Fjords and Glaciers
It’s a relatively easy start for us this morning, with the tour company picking us up at 8:00am and slowly (my least favorite part of tours is, hands down, the milk run to every hotel, picking up and dropping off passengers) moving us towards the port. The weather is not particularly encouraging, but we know that you have to take what you get here, and we’re optimistic things will clear up during the day.
Things start to look up a bit as we get underway. The winds are quite strong, but patches of blue start to show through the clouds and show off some of the dramatic landscapes around us.
Unfortunately, the further we get into our journey the worse things seem to get, and before long, we’re dealing with this:
Every so often, we manage to find pockets that are protected from the weather and everyone on board rushes outside to take pictures. The scenery is raw and rugged, with mountains shooting straight up on both sides of the channel. It feels a lot like Stewart, B.C, bringing back fond memories of time spent on the Prime Time.
Around midday, we dock for a short hike to the base of the Serrano Glacier. The face is about 30 meters high at the waterline, and every so often you can hear pieces of it break away and fall into the lake below. Even more impressive though is that, if I understand our guide correctly, it is another 150 meters thick below the surface.
The crew hauls a piece back on board to serves up shots of whiskey with ice millions of years old.
It only seems fitting to dedicate one to the captain of the Tawny Port.
Our final stop is an estancia for a tasty lunch of barbecued lamb, chorizo and potatoes. We meet some fellow travelers, including a group of teenagers from New Zealand that are living in Santiago, studying abroad for 12th grade. We’ve talked about our boys studying abroad doing college, but high school seems so much younger and I don’t think we’re ready to let them go that soon.
The rest of the journey back is uneventful and the gets progressively better the closer we get to town. By the time we arrive, it is quite pleasant out, making the process of changing hotels that much less painful. It turns out the owner of the restaurant we ate at yesterday has been building some apartments directly behind it, so that’s where we’ll be for the next three nights. There is literally a smoker shack right outside our front door – what could be better than that?