Following our excursion to Cape Horn, the Stella Australis took us to Wulaia Bay for the afternoon, where we had a choice of three hikes. The Captain gave a compelling lecture (previous to our visit to Wulaia Bay) about the Yamana aboriginal settlements. Wulaia Bay was the site of one of the largest Yamana settlements, was also sketched by FitzRoy and described by Darwin during their voyage on board the HMS Beagle (yeah for beagles!). Here’s another link for more information.
There is an old radio station at Wulaia Bay that has been converted to a museum, and it’s very good. For the hikes, BILly decided to take the Difficult option while SILly, DH and I opted for Medium. Really, BILly’s hike just took him to a higher vantage point.
This would be our last time setting forth from the zodiacs. Awwwwwwwww….
Everyone drops their life jackets somewhere they are apt to remember them for picking up later, but it really doesn’t matter whose life jacket you pick up. Some folks were no so great at remembering where they put theirs. 🙂 But I love this shot showing both the Chile and Argentina flags.Breathtaking views! If you look very hard, you can see the old radio station/now museum in the lower left hand corner of this photo. Our hiking group visited the museum following our hike.Patagonia really reminds me of British Columbia. It’s not the same, yet it is. Depending where you are.“Us”.
On the last evening of the cruise, the crew auctioned off the navigation chart sued for sailing to Cape Horn. My motion sickness was still bothering me, though not as badly as the first few days. I’ve done three cruises now (Galapagos 2012, Cuba 2014 and now this one), and the Australis Cruise was by far the shortest, at only 4 nights. It’s a great cruise, not cheap but was well worth it for us. Since we backpacked through Europe and touched the westernmost point of Europe in the 19080s, we have wanted to check out other “direction-most” points. We’ve been to the easternmost tip of North America (Cape Spear, Newfoundland) and to the highest navigable body of water (Lake Titicaca), so visiting the southernmost point of South America was definitely on the Bucket List. Now, I need to get to the Dead Sea, but no idea when that will occur!
We had one more night on the Stella Australis before she docked at Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city on the continent, the following morning. We disembarked and had some more adventures before flying up to Buenos Aires for a couple of days. So we’re not finished yet!
This week’s theme was a tough one for me, because I do quote from some movies but not often, and most of the movies are old. But if I were a movie-quoter, here’s my list of Movies I Sometimes/Sorta Quote From:
Oh, I couldn’t find the Listify Life cards for the last two weeks of the spring challenge, so I just wrote on a notebook page. It was simpler, so I’ll probably continue the notebook pages for the Summer Challenge (Yes, it’s continuing!).
I can not seem to get a non-blurry picture.
“I’ll be back.” – from the original Terminator. Must be said with an Arnie-ominous voice.
“Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” – with Name of Choice in place of Baby. Allie McBeagle likes to use this one. From Dirty Dancing.
“Go ahead. Make my day.” From, I think it was, one of the Dirty Harry movies starring Clint Eastwood. The Internet says it’s from Sudden Impact. Must attempt channeling of Clint when speaking this line.
“You talking to me?” – I knew this was a Robert DeNiro quote, but I had to look up the movie. I’ve never seen Taxi Driver, but mucho channeling of DeNiro occurs when this quote is uttered.
Are you a movie-quoter? I’m proud of myself that I managed to come up with some!
There’s one more week remaining in the Listify Life Spring Challenge. But a Summer Listify Life Challenge begins, well, sometime after June 21st, the equinox. I’m gonna try participating again.
Date Explored: February 16, 2016 – In Other Words, 02-16-2016. Kinda Cool.
Last I left off, we were visiting Pia Glacier and cruising through Glacier Alley. Preparing for today’s post, I see I noted in my travel journal for the night before February 15 (Pia Glacier):
Had some rollers during the night –> my full water glass fell to the floor, not sure where the water went!
Funny how we forget the little things. It’s a good thing I can read my handwriting (it’s very messy).
For Tuesday, February 16th, I wrote:
Woke @ 6 a.m. after a night of huge rolling waves and suited up only to receive the disappointing news that the winds were far too bad to go on Cape Horn. We got great views & photos but it’s not the same as stepping on the piece of earth itself.
200 km/hr winds was the max. they hit charting the course during the night.
Gusting to 88 knots/100 km an hour in a.m.
So there you have it. Yes, a bit disappointing, Cindiana Jones did not get to walk on Cape Horn! But thanks to her (well, my) zoom lens, which is actually pretty old in the scheme of zoom lenses, she/I managed to get some great shots from the ship. The captain made every effort to circle the Cape and allow for amazing photos (considering it was such a blustery day) and we had some wild fun when the ship, um, leaned a little more than perhaps was anticipated. We were told that there was no way the zodiacs would stay afloat trying to get us to the stairs up to the Cape. Even if the zodiacs managed to get us to the stairs, the winds were so strong we wouldn’t be able to walk on the Cape.
Everyone was a good sport about it. There was one fellow who decided to take the return trip from Ushuaia (our drop off point the following morning) for a second run at the Cape, because he had piloted (I believe was the word he used) ships himself and had never landed at Cape Horn. It was on his bucket list, as it was on my mine. But Alan was very determined. I wonder if he got there?
Trying to remain standing on deck as we circled the Cape! Not pretending. Really trying to stand. They wouldn’t let us stand on the very top deck. We were up there, but got shooed down. I guess it wouldn’t do to have one of the guests flail around in the drink.If we look a wee bit chilly, it’s because we were!
Oh, if you look back up at Picture 1, you can see I’m wearing gumboots. The Stella Australis provides gumboots throughout the expeditions, if you wish, but I chose only to take some for the Cape Horn excursion, and then it didn’t work out. According to this article I found about the Via Australis (sister ship to the Stella), the Via manages to land at Cape Horn around 75% of the time. I believe we were advised that the Stella manages to land (lately) around 70% of the time. So we were among the 30% of the time where the weather conditions do not permit landing.
Would I take another cruise that offered the opportunity to land at Cape Horn? If I were independently wealthy and could combine another shot at Cape Horn with a trip to Antarctica, definitely yes. But unless I win the lottery, no. I consider myself very lucky to have circled the Cape. I would love to land there, but…funds.
If the weather had been more cooperative, the zodiacs would have taken us to this staircase.
Here’s a cool video of folks aboard the Stella Australis landing at Cape Horn the month before us, January 2016. The crew determines whether or not you can land, for us, at about 2 a.m. So even though the passengers, at 6 a.m. thought, “We can do this!”, they said no.
So imagine if these folks on YouTube were able to land and we weren’t a month later…how extreme our weather was when they were charting the possibility of landing.
I am a little jealous of those people. If you visit the YouTube video, that’s what the wind sounded like as I was trying to remain standing on the ship.
A view of the lighthouse with my zooms lens.
Yes, I am pretty amaze-balls. I wasn’t standing very steadily when I took the shot.
I love this shot as we’re moving around the Horn. It was both light and dark at the same time.
Agh, I wish I could have gone up top to the monument and signed my name in the book! Oh, dear, it seems if I were a millionaire, I would go back.
I’m wondering why they didn’t let us sleep in instead of making us get up and be on-deck at six only to find out we couldn’t disembark. I guess it’s like allowing a woman to “try and push out the baby” if he’s, say, a surprise breech, like my first one was, so she’ll feel like she actually accomplished something. If they didn’t get us up so we could see for ourselves how windy it was, and if they didn’t give us the report from the weather station about the 200/km hour winds during charting…maybe we wouldn’t have believed them?
I do know from my experience giving birth that, yes, as the OB said, it was advantageous for me “to try” pushing out my baby, even if I didn’t succeed.
And so it is with Cape Horn. “That Cindy, at least she tries.”
Et, voila, to show for it:
By the way, if you are lucky enough to get Captain Juan Carlos Vargas, he’s excellent at what he does. Very informative talks, very personable…and not bad to look at (for those who make travel plans based on such things).
The rest of our morning was spent having a siesta, which I sorely needed. My motion sickness was having a great time with my head and stomach. It was like being spun around on a horizontal Ferris wheel at high speeds. My head hurts just thinking about it.
But, yeah, I would go back if I had the chance.
Next time, our afternoon excursion at Wulaia Bay, which was beautiful. The weather had cleared completely and we had a wonderful time.
I would argue that for a writer there is no such thing as wasting time on the Internet, because entertainment is fodder for stories, and we use the Internet a lot for research and for planning our writing days, etc. So this is really more a catalogue of where I am most likely to be spending my time on the Internet. If I weren’t a writer, would I visit Facebook several times a day? I honestly have no idea because I was an author before I joined Facebook. The Internet, whether you are using email loops or forums or Facebook groups, provides a way for writers to get together and brainstorm and exchange ideas and experiences about publishing houses, editors and agents. It really is an invaluable tool. So that’s my caveat!
Facebook – Yes, I do waste a lot of time following links on Facebook that have nothing to do with writing. I love being able to stalk my kids online using Facebook, and it’s a great way to keep in touch with friends both old and new. I spend more time then I should following links to quizzes and news items that I know are just going to irritate me. I could just open up my USA Today app instead. But of all the social networks out there, Facebook is the one I go to most frequently. I belong to an author support group and also to a group of publishing folks who are really into paper planning, and I just joined a group for authors who are interested in doing their own formatting. All that I find absolutely necessary. 🙂 As I look at my list, though, I realize I haven’t even included Twitter. I have tried really hard to get into Twitter, but it’s just not in my top three. Same with Pinterest. Unless I’m looking for renovation ideas, which is when I usually visit Pinterest, I don’t go there. There’s only so much time in the day!
Trip Advisor – When we are planning a big trip I usually start out by buying a Frommer’s book on the country and reading it cover to cover. But then I follow up with months of research on Trip Advisor. It’s hands-down the best place I know to get advice on where I want to go. I tend to pay the most attention to reviews from travelers who live in my province or Alberta, because we have similar expectations. Whereas, folks from Ontario and folks from the UK have different expectations, I’ve come to realize through reading reviews on Trip Advisor. So while I might check those reviews and those ideas, if I really want to know how I might feel about a place, I depend on the residents of BC and our neighbours to the left, depending which way you are looking at the map of Canada. I consider Alberta to be on the left, because I am standing inside British Columbia looking out. 🙂
Instagram – This is a new one for me. I discovered Instagram basically because I decided to participate in the spring #listifylife challenge and Instagram is the primary place where the challenge is occurring. I discovered that I really like Instagram. Maybe it’s because participating in the challenge coincided with me blogging about our trip to Patagonia, because I realized I could start posting pictures of the trip to Instagram. 🙂 So, on Instagram, instead of networking really with just other writers, I have started networking with other travellers. I follow a lot of travel bloggers and photographers on Instagram, and honestly it is what I am mainly there for, the travel photography, not the social networking.
Romance Divas Forum – Easily the best, in my opinion, support and industry and research and brainstorming forum for romance authors on the Internet. And… It’s how I discovered my paper planning group on Facebook, and that paper planning group is my happiest place on the Internet right now. 🙂
Stock Photo Websites – This one wouldn’t be on my list if I weren’t an author. What reason would I have to visit stock photo websites? You would probably more likely find me on shoe buying websites… But because I am mainly independently publishing right now, stock photo websites are super important in the book cover brainstorming process. While some book cover artists will look at the stock photo websites for you, others want you to search for your own stock images or at least provide them as an example of what you’re looking for. Believe me, I can spend hours and hours and hours on stock photo websites when I am brainstorming a book cover.
Amazon and Chapters – Chapters is a Canadian online bookstore, and I buy paper books mainly from Chapters or Canadian Amazon. I buy e-books from American Amazon, and because I am an independent author I am on Amazon a fair amount checking sales rankings, etc. But I also check sales rankings on Kobo, iBooks, and other places. Actually, I don’t really check sales rankings all that much unless I am running a promotion or have a new release, which hasn’t occurred in too long. But when my next release does come out within the next few months, I know I will be stalking my Amazon dashboard. Kobo is also easy to stalk, but I don’t buy books from Kobo. I buy the odd book from iBooks, but I prefer the lighting on my Kindle to reading on an iPad, so therefore I spend the most time buying books on Amazon. I had a Kindle before the Kobo came out, and I still use my original Kindle (sorry, Kobo, but as an author I love you!)
Cover Artist Sites – I have used the same cover artist for all my books as Cindy and under my pen name except for two short stories. Even though I keep going back to the same cover artist, I like to visit other cover artist sites just to get a taste for what else is out there. A lot of cover artists also run their own photography shoots, so I get sucked into those rabbit holes very, very easily. 😉
Where do you waste time on the Internet? Is it time wasted? Or is it…a necessity?
My delete finger has been a little trigger-happy with comments on my blog lately. Sometimes I empty the spam folder before I realize that a comment might not really be spam. And once I’ve accidentally deleted all the spam comments, I can’t get back to them again.
So if you have left a comment on my blog lately and you come back and don’t see it, that is why. Sorry, it got caught in the spam filter and something about the dashboard on WordPress must’ve changed, because I am losing those comments before getting a chance to check out if they are really spam or not.
The best way for me to realize that you are not spam is to mention in your comment where you saw the link to the post on which you are commenting. If you came to my blog from Facebook, let me know that. If you came to my blog through Twitter or Instagram, let me know that. You are much less likely to get lumped into the spam category along with all the comments from SEO website engines.
Apologies to anyone whose comments I may have inadvertently deleted. Practically nobody comments on blogs anymore, so it is easy to get trigger-happy. 🙂 But I do welcome comments, if you wish to leave them here rather than on Facebook, for example.
Day 3 of our Australis Cruise was pretty much the reason FOR the cruise. Overnight, the ship makes its way around the western end of Tierra del Fuego and into the Ballenero Channel. It’s pretty exciting to look out your cabin window and see bits of ice beginning to show in the water. I can only imagine what it must be like to experience in colder months (but I’m a wimp so we went during their summer). The closer the ship cruises to Pia Glacier, the more you can feel excitement mounting on-board. Pia Glacier is one of the few glaciers accessible to humans that is not in retreat, but instead is advancing (this is when a glacier grows faster than it’s melting, whereas the Columbia Ice Fields in my home province are melting faster than they are growing, hence they are in retreat).
When Pia Glacier first comes into view, it is just breathtaking. It’s surreal to be among such beauty, and in today’s day and age there is a pretty somber realization that seeing a glacier calve (which we did, several times) as the ice pushes from the back and huge chunks split off into the ocean is a rarity. You truly feel like you are at the mercy of Mother Earth.
When you visit the glacier, you can choose to just stay at the viewing area or to hike to gain “better views.” The hike was pretty slippery, over large boulders, and it was muddy. They warned us it would be muddy, and it was! I had rain pants and gators. We were in Chile and Argentina for a month, so I didn’t have space in my luggage for hiking boots. You can borrow gumboots off the cruise folks, but I thought they would be too slippery on the rocks for this excursion. I just used my hiking runners with the rain pants and gators, and that combo worked great.
In the zodiac en route to the disembarkation spot for Pia Glacier. The zodiac engines churn through the ice. It sounds like a big blender.I am “enjoying” a glass of scotch with glacial ice. This was after our hike to a “better viewing area,” which is really, in my opinion, a way to not have too many people on the viewing rock at once. The folks who take the “easy” landing just stay here as long as they want. Meanwhile, the rest of us are hiking up the slippery boulders. The view was very nice, and I’m proud of myself that I made it! But I’m not so sure I would have made it back down if not for my husband telling me (and others) where to step and when. I seem to have a natural inclination to step exactly where I shouldn’t, on the slipperiest area. But at least I didn’t fall off the path like I did hiking down from a volcano in the Galapagos four years earlier.
I had to put quotation marks around “enjoy,” because I am not a scotch drinker. I just wanted my picture taken like everyone else.
See the blue area of the glacier to the left? That’s where Pia Glacier was calving during our visit. We didn’t think it was going to calve at all. Then we started our hike and as the day warmed, you could start to hear the rumblings of a potential calve. Once we returned from our hike, I forgot about taking pictures or even attempting to get a calving on video. I just stood there and watched in awe. A couple small chunks calved, and a big one calved. See that icy water just behind me up above? As the glacier calves and drops into the ocean, it creates this “down the sink” effect, which shoves and swirls the water just beyond our viewing rock. The force of nature is awesome.
The final ascent was up to a viewing area to see a fjord. It was pretty crowded by the time we got there, with a group that had arrived previously. Now, most of the folks you will encounter on the cruise are cognizant that everyone wants to take pictures, but there were a few who felt their photography skills were of paramount importance. Really, a couple of fellows could have just moved a wee tad to allow, say, SOMEONE ELSE, ANYONE ELSE, a chance to take a photo. While I wouldn’t use the term Asshat to describe an individual in particular, I might say “egotistical twit.”Heading back to the cruise ship, DH and I wound up in the last zodiac with a bunch of photographers with massive cameras. Most of them were quite nice (like the gentleman with his back to us) and the zodiac captain was very accommodating driving the zodiac to a vantage point from which the photographers with their massive zoom lenses could take pictures of the ship. I had long since decided just to watch the glacier instead, in case it did a massive calve while I was watching it and the attention of my zodiac mates was diverted to the cruise ship. Wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what happened. All I could get out was a “Holy crap!” and before the massive cameras could turn toward the noise, a building-sized piece calved off the glacier.
Sometimes it pays to just enjoy the moment instead of recording it for posterity, you know?
After you return to the ship, the boat cruises through “Glacier Alley,” which features tidewater glaciers coming down from the Darwin mountains and the Darwin Ice Sheet. Most of these glaciers are named after European countries, and the ship serves you a drink reminiscent of the country as you cruise past a glacier in question. Excuse my photos, because I took them through the window. It was quite blustery outside by this point. So I can’t tell you if this glacier is France, Holland, Germany or Italy, but I can tell you I enjoyed sips of champagne and beer (I think I ran out of steam after that).
This glacier is obviously melting, which was kind of sad.More glaciers!
During the cruise along Beagle Channel (beagle!!!) and through Glacier Alley, my sea-sickness was taking its toll. This was the night before we would reach Cape Horn, another reason to take the cruise – a chance to disembark at Cape Horn!! The success of the landing depends entirely on what the weather is doing around midnight to 2 a.m. the night before. The ship guys (captains, whatever) are in contact with a weather station that alerts them to the probability of landing at Cape Horn. But of course they don’t tell you whether you’ll land or not until the next morning, because how else will they get the entire boat into life jackets otherwise?
Did we land at Cape Horn? Did I fall overboard and need to be retrieved? Or did they toss me a rope and allow me to barefoot water-ski through ice chunks? These and other questions will be answered next week on another installment of Cindiana Jones Does Patagonia. Stay tuned!
