Pitcairn Island 218 Years Later: Been There, Done That, Bought a T-Shirt

Sunday, 19 October – Pitcairn Island

 

Today’s stop at Pitcairn Island was the highest highlight of the cruise. We lingered at Bounty Bay (Yes, named for HMS Bounty and all that. The ship’s remains is right below the surface of a nearby cove. Somebody said something happened with that ship some time ago, something about Charles Laughton and Clarke Gable. You might have seen the movie). We lingered for a few hours controlling the position with the bow thrusters since the sea was too rough for anchoring but long enough for 27 of the 41 residents of this volcanic rock very far from EVERYWHERE to come onboard in an oversized powered rowboat with a gonzo tiller. They brought T-shirts, handy crafts that they make in case a ship comes by, honey, and a lovely bunch of coconuts and other local produce and set up a set of tables in a hallway on Silver Shadow. The well behaved friendly guests (NOT!) onboard immediately stormed the tables making a scene I haven’t observed since Klein’s basement closed. But the local’s visit in this most isolated and remarkable spot was one of the very best port visits ever in my almost two years of shipboard traveling to 120 countries! (Ed. Note: would have been 121 by now if I could go to the bathroom in Easter Island and Pitcairn on this trip, but I don’t feel cheated on these ports in any other way.)

 

Here’s some isolated observations from our 4 hour visit here:

 

• The local group included a uniformed policeman. I asked what a cop does on an island of 41 related people (very related, this is a gene puddle. Everyone has the surnames Christian or Warren), all decedents of Fletcher Christian and 8 of his coconspirators to left Tahiti on the lam and scuttled HMS Bounty here. The answer from a delightful mom who brought her kids onboard—more on them below—was that since everyone was related and had dinner together, the cop’s job was to resolved personal disputes. I imagined that this referred to a radio being too loud or the four or five kids on the island playing on someone’s lawn, although some worse problems were in the news a few years ago. It is a very small and isolated place where everyone shares, perhaps a bit too much. Look it up.
• Regarding law enforcement, I saw our ship’s Security Officer on deck. He stopped by where I was standing and said to me, “Let’s go ashore and steal some stuff since the whole island is on this ship, and no one would suspect the ship’s security officer.” No fooling. He’s a fun guy, but don’t do anything hinkey.
• About half of the island’s kids were huddled under one of the craft tables. I asked the boy if he was bored. He said, “Very!”. So I went to our Cruise Director and asked if she could do something about this. She immediately sent one of her staff to take the kids on a tour of our ship—which has 10 times the total population of this island—and they sat at the bar having Cokes and then played shuffleboard for a while. It was my good deed of the day. I asked the boy if he know the girl and if she was ok. She said that she was his sister, and she immediately said, “I’m very ok”. They let me take my picture with them.
• Chatted quite a bit with Sheila Christian (who sold me a T-shirt), a New Zealander who married “this weird guy who said he lives in a small town, but I didn’t know the half of it until he took me back home to HERE”. She’s been on Pitcairn a couple of years and says she doesn’t want to leave ever. Pitcairn has electricity for 4 hours twice each day. They get CNN International (unlike Silver Shadow which seems to be locked on FOX Noise Channel) and have a good Internet connection. The kids told me that they hate newspapers since the Internet is much better. Go figure.
• Speaking of communications, I met the current local ham and had a nice conversation. (He had an ICOM microphone on his lapel. He told me he was the “communications guy for the island.”) He gave me his VP6 call letters but said he doesn’t go on the air much since “the Internet is a lot more fun.” Tom Christian, VP6TC, the famous ham I and every other ham of the early 1960s talked as our first “DX” contact in the Pacific, is still an active ham but is in New Zealand getting a pacemaker at the moment.
• We took on a passenger, a local woman who is going to a crafts fair in Tahiti. She will be catching another cruise ship back to Pitcairn in November.
• At noon, the local folks climbed down the pilot’s rope ladder into their very large tiller boat and putted away after loading on cases of Coke, some wine, and an assortment of pillow chocolates and other goodies, and we took a 290 degree heading and speeded up to 17.2 knots for the two day 1600 mile journey to Moorea, French Polynesia where we will arrive at 10 am on the 22^nd.

 

The interactions with the locals—most of all there are—was infinitely more satisfying that actually setting foot on this rock, of course. Pitcairn is now under the administrative control of New Zealand rather than the UK (the reason for the change of amateur call letter prefix changing from VR6 to VP6 it appears). So the locals have always spoken England as well as a Polynesian dialect and despite the crude joking onboard this ship, they seemed genuinely friendly and happy to meet us. Perhaps they are too accepting in this regard, I’m afraid to say, since the crowd on this cruise segment seems to me to be—with a few very notable exceptions—to be the most spoiled grumpy bunch I’ve every traveled with. I don’t have to hang out with every one of the 249 of so guests of course, but it was a dark spot in an otherwise brilliant morning when a 70ish guest came from our Pitcairn “mall” set up by the Paranormal, uh, Panorama Lounge hallway and said to me, “This is all show business. These folks are milking us for all we’re worth, selling us overpriced T-shirts and poorly made handicrafts. They really have dozens of ships visiting every month, and they are all putting on an act by saying they are all alone here.” (MB note: The Captain said that there are about a dozen ships of any kind that stop here a year and many can not even board the locals, much less set guests on shore.) Even though I’ve never talked to this guy before, I responded that I thought the experience of meeting the locals and seeing what they had to sell was fantastic and that even if what he said might be true (it isn’t off course), that is part of what this kind of cruise is all about. He snarled at me and said, “You must be a better person than I am.” Instead of just shaking my head and walking away, I felt the need to say, “I agree with you completely.”

 

It’s 79 degrees. I just had a nice lunch of bowtie pasta in a custom made mushroom sauce and Nasi Goring (sambal on the side) with a dry California Chenin Blanc as Pitcairn disappeared off the stern. Time to enjoy the last two sea days before Moorea on Wednesday, Bora Bora on Thursday Thursday, and then off the ship (boo) on Friday for the overnight trip home. The cruise has gone much too quickly. Champagne Room tonight for dinner despite the $30 over charge. Oh well. Someone has to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Easter Island GPS Track & Lost at Sea - III

Documenting the Easter Island Circumnavigation

 

The GPS track of the ship’s route is above for those interested in our circumnavigation of Easter Island. For all it’s worth, the more the other guests got grumpy yesterday about the boat (albeit a very big boat) tour of Easter Island and its maoi, the more I got in a good mood. The day was fantastic, and I suppose I got to see enough of the place that with the narration for the two ship’s lecturers I felt that I had really been there. Setting foot on land would have been nice, but many of us would have been happy with a seaward excursion had it been offered as the alternative to a long dusty bus ride.

 

Persona du Bateau

 

Also we sailed around Easter Island I became aware that a rumor is going around the ship that I am a professional reporter who is writing an article about this cruise. I didn’t believe this until a guest who I have not met before came over to me and told me that the wrong salad dressing was on their salad at last night’s dinner and proceeded to spell their first and last name slowly.

 

Of course, my dinner with the Hotel Director a few nights ago may have had something to do with my new persona du bateau. Michele is a 47 year old Napolitano who was running the Silver Whisper last February on my cruise from Sydney to Hong Kong. We had planned to have dinner then, and it finally was able to get scheduled on this cruise. The HD is in a way at the same level of management as the captain and of course has a much larger staff. He runs the operation of the cruise ship, although the captain gets to move it around on a frequent basis. With some thought it is easy to understand how the duties of these two “bosses” divide and they don’t seem to need to spend much time with each other.

 

We hit it off quite well and had a fantastic dinner. (Do you think that maybe the chef made some extra care in the food for us?) I spent some time before the dinner thinking about how not to say anything that might sound like a complaint, and certainly not to mention any individual or anything that might be traced to any individual. It was a social dinner with a kind of business slant, with him getting my opinion from a perhaps educated if not process oriented point of view and he enlightening me about a profession that I have no knowledge of. We also shared personal “life stories” and drank a lot of very nice wine. Michele is recovering from a painful divorce, and that came up. I was honored that he chose me to dine with. His pager only went off once during the dinner. Something about “a hose breaking.” I’m sure his interest probably had to do more with a guest possibly getting hurt or the cleanup of the carpet. The Captain (actually Staff Captain) would be more concerned with actually fixing said hose. See how this works?

 

As luck would have it, the Tour Desk Manager of the previous two cruise segments did come up. Actually, the Hotel Director brought it up. (It was in the section of the dinner conversation titled, “Boy, do I get a long queue of guests at my office when someone screws up.”) I politely asked how this guy would be viewed for future cruise assignments with Silversea. The answer was one word: “Finito”. I guess the white rabbit is permanently down the rabbit hole. I have to admit I asked a Head Waiter who was the only countryman of the ex-Tour Manager a few nights later if the guy who is now gone had some personal problems that would have generated such poor performance. The response was, “Colombia has many GOOD things. Don’t be discouraged.” As I said, it’s a very personal experience on a small ship, and I have lots of friends on the crew.

 

In the Middle of the Ocean

 

I suspect that a great deal of folks who have not done ocean crossings feel that the deep ocean affects shipboard comfort in an, uh, adverse way. Yes the ocean is miles deep here and we are very far from land, but of course only the first 20 feet of so of the water matters to this ship. More water below the keel is of marginal interest. Storms near shore can be a lot more troublesome, and ships in general often leave port to “weather the storm” at sea rather than take a chance being battered by the dock or snapping the lines and drifting into say a gasoline tanker. The cruise lines usually plan the routes across the ocean to avoid the latitudes of possible storms. Equatorial cruises mostly experience no weather at all, doldrums being what they are. Itineraries that cross the North Atlantic in winter, for example, are an exception as are Caribbean cruises in September or October. There’s a reason such trips are heavily discounted: most experienced travelers should know better than to book a heavily discounted cruise. It’s like paying to see the “best ballerina from Romania”, say. Ya get what you pay for when the itinerary is cheap and sometimes a lot more than you wanted.

 

The discussion above seemed appropriate to be included here because of the few incidences of my mentioning “swells” and “listing” and “sea water streaming into the ship”, “coffee flying out of cups”, “small tables rolling across the room”, etc. Stuff like that. Perhaps I exaggerated. Me? In reality it should be understood that this is a big hotel that does float, but it’s a big hotel that is 610 feet long and weighs almost 30,000 tons. (Of course, most Hiltons for example are not weighed as a rule.) It would be impossible to run a huge kitchen, multiple restaurants, a theater, conference rooms, and all the business offices of a ship (or a hotel) if the darn thing kept tilting over and bouncing up and down to a great extent. Yes, there is some movement from time to time, but 99% of the time if there is noticeable movement it is very slow and you have to look for it—by sighting against a railing or windowsill—and most of the time there is no perceivable feeling of motion. This is what you would expect of a hotel, and that is the experience just about all the time. People do have stories of rough days at sea, and it does happen of course. In almost two years worth of traveling on smallish cruise ships, I have experienced about three days where I’ve rather been on land. But all the other times that motion was felt it was subtle and not at all anything like that of a car, train, or anything smaller than a very large building. This is a hotel after all.

 

OK, you want to know about waves and swells. It’s the latter that I’ve mentioned from time to time, you might have noted. Waves are caused by the wind. They are generally very short period: that is close together. They’re the things that develop whitecaps when it’s windy and might spray the rich but cheap folks on the lower decks who insist on sitting on their verandas on windy days. Waves are not usually an issue for big ships. They cut right through them. The swell, however, is much more interesting. Swells are caused by storms thousands (!) of miles away. This part of the Pacific is known for as a high swell area because of the typhoons in the Oriental waters this time of year. My oceanography friends (?) explain how the propagation of waves from far away bunch up as they propagate from afar to form the swell, and problems can develop when the local waves and a large swell are at crossed directions of course. But at any rate, the swell is very long period, up to 100s of feet apart but can be quite high. It’s swell that makes ships slowly pitch up and down. (Rolling isn’t a problem with modern stabilizers. That’s a good thing, of course.) You might notice the swell—currently I estimate at 10 feet peak to trough—and the almost nonexistent waves in the above picture I am about to take from the bow and will include above. We are truly in the middle of the ocean now, 26.5S 116.5W. Look on the globe. We’re about a third of the way from Easter Island to Pitcairn Island. That’s the middle of the ocean by anyone’s measure. Right? The GPS trace on the in room TVs show a pulsating circle with only blue for the entire screen. (Note the distortion on the HDTV 16:9 aspect ratio set showing a 4:3 picture on ALMOST EVERY CHANNEL FOR THE LAST 5 WEEKS. (But this is not bothering me, the TV distortion freak that I am, see.) The weather is clear now, the wind light, temperature at 9 am MDT (same time zone for today only as Boulder) is 70 degrees with highs expected about 80. Water temperature is about 72 or so I estimate. It is a glorious day as it almost always is in the “middle of the ocean.” Oh yes, this hotel bobbed like a cork for a few moments as we entered a few ports in Peru and Chile, but it was a fun E-ticket ride as long as you held on. It is not like that at sea, and most generally on the high seas. Again, the rich folks who book the suites on Deck 9 at the bow may have their designer luggage roll in and out from under their beds, but high and forward is not the best place on a pitching ship. The very very rich are not like you or I. Those of us who think about it book cabins amidships and low. So there.

 

 

Galley lunch today. I won’t hug the new pastry chef for making my lactose free chocolate desserts. He’s a tall guy with a mustache. It was a lot more fun with Annemarie, but she left in Valparaiso. I’m ready to come home. I miss everyone and a “real” life, such as it is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Swell Day at Rapa Nui or Don't Have a Stone Face on Easter Island

Thursday, 16 October – Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Even with another hour gained to the same time zone as Chicago, the beginning of the breaking of dawn over Easter Island was not evident at 6:30 am. The Southern Cross was however, although it appeared upside down on the Southern horizon. Even alpha and beta Centauri were easily seen despite the very gibbous barely waning moon setting straight ahead over where a few bright lights were indicating this very isolated island’s presence. (This is intended to be poetic. Enjoy.) The sky looked like the Australian flag was indicating distress. Perhaps it knew something.

The view of the arrival to the planned anchorage at Hango Roa, the main town here, was also truly swell. So was the swell. A matter of fact, the swell was 15 to 20 feet and the ship now not underway and the stabilizers retracted to allow the little yellow boat full of Chilean officials to come aboard to have their coffee and check that we were not trying to enter this most western part of their country illegally was greeted by the 3^rd deck entry port opened to let them in. What came in was sea water as the huge and very long period swell was listing this 28,253 ton ship 15 to 20 degrees. The little yellow boat turned away and went back to shore as the port was closed and we pulled up the anchor and headed back out to sea. The Captain came on the PA and announced he had a “Plan B”. We then sailed around the island to the north side of the island where a lovely little beach lay, there was no swell, and weather was spectacularly fine, and where the little jetty that would have allowed to easy access to the island had been. The ship’s tender sailed out to where the jetty was a few weeks ago when A HUGE SWELL had taken it away and looked for an alternative access to the land. After a while—time for another little yellow boat to bring the officials who had driven across the island along with a bunch of tour buses—the tender came back and the captain announced that the weather was fine but the tender couldn’t get close enough to shore to bring the guests onto Easter Island after all. So we stayed anchored in this most beautiful cove, took pictures of where the picnic 120 of us had signed up for would have been, and also of the maoi that were on the beach. They looked forlorn as is their wont. (They also have stone topknots. Make of that what you will.) Many of the guests became very feisty and/or downright grumpy about seeing but not “bagging” another “country” (note all the quotes), but some of us were enjoying taking pictures of the huge stone statues like mad and discussing techniques of photoshopping these pictures with the ones we were taking of each other together as well as how to spend the $205 or so the all day tour and picnic now to be refunded would have cost. Note the maoi at the extreme right of the my picture as we were anchored at Honga Roa. The immigration officials left after a few hours of rubber stamping and the captain commenced a slow circuit of the island as the new port lecturer earned his keep (well, as much as ship’s enrichment lecturers earn anything) by giving a narration of all the maoi’s we passed, especially the row of them looking out at the point of rock called Tangariki. He then said that these were only really visible from sea and not easily seen from the $205 tour we had all saved the money from not setting foot on shore. One wag onboard even suggested that seeing hundreds of these “big heads” for 6½ hours might have been a bit much and that it was awfully nice to enjoy being at Easter Island without the hassle of being forcibly hurled into the tender (the swell was smaller but not nonexistent on the north side), without a long bus ride to see even more of these statues, and of not having to worry about eating a possibly lactose laden lunch. Guess who that was. Nevertheless, many of these fairly unpleasant to begin with crowd on this segment of the cruise were having hissy fits (I had found out that a group from the Travelers Century Club were onboard ready to add up this place to their long lists of countries visited), but the dozen or so friends I’ve made on this cruise all seemed to have pretty much the same attitude as I did. We had a great time in this fantastic and very special location and felt we “did” this unbelievable remote and strange place. We agreed that we felt as if we really saw it sufficiently and especially in this great weather. For the record, we are 2237 miles West of continental Chile and 1290 miles east of the next stop of Pitcairn. As I write this the port lecturer is giving a lecture of Pitcairn in the foolish hope that in 3 days we will actually land the tenders there. Even the ship’s brochure says that “few people EVER make it onshore at Pitcairn”. Something about a place called Disaster Hill, I seem to recall. But I’m looking forward to great pictures in another fantastic anchorage there and then the probable mutiny of the Silver Shadow by guests that will echo Fletcher Christian’s event of 1790.

Having a great time. Really. Wish you were here to replace some of the grumps that are actually here. Gotta go. It’s “Ice Cream Social” time on the pool deck. They promised to have some sorbet for me. With nuts and raspberry sauce.

Robinson Crusoe Island - No Friday on Sunday

Sunday, 12 October – Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile

 

429 miles sailing from the Chilean coast is Mas a Tierra which oddly enough means “Closer to Land”. The Chileans upon realizing that 429 miles isn’t really close renamed the largest of the islands of the Juan Fernandez archipelago, Robinson Crusoe Island. Why this name was chosen is unknown other than a sailor named Alexander Selkirk was marooned here in 1704. He lived alone on this volcanic rock (the highest of a number of the incredibly green mountains here rises to 3,000 feet above sea level) for almost 4½ years before being rescued by a ship carrying a writer named Daniel Defoe. Hey, do you think….? Nah.

 

Selkirk’s journal states that by the time he was recued he could no longer speak intelligibly and “had only goats as friends”. He mentions one goat particularly fondly, but he told Defoe that he only saw it socially on Fridays. Perhaps the details got changed a bit in the novel. Actually RCI is pretty darn spectacular. There are 146 native species of plants of which 101 exist no where else and all sorts of interesting birds and about 1000 seals which are known for their bad breathe. Honest. (This might explain Selkirk’s interest in goats, not seals.) The very rare Double Skinned Seal lives here. I told a number of the others at lunch that this was so that they could swim through the ice when the water was frozen. A few wrote that down in their notes. The guide book also speaks lovingly of the red hummingbird which is famous for “its needle-fine black beak and silken feather coverage.” I believe Selkirk might have written the guidebook.

 

We arrived this morning during a rainstorm that seemed only to be only turning the unpaved streets to mud but made for a pretty nifty sunrise—we anchored at 8 am in the dark due to the ill advised time change to daylight savings time for all of Chile last night—and sailed out of Cumberland Bay four hours later apparently because the sun came out and the mud was drying out. I took the first ship’s tender (we call it “the cork”) and after documenting my visit to “country #121 upon landing made a little hike up a hill to the aeronautical radio and automated weather site for the airstrip on the other side of the island (they use a ferry to get people around the island from the airstrip to town) and then back around the town. The surprisingly pretty and well kept municipality of San Juan Bautista accommodates 100% of the entire islands population of 600. The town runs a TVRO dish and rebroadcasts a number of TV channels to the locals from a couple of yagi antennas on a pole. Since a total number of tourists of only a few hundred a year actually visit Robinson Crusoe Island, those of us who left the ship here pretty much made for 1/3^rd of the 2008 count. So it was pretty surprising that the couple of shops in town opened only for about an hour before closing for the day. It was equally surprising that the shops had picture postcards of OUR SHIP on them, island tee-shirts and hats, and the tiny post office opened. The crowd of ship’s passengers were a bit disappointed that the PO only could sell them regular Chilean postage stamps. That is, none of the stamps were unique to Robinson Crusoe Island, but ultimately that didn’t seem to limit the trade. I suspect the postcards mailed from here will arrive with the next shipment of spiny lobsters for which the island is famous. This might explain why there is a small restaurant on the wharf. It is named, “The Slow Restaurant”. Honest. I guess the pace of life (and restaurant service) is slow here. This is a this little rock in the middle of the South Pacific 500 miles from Santiago, Chile for heaven’s sake. It all makes sense. Even the goat thing.

 

By the way, the 2^nd sink in the bathroom in my suite is ideal for washing the mud off shoes. The Bulgari bath soap will make the sneakers smell very nice. Now for 3½ days at sea to find out if we can actually land at Easter Island.

Lost at Sea - II

Saturday, 11 October – Between Valparaiso and Robinson Crusoe Island (S33 07 W74 33 at 1600 GMT)

Sail out at 11 pm last night was beautiful. Apparently it is the usual spring weather along the mid-Chilean coast for the clouds to dissipate at night. The gibbous moon was directly overhead as the captain eased the ship away from the dock and had to do almost a J-turn to avoid the adjacent dock, a seafront restaurant with a number of small water taxi boats (with names like Elwood and Plenty plus one with a swan head that seemed to be carrying Navy officers to the military ship I photographed during our arrival), and a docked container ship plus an anchored floating drydock. Like in Lisbon as mentioned earlier, Valparaiso is built on a hillside. The lights of the city were spectacular as we finally headed out to sea. I was the only observer on deck. The captain saw me and waved with a big smile. He stopped me on deck this morning to give me a weather report. This is a great honor or maybe a result of his limited English. I prefer to believe it’s the former. On a similar note, Heinz, the Food and Beverage Manager, a very tall Austrian has been calling me, “Mr. Howard”. This has been taken up by one or two of the assistant waiters who invariably get reprimanded by the head waiters who know my name correctly. The poor underlings are having to deal now with a long time guest who seems to have two persona.

Note above the photo detail on the Navy ship as we came into Valparaiso yesterday. This is the Chilean Navy vessel that the swan boat was taking officers to. The big ship sailed out during the day. I presume without the clam eating stowaway, and the swan boat went back to civilian duties.

Oddly enough and most surprisingly, we did have to set the clocks AHEAD one hour as we sailed due west. We have been holding 264 degrees at a leisurely 12.1 knots for the last 13 hours and will do so until arriving at the anchorage at RC Island tomorrow morning at 8 am. That will be the most southerly point on the cruise from LA to Papeete which is at only 6 degrees south latitude. The sky is now clear, but the temperature is only 60 degrees or so. Nice in the sheltered pool area however but nobody is in the pool. We should be out of the 58 degree Humboldt Current after our stop tomorrow. The sea is virtually flat. There is no noticeable movement of the ship, usually the case during tropical crossings in this part of the world. At least none of the new guests (at least new elderly women guests) are doing the exaggerated penguin imitation upon sailing, usually followed by my mumbling (under by breath of course), “It’s a xxxx’ing ship for heaven’s sake.” I heard this morning, however, that the intriguingly named, Prince Albert II, the expedition ship run by Silversea had to evacuate the passengers and most of the crew in Mexico yesterday and fly them south so that the ship could sail out to sea to avoid the hurricane. I continue to advise people not to buy those cheap Caribbean and “Mexican Riviera” cruise itineraries that are offered in the Fall. There are hurricanes there! Of course, we passed through the area at the beginning of the cruise, but we passed through quickly.

The cognitive dissonance inducing time change in the wrong direction was necessitated by Chile going onto Summer Time tonight. Robinson Crusoe Island is part of Chile and observes the same time as on the mainland. While this solves the mystery, we now have to make up 7 hours (from -3 GMT here to -10 GMT) before arriving in French Polynesia. My inside sources advise me that will entail moving the clock back one hour for 7 out of 9 days starting Monday evening. Bet there’ll be lots of folks for the 6:30 am early bird coffee service, although room service is in fact available 24/7. (You can get a steak or even spring rolls any time if that’s your need.)

The new folks who embarked yesterday include quite a few old faces (in more ways than one), some of whom are nice to see again. An additional enrichment lecturer appeared to share his knowledge about these South Sea island calls. He recognized me from earlier cruises and remembered my prior shipboard life as a fellow lecturer. Nice to see him. He spent all summer on this ship in Alaska and came back after leaving in LA the day I got on. I didn’t go to his talk this morning, but the report I got was that he started his lecture by saying he didn’t know much about these islands and had never been there. I guess they owed him a warm weather cruise. Nice guy, though.

Had dinner last night with a lovely English couple in my age group. They have a business of business risk management training. Tomorrow I will dine with a delightful retired California supreme court judge and journalist wife (hope they don’t read the word “delightful”), and Selvaggia is planning a dinner for the two of us in the La Terraza Italian restaurant later this week. You may recall that she is the Cruise Consultant onboard. We’ve sailed a number of times on the same cruises, and I had dinner with her and Allesandra, the International Hostess, on the first cruise. The Hotel Director also said he wants to have a private dinner with me. May have something to do with the e-mail I copied him regarding the now disembarked prior Tour Desk Manager. (I asked the new tour guy if he heard about the old one. He just held his head and laughed. He then said something about an e-mail copy that is circulating in the officers’ bar. I said, “Oh really. Tell me more.”)

About to go up on deck now that it is clement outside and read, “Mathematics of the Incas: Code of the Quipu.” Quipu’s (or is it quipa?) were the knotted colored twine that was used for more than a century to convey messages to the outlying districts from the central Inca command and control center in Cusco. I am essentially ok now from the intense but brief cold, but I will continue the Cephalexin caplets and neat single malt treatments until the prescription and bottle respectively are gone.

Valparaiso Turn Over Day

Friday, 10 October – Valparaiso, Chile

Yesterday was a sea day after leaving a very isolated Antofagasta late in the afternoon before a very large send off group of locals. They waved as they hollered what the Tour Desk informed us was the traditional Chilean farewell of staring at the ship with open mouths. Funny customs in this part of the world. I spent the cold rainy day yesterday mostly on the bed in my suite in a stupor watching the safety video over and over while waiting for the antibiotic to finally really start working. I woke up this morning as we were coming into port with three realizations as follows: 1) I had only dreamed that I had set my alarm for 45 minutes earlier, 2) I was not really dying of terminal head cold symptoms any more and was feeling quite well despite some sniffles, and 3) I was all excited about starting a new cruise today. I have no life, but as no lives go this isn’t bad, paraphrasing Woody Allen who was addressing another oddly similar topic.

Transit Tours are for those of us who are not leaving or arriving to the ship. As with the mysteriously price refunded tour in Costa Rica, such excursions get those of us not starting or ending our cruises to see something of the areas that presumably the others are exploring in some length as part of their vacations. The ship personnel are happy to have fewer passengers on-board tripping over luggage being delivered and seeing what the new provisions are on these “turn over” days. Everyone is ahead.

The 4 hour excursion included some exploration of this port city of 300,000 that at least to me looks a bit like Lisbon and of Vina del Mar, a resort and very expensive bedroom community for Santiago, the Chilean capital about 70 miles inland. Got back to a nice lunch in the dining room of beef bouillon, spaghetti with meat ragout, and a Thai seafood stir fry. Someone has to do it. More than 100 new guests will arrive in an hour or so to replace the similar number that disembarked this morning. I met some nice folks who will be missed, but we will still have only about 240 guests out of a possible total of 382. The dining room will be pretty empty again for my last cruise segment affording me both easy opportunities to eat quickly and/or alone when so desired. We don’t sail until 11 pm tonight as the five containers of provisions apparently need to be loaded one box at a time up a small conveyor onto the ship. Got to do something with that 295 member crew.

Oh, I’ve received a few requests for a picture of the local entertainment we had onboard for the barbeque last week. It should be above. Another day at sea tomorrow and then a visit to Robinson Crusoe Island. The daily schedule says that we are to set our clocks one hour AHEAD tonight before we head due west. I think that’s wrong. Will advise if half the ship is two hours off tomorrow.

Antofagasta: My Favorite Kind of Tour

Wednesday, 8 October – Antofagasta, Chile

 

My favorite type of tour is one that shows the best a port of call has to offer even if it’s a mostly modern fast growing mining city without any need for accommodating or means of attracting tourists. The 20ish guide told us how she has been to Europe and the USA but loves coming back to her home in Antofagasta. She has a BS in geology from one of the half dozen universities in this very isolated location unlike most of our previous guides who had 2 year training programs in “tourism”. Antofagasta is a 20 hour bus ride or 2 hour plane ride (or 36 hour by 18 knot cruise ship) from Santiago, and the nearest next strip town (they all are in coastal Chile as the coastal plain is only a km or two wide before the multi-thousand meter mountains and lifeless desert starts so that even moderate sized cities are 30 km long) is hours away. The annual rainfall here is 4mm. A 60mm (2¼ inch) rain storm in 1963 flooded the town and killed a dozen or so people. Did I mention that it’s really dry in coastal Peru and Chile? In case you were about to ask, the Port of Antofagasta ships one half of the world’s copper. Everyone here is associated directly or indirectly with mining. I said the cute homesick tour guide majored in Geology, didn’t I?

 

As I was saying, the best of a town tour includes the historical market with lots of huge pieces of some sort of meats and strange looking produce from “down south” as nothing grows here, the ruins of a refinery build in 1868 that is across the road from what will be the city’s first 5 start hotel, and a 10 mile drive to LA PORTADA, a fairly modest natural arch along the rocky seashore. The arch is such a wonder in this very stark landscape that the city buses in this very prosperous city have a picture of it on their sides. This town is otherwise rich and well maintained. Antofagasta looks quite 1^st world. Chile is nothing like the other Latin American countries on this cruise. Great to see it and to see the difference.

 

Now for some follow up items. Yes, a refund of 50% of yesterday’s Nitrate tour was forthcoming by dinner time. And, no, I did not have anything to do with it. Well actually, I did mention casually to a few of the other guests that “if it were me who might be complaining” (about the guide who couldn’t speak English and knew nothing of the topic of the Nitrate, the subject of the tour), I probably would go directly to the Hotel Director (the big boss of the ship, as I’ve already mentioned) but not the Tour Director (who would no doubt jump into his rabbit hole and was in a way responsible for the screw-ups encountered) and “perhaps refer to the following talking points in this order.” As I said, the refund was credited before the bus got back to the garage. Oh well. Believe me, I know that entertaining some of these luxury cruise passengers takes a lot of work. I suspect, though, that little whining about the tour would have occurred if it were priced at $61 and not $122.

 

Regarding ship’s tours in general, the guides here—the awful but pleasant one yesterday and the wonderful young lady today—speak English easily but the English they speak has clearly been taught by teachers who are not native English speakers or even lived in an English speaking country. The vocabulary of the guides in Peru and Chile were very limited (like not knowing the word for “ground” as in ‘the white mineral component on the floor ceiling is salt”) or the pronunciation most reasonable but not quite right. Telling us that the new hotel is not yet occupied had a word in it that sounds like “oc-u-pate-ted”. Easy to understand, of course, but we struggled with, “as with many cities, we have a problem with too many stray ducks” as this was said as we were passing a site that would be a small city park with a pond. (But she called it a “small closed river in a new place where people could have reunion”.) I really love all this, of course, but when one of us clarified to the others (guess who) that feral dogs was the issue in the poorer parts of the city, the grumpy New Zealand lady hollered out, “Shoot them.” Actually I should have kept my mouth shut (!) and let her think that mallards were taking over an area that has no natural surface water of any kind.

 

The other follow up item I failed to mention in the proper earlier report from Callao, Peru was that there are 2900 Chinese restaurants in Lima. Hard to figure out where that would have fit in the narrative, but it’s nice to know for future reference.

 

About to go on deck and finish my book on Beaufort and wait for the Cephalexin to kick in. My post nasal drip and slight cough was beginning to wear me down and causing the couple in the next suite to ask me about my health each morning. An early visit to the ship’s doctor (an old friend who has dealt with similar symptoms of mine on previous cruises) welcomed me back when he found me camping at the infirmary door when he opened at 8 am. By the way, Dr. Riedel confirmed that I had done the right thing by taking the bus microphone on the trip to Lake Chungara at 15,200 feet after we had were to be above 14,000 feet MSL for many hours and delivering a short lecture on recognizing the symptoms of altitude sickness. He said that last year a number of guests from the ship had to have emergency treatment in Cusco on the two day trip to Machu Picchu.

 

Tomorrow is a sea day and then a short tour, “Valparaiso & Vina del Mar” (another favorite type tour with a stop to the town square, the Fonck Museum with Easter Island and Chilean mainland artifacts, and a beach resort), before turning West for 6000 thousand miles more of this with a stop at the real Easter Island. Whoopee.