Fjords, Glaciers and Roundin' the Horn

What a beautiful part of the world this is!!! We’ve sailed in the Magellan Strait, the Beagle Channel, a bit of the Drake Passage and several lesser-known channels down here. If you look at the map, you’ll see that the southern tip of Chile and Argentina is a myriad of islands. It’s also snow-capped mountains, lovely fjords and glaciers—both hanging and tidewater.

It’s also VERY cold and windy. Temperatures have generally been in the 40s, with winds ranging from 25-40 MPH. Yesterday the winds were gusting above 40 MPH and the captain stayed at the pier a while longer, waiting for them to die down It’s also gloomy, but that’s part of the magic of the landscape. We saw some sun yesterday in Ushuaia but that’s the only time.

Pictures 1-3 are some of the glaciers we visited.  Pictures 1 and 2 are tidewater, with burgie-bits that have broken off in the water. We did note that these aren’t like some of the glaciers we saw in Alaska and Antarctica, where huge sheets break off and huge icebergs float in the water. Picture 3 is a hanging glacier and we particularly enjoyed the waterfalls flowing from it.

Pictures 4-6 are just 3 of many photos of spectacular scenery along the way.

Picture 7 is a picture of Ushuaia Argentina from our ship. This is our 3^rd trip in and out of Ushuaia. This is where we departed from on our 2 trips to Antarctica. It’s the southernmost city in the world and just a short hop from Tierra Del Fuego National Park. We had visited the park on a prior visit and it was VERY cold, so we contented ourselves to view it from a distance.

Finally, Picture 8 shows us roundin’ the horn this morning about 5:15 AM. The sun was just coming up, but it was too cloudy to see it. We got to 56 degrees south as we passed it and are now headed north again.  Of course we did it the easy way—west to east with the current. The scary stories come from those ships going east to west. The seas were higher than they have been, but nothing scary—nothing close to what we experienced crossing the Drake Passage on our way to Antarctica.

We’re now heading to the Falkland Islands—or the Malvenas, as all the signs in Argentina say!