Yesterday was a pretty relaxing do nothing kind of day. It was a later wake up and check out, then saying goodbye to our other group members that weren’t continuing with us to Antarctica. We walked across to the other hotel for check in with all of the Antarctica passengers, dropped our bags, then headed off to lunch. There was a large cruise ship in port, and many things were closed being a Sunday, so it made it very busy. Thankfully we went in for lunch early and got a good spot.
In the afternoon it was just a lazy day at the hotel. The power went out in all of Ushuaia for just under an hour, so was a great time to take a nap. When the power was back, we went to the hotel spa and lounged in the hot tub and steam room for a bit. After all the busyness and hiking that occurred during the trip, it was nice to have some down time. We went out for dinner and had nice steak. All in all, it was a nice relaxing day.
Today has been much the same so far. We got our bags all packed up and tagged, as they will be in our rooms when we board the ship this afternoon. With 140 passengers, there was a whole pile of luggage closely watched by Sebastian, our in-port rep.
We had breakfast and said goodbye to Neil. He was such a fantastic tour guide through all of Patagonia, and we were so blessed to have him lead us. We wandered around for a bit and our ship is in port being re-equipped and readied for us.
Our ship is the MS Expedition. It is 105m long, much smaller than the giant cruise ship on the other side of the pier. I’ll try and post up more details once we are aboard; this will be our home for the next 12 nights. With the very slow and expensive satellite internet aboard, I’m not too sure how frequent or photo-intense my blog posts will be, but I’ll do my best.
We are trying to get all prepared for crossing the Drake Passage, the 800km stretch of water separating the southern tip of South America and the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula. It is known as some of the roughest waters in the world, due to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and winds/storms/waves that circle Antarctica. The group that just disembarked got absolutely punished on the crossing yesterday after enduring quite the storm on the peninsula with 50+ knot winds. Our forecast is looking better than theirs as we enter the channel.
But that storm to the west is supposed to catch up to us before we leave it.
Those charts are showing wave height in metres and are courtesy of www.passageweather.com. Hopefully we’ll survive and our seasickness medications work.
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