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Published: January 24th 2013
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We have experienced another rough night at sea, but it turned out to be not quite as bad as the prior night. It appears as we head down toward the Horn, sea conditions will worsen a bit each day, so this is our time to see if we are going to be able handle Antarctica on a future voyage on a much smaller ship. We awoke this morning, pulled the curtains back to find an ASROC rocket launcher staring us back in the face. This is the home port of the biggest portion of the Chilean Navy, so there a bunch of Frigates and Destroyers moored alongside. Steve is not really up-to-snuff on his Jane’s Naval Order of Battle, but he thinks the vessels have a Russian design look, versus a U.S. look. The first leg of the cruise ends here, as about half the passengers are getting off the ship to head for other places, and another 1,300 will come on-board today while we are in town touring, to replace them. Princess really has this turn-around thing going. We docked at 0400, disembarked 1,300 passengers, and will leave Valparaiso this evening at 1800 topped off with everything we need, including
replacements for all of the passengers who left the ship. Given what it costs to operate this beast, idle days are extremely unwelcome. The 17-day voyage has covered 6,640 statute miles at an average speed of about 21 knots.
The second component of the cruise will continue for another 13 days before we disembark at Buenos Aires. We burned 665,000 gallons of bunker oil at a cost of $1,530,000 for the fuel alone! We went on our last Princess tour today, which thrills us greatly. We have found that you are completely at the mercy of a tour guide someone else has chosen. We have had about 50 – 60% success with our tours, which were not inexpensive, so we will be happy to assume that responsibility for ourselves and our friends. Our opinion is that the worst possible way to spend a period of time is riding around town on a bus, attempting to take photos out of a window. We have also found that our Frommer’s Travel Guide for South America is lacking a great deal with respect to the areas we are visiting, so we will need to revisit this prior to our next little adventure.
However, due to some of the places we are visiting, there are obvious security concerns, and we do understand that. It appears a good 40% of the “new” folks who have come aboard are South Americans who speak little English, so all of the ship’s announcements are bilingual now, but it will also give us an opportunity to work on our Spanish. We have learned there are something like 27 different dialects of Spanish and Portuguese spoken here in South America, so as poor Spanish speakers we are being very careful not to offend anyone. One interesting aspect of our tour today was regarding those large stone figurines found on Eastern (Rapanui) Island. For whatever reasons we had always been led to believe these statues had to do with Deity worship, but in the second of our two museum tours dealing with Rapanui, we learned these statues are actually remembrances to certain family members who have died. The statues are only of males (Carol says, “So what else is new?”), and the various sizes and shapes (and those which appear to be wearing hats of some sort) have to do with the family’s wealth and stature within the tribes among
the islanders.
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