We arrive in Beijing right on schedule. Beijing is exactly 12 hours ahead and of course we have crossed the International Date Line, so even though our bodies insist it's 4 am, it's actually 4 pm the next day. Beijing airport is enormous. We have to take a monorail to proceed from the arrivals area to the mammoth baggage retrieval area. And everyone's luggage is there safe and sound! After collecting our bags and exiting arrivals, we connect with our group and meet our guides: Jack, who will travel with us throughout China, and Wanda, our local guide in Beijing. We board our bus for the hotel. Beijing is a huge city of 20 million people. With 5 million cars, it has a very bad case of the disease that we've seen in some other major ... read more

The ship docks early at Valparaíso. We have a few issues with our on-board account to resolve. Eventually we say goodbye to the MS Veendam, which has carried us to Antarctica and back. We sailed 3588 nautical miles, which is 4128 miles or 6645 kilometres. We board the bus for our tour. Sylvia, our guide, turns out to have dual Chilean/Canadian citizenship. (She spends part of the year teaching Spanish in Montreal, where her daughter lives.) It's a grey, dreary and fairly cool day with occasional drizzle, but Sylvia promises that the weather will be beautiful when we reach the valley. Valparaíso is a port city built up from the sea into the sides of rocky hills. The way many of the buildings are built into and around sheer cliffs defies belief. The bus starts at ... read more

The ship arrives in Puerto Montt around 8 am and we are tended to shore and on a bus by 9:30. This is a full-day excursion of the city and the surrounding area. The weather is cloudy and rainy but fairly warm at about 15°C. Puerto Montt, named for a former Chilean president, is an attractive but mostly industrial city of 180,000 people. The big industry in town is salmon farming, which has been going on for about a decade. About four years ago, there was a disease crisis with the fish that caused the complete collapse of the industry, but it is now healthy again. The other interesting thing about the area is that it was originally settled by Germans around 1850, and the various towns retain a certain Teutonic charm. Puerto Montt is literally ... read more

We awake to a rainy, foggy day and behave accordingly—like lazy slugs. We have now exited the Strait of Magellan on the west side and are heading north into the region known as the Chilean Fjords, consisting of countless islands and bays carved out by retreating glaciers some 10,000 years ago and then flooded by the sea. However, we can see very little because of the weather. Attended lectures on the voyages of the Beagle (with and without Darwin aboard), on Antarctic explorations and their relationship to Darwinism, and on the geology of the Earth. The weather clears around 2 pm, revealing a similar scene to what we saw on previous days: rugged rocky islands and mainland, punctuated by ribbon-like streams cascading from the heights, and in the distance wonderful snow-capped mountains. Magnificent vistas that have ... read more

Up early (6 am). In the night, the ship has entered the Beagle Channel from the east, and it docks in Ushuaia, Argentina about 7 pm. We are off the boat and on a bus tour by 8. Our destination is Tierra del Fuego National Park, about 15k away from the city. And once again we are blessed to have a gorgeous sunny day with light variable clouds, a rarity in these parts. The park was created in 1960 to protect the area spanning the southern tip of the Andes Mountains. The mountains run east/west here; the Andes actually extend out eastward right into the ocean to form the Falklands, South Georgia and the other islands of the south Atlantic, and then swing around in an s-shape under the ocean to emerge as the backbone of ... read more