Punta Arenas, Chile

Friday, February 10, 2006

I ended up doing some work on the next unit of my course, and then at 4:00 I went to Bingo. The grand prize was a free Alaskan cruise. I was within one number on the first game for a $194 prize, but I didn’t hit it. In the final grand prize game, two people had legitimate bingos and then they had to go to a sudden death where the first person to have a drawn number on their card won. An American lady won. Can you imagine losing in that situation? I’d rather be 15 numbers away.

After Bingo I worked a little more on my course and then did that Abs Blast. It wasn’t that hard but I could feel that things were working. I did a 3 kilometer run on the treadmill after workout.
I headed back up to the room and took a shower. I drank away my workout by having a couple of Cristal, and then headed down for dinner. It was pretty good. I headed to bed after dinner because it was an early wakeup call.

Room service called at 5:55am and my Dad and I had breakfast. I didn’t eat very much as I’m finding the food very salty. I took a shower and after getting dressed and waiting for my Dad, we headed down to the Rendez Vous lounge for our excursion.

We arrived at the most southerly city in the Americas: Punta Arenas. It seemed like a nice town, but we didn’t spend much time there. We caught our tender and arrived on the mainland after two full days at sea. We quickly boarded a bus and drove to the ferry. We boarded the ferry and began our two hour ride to the Los Pinguinos Magellan Penguin Habitat/Sanctuary.

The ferry ride was brutal; small uncomfortable seats, and impossible long. As we approached the island, schools of penguin were swimming around and bouncing out of the water. It was amazing. They came right out of the water like (I imagine) dolphins would. You could see huge masses of penguins waddling down the hill to the ocean.

We disembarked and wandered around the island. There were thousands and thousands of penguins. This year’s babies were molting and losing all of their baby feathers. The island was specked with soft white feathers. They seemed to pay no attention to all the people wandering around. Whether they were burrowed in this underground nests, preening, or moping around, the penguins ignored us. I was surprised that they didn’t run away, but most of the time would approach us. They were never close enough to touch, but we got a lot of great pictures.

We wandered around for about 90 minutes and headed back to Punta Arenas. I slept for most of the ride and listened to my iPod. I got really sad at one point thinking about my Mom, so I decided to wander around the ferry. Just as I came out onto the deck I looked overboard and saw two dolphins swimming along beside us. They swam along for a few seconds, but by the time I got my camera out, they were gone. It was pretty cool since I’ve only seen dolphins at Marineland, and those don’t really count.

The bus dropped us off at the city square. There is a huge statue of Magellan, with two native South Americans below him (most people didn’t seem to see the significance). Tradition is to touch the foot of one of the natives; apparently it brings good luck. My Dad took a picture of me touching the foot, and then he touched it.

We decided to wander around. I wanted to get some Chilean wine for someone special, and my Dad and I needed to buy laundry soap. I brought a lot of clothes, but most were packed dirty. I figured that there would be a Laundromat on board, but it is unreasonable (a pair of boxer shorts cost $1.25US to wash!). We are short on clean clothes so we needed soap so that we could do some laundry in the sink.

We headed to a supermarket. I bought some of their most expensive wine and we got some detergent. After we paid, and we on our way to the ship, I noticed that the cashier hadn’t charged us for the most expensive bottle of wine. A bottle that would no doubt cost $50+ in Canada was free! We headed back to the Magellan statue to touch the foot again.

We walked to the port and boarded the tender back to the ship. We ordered some room service and then I washed all my laundry. It took a helluva long time and my hands are pretty sore. How pathetic is that? I hung everything out to dry so I’m hoping that it won’t take too long. When I finished the clothes, I came down to the Internet café where I sit and type now. The boat is moving along towards the town of Ushuaia. We will arrive there sometime tonight.

10:50pm

I’m just back from having dinner. It was another raucous evening with the crazy Canadian dentists. There has been a lot of discussion about a certain woman on the cruise. Without a doubt she is every bit of 65, but tarts herself up as though she was 25. She clearly has had a tremendous amount of plastic surgery. It is quite appalling and repulsive.

Earlier in the day, we were on our tender to the mainland and she walked in with four inch heels (I’m not exaggerating) and climbs the thin steel stairs up to the top floor. At the top she slipped and fell rather hard, much to the laughter of many (NOT including me). My Dad suspects that she may even have been born a man, and I think that that might be entirely plausible.

Anyway, at dinner, this woman and her husband were at the table a short distance away and everyone was talking about her and making a big deal about how she looked, and what her story was. This guys she is with doesn’t look like someone that should be trifled with. He’s a big guy with lots of money by the looks of it and guys that look like him don’t make lots of money calmly listening to a variety of opinions or by making polite conversation. If there is a misplaced comment or something said slightly too loudly, there could be a major shitstorm. As the youngest person in the group, I’m going to be the one to step forward to take one for the team. I may be heading home with a black eye, because these dentists love to drink and things could get messy.