Gary’s Ramblings

Buenos Aires, and another tour arranged by the same person as the last one. Still something of a larger group than I expected, but this tour did turn out to be a lot better. Basically we did a driving tour of some of the areas of Buenos Aires, and then stopped at La Recoletta cemetary. Kind of an interesting cemetary, all the sites are mausoleums, generally owned by families and then the various members of the family are interred in them. Our guide seemed to indicated that many of them also go down into the ground somewhat. We stopped at several different interesting sites in the cemetary, but of course the real reason most people go here is to visit the grave for Eva Peron. She’s buried in the tomb of her family (Duarte) instead of being in anything with the Peron name.

After that we drove through some of the city center area, and stopped in the plaza with the pink house (where the movie and the musical make it seem like Eva gave her don’t cry for me argentina speech, although apparently that actually happened in a different location). Didn’t get a real chance to stop here, because apparently they were setting up to close the square off for an announcement from their president about her having thyroid cancer that was just recently diagnosed. Apparently, with these major events, the police actually shut down the area in front of this building, and we could see most of the barricades already up. And apparently, once they shut it down, noone comes in or out until they’re done, so our guide was real concerned that we not spend too much time here or we could get stuck.

Next we went to an area called La Boca, which is the area of the town where the Tango originally started. Nowadays, it’s a place where a lot of local artists set up shop and sell their wares, and there’s a bunch of restaurants and coffee shops, many of which have tango demonstrations going on while you eat there.

Finally, it was back to the ship.

We’d actually arrived somewhat late to Buenos Aires, apparently we’d run into some traffic issues in the River Plate channel. It got us in probably a good hour later than we were supposed to, but thankfully our tour wasn’t scheduled to leave until a little later anyways, so it didn’t really affect us.

Oddly, it seems like there was a significant number of people that were disembarking the ship here, and then a fair number that were actually embarking the ship also. Not really sure how that worked out, but it appeared to be a reasonable number of people. And, when we got down near when we were supposed to be leaving, there were a fair number of people being paged to check in with the purser’s desk, implying that they hadn’t made it back to the ship yet. The captain in his pre-departure announcement explaining what we’d be doing, referenced that we’d be leaving as soon as the clearances from shore were done, even though there were a number of people that were still not accounted for. Apparently, the ship had an appointment for transiting the River Plate navigation channel, and if we missed it, it could cause us to get delayed by traffic in the channel, which could affect us getting to the next port. I think some of those people showed up, but I’m also absolutely positive there were at least 3 that never did. I’m kinda guessing it might be a little difficult to get from Argentina to the Falkland Islands easily too, so who know if they’ll catch up.

Another sea day. We seemed to make it down the river channel last night without any problems. For that matter, during the times that I was watching out out balcony, I never did see *any* other traffic. That kinda surprised me, especially since we’d apparently had traffic problems when going upriver.

Another day of not really doing much. Went to a couple of the lectures that were given on the ship, one on various types of print making in art, and the other about the battle of the Plate River from back in WW2. That one was apparently given by a passenger that had done a couple of lectures who’d been on since Venice.

Noticed in the dining room this evening that they seemed to be running somewhat fewer staff than normal early. As I’d commented, the dining rooms are very empty during the early hours on this cruise. I think they’re trying to adjust a little so they can handle the larger crowds late, but this evening at least it seemed to miss a little, as if they weren’t quite sure about things.

Another sea day. This ended up being laundry day. Unfortunately, still haven’t cruised enough to start getting the free laundry (man, I look forward to that). Machine prices seem to have gone up, they were running $2 each. Still, was able to get the laundry done before lunch, and I think that should carry us through the rest of the trip.

Weather today was definitely a little cooler. I think the high was supposedly around 59 or so. I did notice at the noon update today was the first day that we’re actually further south than how far north we live. Still, not all that shabby. If we can get similar weather for Stanley we’ll be doing good.

Watching out the balcony I’ve noticed that we seem to have picked up a few albotrosses (or is the plural still albotross?). They’re taunting me though, every time I go out to try to take pictures, they back further away from the ship. Looks like we have more than one type, one’s a larger one that has a lot more white to it, while the other is smaller and is mainly grey or black. The smaller one seems to actually have to flap its wings sometimes, while the bigger one just seems to skim along, and I’ve never seem it flapping its wings. No idea how they manage to do that.

Captain’s Circle party tonight. Room was pretty crowded, but unlike some comments I’d seen recently, they were still doing it in multiple sessions in the Vista lounge, with the usual free “drinks”. Our captain, Captain Kent, I think is working on going into a second career as a stand-up comedian.

Seas have picked up a little, and we’re doing a little more rocking tonight, but still nothing of real significance. The captain did say we might run into a little more movement sometime tonight, but that things were looking pretty decent for the Falklands. However, it also sounds like we’re going to be headed down to Cape Horn right in front of a big storm, and it could get a little more entertaining for that. After all, we are going to one of the places that can have the worst seas in the world.

Falkland Islands today, and our trip to the penguins. This was the one port we’d really wanted to make it to, and it can be iffy at times because of the weather. However, we lucked out and ended up with some absolutely perfect weather. In fact, as we sailed away at the end of the day, the captain said he’d been coming to the Falklands for 30 years, and doesn’t remember having weather that good ever before. We had pretty clear skies, high around 60 degrees. In fact, we ended up not using some of our layers of coats because it really wasn’t necessary.

We’d booked with Patrick Watts for the Volunteer Point penguin trip, and managed to get off on what was probably the second tender of the morning. At first it was looking like we were going to be in the 4×4 with Patrick himself, but because he’s the organizer, he was still trying to wait on a few more people that hadn’t showed up (and apparently never did), so he passed us on to one of his other drivers. Our new driver was Caris, and this turned out to work out pretty well. She was able to give us a lot of information about living on the islands as we went to and from Volunteer Point. It also seemed like half her family works as drivers for the various tour companies that do this trip (they seem to work somewhat interchangeably for Patrick or FIC depending on need).

Now, for this trip they load you up 4 passengers to a 4×4. For the first part, you’re on the main road on the island (there’s apparently 1 main loop road) that varies between occasional patches of tarmac and mostly gravel. After a little while on that, you get to the sheep farm that Volunteer Point is on, and the rest of the trip is cross country, basically following previous tracks they’d taken. It’s pretty rough, and if it was wet at all I imagine it would be pretty iffy, because most of the trip is over areas of peat. All this is done with the drivers personal 4×4 vehicles, and I’ve got to think that the maintenance has got to be pretty brutal. We heard tales of getting bogged down in the mud, broken axles, various other broken parts. At one point when we crossed a small wooden bridge (ie, basically some boards that were laid down over a ditch), some wires on the back of our vehicle caught the boards up and started dragging them along. (Caris said the previous owner of her car had a boat, and it was the trailer wires that had gotten caught up in this). When doing this trip, the groups travel in a convoy, so that if something happens, at least they have the ability to stop and help each other out.

Total time out to Volunteer Point seems to be a little over 2 hours, and over half of that is the off-road portion of the trip. Then you finally arrive on the top of a hill over a beach. And there’s lots of penguins. This area has 3 types of penguins: king, gentoo, and magellenic. There’s a variety of lines marked out with either sticks or white rocks, and the general rule besides don’t go past the lines is that you’re not supposed to go within 20 feet of the penguins, but the penguins are allowed to approach you if they want. (There were a fair number of people that weren’t really paying much attention to this rule, but the wardens weren’t giving them a hard time about it either).

We were late enough in the season that most of the penguin chicks had already had a chance to grow some, but many still retained large patches of their baby down. For king’s especially, once they shed that they’re hard to distinguish from the adult penguins, because they’re already close to full-size by that point.

We had about an hour and a half to wander around the area and watch penguins before getting back in the 4×4 to head back to Stanley. Wandered around briefly and looked through a couple of gift shops before heading back to the ship. BTW, Stanley has a population of around 2000, and the entire islands have a population of about 3000, so when they get a large cruise ship in like ours, it basically doubles the population.

Oh, one other update, apparently our late passengers from Buenos Aires may have made it on the ship somehow. The people in our 4×4 said that they’d heard that. And apparently some of those missing passengers may not have been first offenders on being late back to the ship. I imagine they might have gotten into a little trouble.

Since it’s New Years Eve, tonight’s formal night. I doubt it would normally be a formal night because of the port day (with so many sea days, there’d be no reason to do it on a port day). A little weird, because you could tell people definitely didn’t start dressing up until somewhat later in the evening. (Of course, that could also tie in with how late people tend to eat on this trip. I think we finished dinner shortly before 8PM or so, and the dining room was still mostly empty.) Watched the hypnotist show largely to kill some time, and it was ok. He did have an issue where partway through the show they announced a “Code Sierra” for a cabin number, and that seemed to wake up some of his volunteers.

No idea what a Code Sierra is, but it seems to be something involving security. The cabin was on the same floor as us, and I could see security personel hanging around near that end of the hallway. Cathy also says someone she talked to had problems getting to her cabin going one way, because there was a number of security personell not letting people through (and apparently, the next morning there was still a security person outside the cabin door).

On this ship, all the New Years stuff was happening indoors. I guess they must have decided it was too cold to do things outside (plus maybe too windy). Seas have started to pick up a little, so we’re moving more than we had up to now on the ship. It’s not quite the same experience to ring in the new year when you’re not out on the top deck, and made for a much more crowded experience. They did do baloon drops in the piazza and a couple of the lounges. Off to bed after that.

Obviously it wasn’t the earliest morning in the world for us today, and I think that was probably true for a large portion of the ship. Sticking our head out the balcony in the morning, and it was definitely pretty cool out. The only real thing for today on the agenda was the scenic cruising of Cape Horn, and that wasn’t scheduled until later in the afternoon.

Cape Horn is actually on an island, specifically the Isla Hornos. The captain told us the plan was to go in and sail around the island in a counter-clockwise direction. Weather was, well, probably fair for this area of the world. Seas were minimal, and all we were really getting was some wind and rain/sleet/snow mixture from time to time. Part of me almost feels a little cheated that we didn’t get the true Cape Horn experience as a result.

Italian night in the dining room, which means a pretty so-so menu, but it also means limoncello, which makes Cathy happy. Oddly, tonight the dining room seemed noticeably busier than it normally is that early. Yeah, we were a little later than normal because of the Cape Horn viewing, but still, at worst it was we entered the dining room around the time we’d been leaving it before, and never saw it that busy then.