12:30
We’ve just passed through the Gatun Locks on the
northern Atlantic Ocean end of the Panama Canal. Since 11:00 we’ve been at anchor
for an hour to allow a large LNG carrier to pass through the narrow Culebra or
Gaillard cut at the southern end of Gatun Lake, but we’re now on the way again.
Last night did see wave heights get up a bit, to about 3.5m and we rolled a
bit, despite the ship’s stabilisers, but it was still rather mild and nothing
like the mayhem presaged by the red patch on the weather map last Monday.
I must mention our so-called destination expert Hutch,
known as Butch, a bumptious and jingoistic American bloviator, who has been
commentating from the bridge on our passage through the canal, and will
continue throughout the day. I desperately want to turn him off, but he has a
better view, and I can’t bring myself to do it – it’s self-administered
torture. He obviously has a lot of information to offer in his ‘destination
enrichment lectures’ [hey, this is an American ship, and BS abounds], but
prefers to show his slides [when we’ll all see the real thing the next day],
and utter ‘you haves’, such as ‘on the port side you have an alligator’ [which
we have just had] or, ‘here you have some mangoes’, or ‘and then you have Ernie
Windschuttle’s emerald shops’, etc. I’m hoping they operate soon to remove his
‘you haves’. He has the grace and charm of Richard Nixon, without the charisma.
We’ve been up since 06:30 when we had our first
morning tea, delivered by Anthony who thoughtfully included the milk we had
forgotten to add to our order. Then at 08:00 the special order “deluxe” breakfast was delivered
to and served on our cabin balcony as we were going through the Gatun Locks –
champagne, melon halves filled with a blueberry and grape melody complete with
Chantilly cream, followed by smoked salmon on bagels – very nice it was. The
remainder, quiche and bacon and salad, pastries and brioche, have been reserved
for ‘ron. And most enjoyable it was too. Photos will be included for anyone
interested in a little cruise envy.
“deluxe” breakfast was delivered
to and served on our cabin balcony as we were going through the Gatun Locks –
champagne, melon halves filled with a blueberry and grape melody complete with
Chantilly cream, followed by smoked salmon on bagels – very nice it was. The
remainder, quiche and bacon and salad, pastries and brioche, have been reserved
for ‘ron. And most enjoyable it was too. Photos will be included for anyone
interested in a little cruise envy.
So far today we haven’t been out of the cabin; the port
side viewing along with the forward view on the cabin TV has been so good.
Today has been a treat for both of us. Today has
confirmed that engineering is a much underrated profession, By going through
the old locks we have experienced an engineering marvel commenced 125 years ago
and accomplished totally without computers. Engineers were not only responsible
for the design and construction of the series of locks but for draining the
swamps and providing other sanitary facilities that considerably reduced the
death toll due to yellow fever and several other diseases that killed tens of
thousands of slaves and other workers. They were and continue to be responsible
for the bridges that cross the river either side of the locks, for the roads
and railway, for the extensive lighting system that allows night time
navigation of the Panama Canals and of course the maintenance of all the
facilities.
Culebra
Cut [Gaillard Cut] and the new Centennial Bridge
The
Panama transit was one of the things I (Kay) particularly looked forward to and
it didn’t disappoint – one more off the bucket list.
Thu 9 Mar; 11:00
Hello again. I’m trying to get this blog instalment
up-to-date and off before it becomes War & Peace. We’re now heading west
along the Pacific coast of Costa Rica to Puntarenas where we expect to arrive
tomorrow at
07:00. The weather is sunny and balmy and the sea
state is again pacific, boringly benign.
Another time change is
Mules
keeping ship aligned
scheduled for tonight, taking us from GMT-5 to GMT-6;
that is from 16hrs behind you people in eastern Australia on daylight saving,
to 15hrs behind.
Apart from yesterday, there isn’t much to see on the
sea, and the on-board entertainment isn’t much chop, but the high intensity
Trump Follies on MSNBC keeps us entertained.
After Curacao and then a sea day, our next port was
Cartagena in Colombia. The old city is a World Heritage site. Not too many years
after the town was established by the Spanish, its fame and wealth prompted
French and British privateers to attack it at regular intervals, for its
wealth, and these included Sir Francis Drake whose cannons blew the top off the
Cathedral and demolished a third of the town in 1586. For his pains, the town
gave him 107,000 Spanish Gold Reals to go away. The 7% excess was presumably
for taxes and expenses.
Faced with this type of treatment, Spain sunk an
enormous amount of money into fortifying the city over 100 years from 1590,
building a gigantic fortress and a wall encircling the city. Much of the
fortifications still stand today as they did then.
We did a guided tour of the city, and eight of us lost
our bus and guide for 45min, until I was able to flag down another tour bus
whose guide contacted our driver. It wouldn’t have been any problem except that
all of us had left our packs on the bus, and ours contained wallets, credit
cards, driving licences, money and phones.
Cartagena
has the best port entry terminal of any we’ve seen, with a large open air area
to wander through, full of birds of all type, plants and monkeys.
The duty free shop was however ‘closed for
renovations’ so we couldn’t pick up any wine or spirits before returning to the
ship. This was probably not a bad thing because there seems to have been a
crackdown on bringing alcohol back on board since Captain Paolo took over.
While I seem to have skipped a bit briefly over
Colombia and Cartagena, it was actually an interesting town with lots of
history in the old walled city, and we both really enjoyed its atmosphere,
including the adrenaline rush while we were lost. Unfortunately, we were
assailed here more than anywhere else by importunate vendors thrusting things
into our faces to buy, including beads and stacks of Panama hats, since this
is where they are made. This also includes emeralds, since Colombia produces
the best in the world.
including beads and stacks of Panama hats, since this
is where they are made. This also includes emeralds, since Colombia produces
the best in the world.
We’ve just heard that our norovirus count is now up to
26, which isn’t good.
Getting back to the Panama Canal transit, just about
every ship nowadays is of Panamax size so the clearance either side is less
than 400mm. The ship moves forward under its own power but is steered by, in
our case, three so-called mules each side, the drivers of which respond to
orders from the pilot on-board to keep the ship aligned within the lock.
There are six pairs of locks[33.5mx330m: three on the
Atlantic side at Gatun] called the Gatun locks which lift a ship 26.5m in
total, one named the Pedro Miguel locks which drop a ship
9.5m into Miraflores Lake, and the final two
Miraflores Locks with a drop which depends on the Pacific tidal range, which
can be up to 4m or so. The water to fill the locks comes from the Chagres River
which flows into the Atlantic at Christobal and is dammed to form Gatun Lake.
New, larger locks are now operating at each end but the water they use is
stored – if not, Gatun lake would have been drained in two years apparently.
Our passage cost about $50,000 and a guy who swam the
canal in 1925 paid the cheapest toll of 36c, based on his Gross Registered
Tonnage.
Panama City and new museum in foreground
Tue
14 Mar: 10:00
We are steaming into Callao, the port for Lima in
Peru, where we expect to berth around 12:00. Since leaving Panama on Wed last,
8 Mar, the conditions have continued calm and our norovirus cases are
continuing to drop, with only six yesterday. The crew are working overtime on
this issue, totally disinfecting the cabins every second day, including ice
buckets; in port, disinfecting every shuttle bus, spraying every surface which
may have been touched by a passenger, such as all hand holds, door jambs and
seat backs; soaking chairs and tables with a disinfectant in all the
restaurants, to the extent that they are unusable for 15min until they dry.
It’s good to see their efforts are having results but there are still
passengers who offensively and publicly refuse to comply with the hygiene
requirements.
But the people who run this ship are also weird in
some significant ways. An interesting example is our passenger account, of
which one can get a current version at any time, on line or a hard copy. We
found we had been incorrectly charged for two bottles of wine a week or so ago,
which we had never ordered or received. On querying the charges we were told ‘the
system is complicated’. Too true, it includes charges that have not actually been
incurred, and compensates by randomly deleting earlier charges that have
actually been incurred. So we’re billed for what we haven’t had, and not billed
for all we have had. This is Accounting 101, US style, which isn’t complicated,
just wrong. It also makes it almost impossible to determine if we’re being
ripped off or not.
Wed 15 Mar; 15:00
After the excitement of the Panama Canal the ensuing
sea day, heading essentially west along the Panamanian and Costa Rican coast to
Puntarenas, was essential in order to calm down. I must admit that Puntarenas didn’t really
upset our calming systems either. The town is fairly small and sits on a spit
of land lying parallel to the mainland and no more than 500m wide. That’s
probably why it’s called Sand Point.
admit that Puntarenas didn’t really
upset our calming systems either. The town is fairly small and sits on a spit
of land lying parallel to the mainland and no more than 500m wide. That’s
probably why it’s called Sand Point.
Our organised ;Puntarenas top 10’ tour took us to a
roadside stop first where our guide failed to call monkeys, then on to another
roadside stop where he was successful, inducing two capuchin monkeys to come
and look at the tourists. They didn’t seem impressed, and soon left.
We
then poked around a rainforest in the minibus before heading off for a 90min
river cruise to look at birds and crocodiles. I say a ‘river cruise’ but the
words seem to create an impression which significantly exceeds the reality.
Nevertheless, we did see lots of birds and more than a few crocodiles. We were
lucky – the longboat driver got out onto the bank and fed fish to a big croc. This
act of bravado was ‘free’ and not an advertised part of the trip. ‘We couldn’t
expect this every time’, we were told, it’s because you are such great people’.
We noted in passing that the crocodile being fed didn’t have an upper jaw.
After lunch in a local roadside café, the tour
finished with retail therapy at a very slick souvenir mart where Kay undertook
the therapy and bought a silver pendant in the form of a hermaphroditic human
figure, while Max sampled six different local liqueurs [coca, amoretto and rum
were three] and the admittedly great local coffee blends.
For
interest, here is the tour blurb which induced us to take it:
‘8 hours tour from
8:00am to 4:00pm including Crocodiles river cruise & bird watching paradise
activity, white sand beach, wildlife spotting such as monkeys, scarlet macaws,
crocodiles, toucans in their natural habitat, farmers markets, city and towns,
colonial village, waterfalls, souvenirs, plantations and of course rain forest.
You can pay cash or credit card (we accept all them) once you are here. We will
be going to Carara park surroundings, Santa Lucia village, Puntarenas, and
Punta Leona beach, only 1 hour drive each way is needed. We include: full
insurance, a/c and comfortable transportation, bilingual and nature guide,
lunch at very good local restaurant.’
I kept count and came
up with 12 stops, so we got more for our money than just the top ten. There is
an increasing trend for cruise ships to call at every small town, no matter how
minimal are the facilities available to dock the ship, or how meagre the sights
and attractions; and the tourists suck it up.
Costa Ricans claim to be the happiest people in the
world because of their ‘pura vide’ lifestyle, and the country is often sold as
the southern Switzerland. But I can’t say I saw any evidence of a utopia, and
there was as much evidence of poverty and gross income disparity as in any
other Central/South American country. Nevertheless, they’re one of the few
countries in the world without an army to speak of, and seem to rub along well
with their neighbours Panama and Nicaragua. And we like it because we have a
personal connection – our Argentine ex daughter-in-law lives there, though we
didn’t get to see her.
After Puntarenas we turned around and headed south
east, and after another sea day, arrived on Sunday 12 Mar at Manta in little Ecuador,
sandwiched between Colombia in the north and Peru in the south and east.
As you probably know, Ecuador has a few claims to
fame, two of which are that the Galapagos Islands is one of its provinces, and
it has been sheltering Australian wholesale journalist Julian Assange in its
London embassy for the last four years. No one we spoke to was aware of the
latter fact, including our tour guide Angie, who was a fifth year medical
student.
Thu 16 Mar; 09:00
Manta is the largest port in Ecuador and its economy
is based on tuna fishing and processing, so it’s the kind of place you smell well before you get there. The
harbour was packed with large and small tuna fishing boats and on-shore there
were another dozen in different stages of construction next to the fish market.
well before you get there. The
harbour was packed with large and small tuna fishing boats and on-shore there
were another dozen in different stages of construction next to the fish market.The
city had recently [Sep 2016 I think] suffered a 7.6 Richter scale earthquake and
there were many buildings destroyed and damaged. A feature was the number of
shipping containers brought in by government and set up with services so local
businesses could continue in them until new buildings had been constructed. The
same has been done in Christchurch we understand.
Our organised tour of Manta took us to the fish
markets, Pacoche rain forest reserve where we staggered along a muddy jungle
path for 20min in 36°
heat and 99% humidity, so we could arrive at a particularly suitable spot to have
a go at looking for more monkeys, howlers this time. Suffice to say, the
monkeys were resting, but we did hear a donkey.
It was then off to quite a large and surprisingly
sympathetic complex of buildings recently constructed to honour an early 20th
century president Eloy Alfaro, who after much good works, let power go to his
head and had his presidency terminated with a bullet.
Our final stop was in Montecristi which is the centre
of the Ecuadoran panama hat industry. The hats are indeed made in Ecuador, and
are known as panama hats only because an Ecuadorian entrepreneur gave away
thousands of them to the Americans who were building the Panama Canal in the
early years of the 20th century. Just about every male on the bus
bought one, except Max who bargained for two leather belts at $15 the pair.
Manta, and Ecuador generally, is an apparently very
amenable destination for North Americans, many of whom retire there [like
Panama City is for Brits, apparently]. I counted upwards of 15 gated community
estates in and around Manta, obviously not all full of expats because the
houses were often small and I’d assume inadequate for an expat, but ‘in your
face’ for all that. And this is in a city where crime didn’t seem to be a major
issue. No explanation!
Our next and last port in South America was Lima
[actually Callao] in Peru, where 13 years ago we spent ten days at the start of
our three month South American overland trip. Since then the city has grown
from some 8M to 11M population and seems much more prosperous and international
[ie, less individual, more American], although we didn’t get outside the main
centres so didn’t see the outer areas, where the newer and poorer generally
live.
Peru
is an unusual country in that they’ve been electing non-Peruvians as their
President for quite a while – Japanese Fujimori first, who fled to Japan after his
terms to escape fraud charges, but was cunningly enticed back and is now locked
up; and recently a Pole who won 51% of the vote, against Fujimori’s daughter
who unbelievably got 49%. I think she was also President in there for a while.
The ship berthed at 12:00 on Tuesday and was due to
depart at 23:00 the next day. Since we had spent some time here, nothing was
planned except an evening tour of the Laser Magic Light show, which was very
speccy. Instead of blowing a couple of million dollars two or three times a
year or more for a transient fireworks show, Lima city has constructed a large
park with about 30 fountains in it which are spectacularly floodlit at night,
with one showing an historical laser sound and light show beamed against the
fine spray from the fountains. The show runs for 40min three times a night,
every night and is always packed, we understand. So everyone can come in at
some time to enjoy it.
Another benefit is that the darker parts of the park
provides space at night for ‘courting’ couples, and they make use of it,
believe me. I suspect that at closing time each night the guards have to come
around with wheelbarrows and clubs to clear ‘em out.
The younger kids, like Kay and me, had great fun running through some of
the fountains, and dodging, or not dodging, the jets. I’m kidding; Kay is more
mature than that.
e Kay and me, had great fun running through some of
the fountains, and dodging, or not dodging, the jets. I’m kidding; Kay is more
mature than that.
Actually, it was good that we had nothing else on
because it wasn’t easy to get into town. The ship had docked in the working
port and, also because the area outside the port was deemed insecure, we had to
take a shuttle into the city to a large shopping mall, a 50min journey. With
only six buses running for much of the time, with a capacity of 45 each, you
can do the maths and come up with an hourly capacity of less than 150, which
meant that there were long, long waits. At least numbered shuttle tickets kept
riots at bay at the ship end, but coming back there were no tickets issued and
it was those with the sharpest elbows and the most aggressive temperament that
got on a bus. It wasn’t pretty and we kept to our cabin for a day or so
afterwards to get over the enochlophobia [‘just swallowed a dictionary] that
we’d acquired.
Fri 17 Mar; 11:00
We’re now into the second day of our nine day crossing
of the Pacific to Pape’ete, and well into our standard sea day routine again,
with a morning and evening walk for me, and exercises and a walk for Kay.
The monthly life boat drill this morning was a bit of
fiasco, with comms failures and inaccurate information broadcast from the
bridge by the third officer. It was obvious in his tone during his broadcast
that Captain Paolo wasn’t happy, and he let off a public blast at some crew who
hadn’t donned their lifebelts – public berating’s aren’t a good look.
While the norovirus issue did seem to be declining,
with only five cases yesterday, today we’re up to 17 cases, but many of them
may be just your garden variety diarrhoea picked up ashore.
St Patrick’s Day paraphernalia and decorations are all
over the ship, to keep the customers happy.
Thu 23 Mar; 15:00
Good news – the norovirus has been vanquished and we
are now on Level 2 and able to feed ourselves now. I think the crew is more
relieved than the passengers. It’s been a long crossing but there’s now only
one more day before we reach Pape’ete – Kay intends to stock up on duty free
French gear like Lancôme and perfumes, and I intend to recharge our cabin
drinks cabinet. Other than that, nothing is planned except a general wander
through the town and some ‘local gazing’.
Captain Paolo has just told us he’s jumping ship in
Pape’ete and we’re in for our third Captain, another Italian.
Fri
31 Mar, 14:00
We berthed in Papeete on the island of Tahiti on
Saturday. We were alongside an impressive looking ship which had a familiar
name, and which turned out to be James Packer’s private yacht Arctic P, an
ocean going tug and icebreaker bought by James’ dad Kerry and converted into a
luxury gin palace and chick magnet. It has all the pugnacity of Kerry and lack
of style and sophistication of the Packers, but is beautifully maintained and
presented, with not a speck of rust and with matching blue weather covers over
the seven jet skis, the five tenders and speedboats, and all the external
furniture and fittings. It has been hanging around Tahiti apparently, for a few
months while James organises his brand new boat and arranges the sale of Arctic
P to his sister Gretel.
The boat is reputed to be
worth $80M and costs $10M per annum to run, which seems to be reasonable. It
was sitting there, going nowhere for 12hrs while we were there, with engines
running to maintain all systems, and a reported crew of 26: the ones we saw
looked like a tough mob, a cross between ex-SAS close protection boys and
Lebanese bouncers in Kings Cross clubs. Definitely not to be tangled with. And
Australian taxpayers don’t contribute a penny to its upkeep; and with the
projected cuts in the company tax rate they’ll contribute even less. L Apparently, the man himself
was on board.
There were
also another two cruise ships in port, so Pape’ete was crowded with tourists.
French Polynesia stretches over 2,000km in the South
Pacific and consists of five archipelagos: the Society Islands [Windward &
Leeward Islands], which include Tahiti and contain nearly 70% of the
population, Tuamota [which includes Mururoa Atoll atomic testing site], Gambier,
Marquesas and Austral. French is the official language.
The
first Europeans to visit the islands were the usual lot: Ferdinand Magellan in
1521, Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen who visited Bora Bora in 1772, Samuel Wallis
[1767], Louis de Bougainville [1768] and James Cook [1769]. The Spanish
established a short-lived settlement in 1774 and were the first missionaries,
but it was the Protestants of the London Missionary Society in 1797 who made
the first impact, converting King Pomare II and his people. They were so good
that when French catholic missionaries arrived in 1834, Pomare kicked them out
again.
The
French, being French, responded in 1842 with gunboat and a takeover of the
islands, and the establishment of a protectorate to allow the Catholic missionaries
to work undisturbed.
The
remainder of the 118 islands of French Polynesia were progressively
incorporated into the protectorate [later a colony] over the next 50 years.
French Polynesia rejected the Vichy French regime and sided with the Free French
forces under General de Gaulle in 1940, so there are a lot of streets and
features named after the General. In 1946 the islands became an overseas
territory of France and in 1957 a French collective, only gaining
administrative autonomy in 2004. It seems that there is a strong independence
movement.
As
is evident from the size and bustle of Pape’ete, French Polynesia Is the sixth
largest economy in Oceania [after Australia, NZ, Hawaii, New Caledonia, PNG],
the major export being Tahitian black pearls. For all that, it still has the
seedy, louche and decaying look of all Pacific Island towns. It’s a fairly expensive
town, too, so no perfume and cosmetics.
We crossed the International Date
Line late at night on Tue, and went from GMT-11 to GMT+13 in an instant, faster
than warp speed or ‘beam me up Scotty’, and lost Wed altogether. Tomorrow we
expect to berth in Auckland at 08:00.
I’ve just been folowing the
progress of the remnants of Debbie and it seems that our home town of
Murwillumbah is a little wet at the moment. Even allowing for the normal media
excitement and exaggeration, the flooding appears to be more extensive than any
events we’ve experience in the 14 years we’ve lived there. Debbie’s remnants
also seem to have excited the Tasman Sea, with up to 5m wave heights predicted duting
our crossing next Mon and Tue, so we may at last get some ship rock ‘n roll
after this so far fairly benign voyage, wave-wise.
