CRUISING SOUTH
AMERICA AND THE PANAMA CANAL
Excited? Of course we were, and getting checked in to
an Airline we’d never even heard of before: a Chilean flight on Aviance. The helpful lady checking us in said she was
from Colombia, which was our first stop.
It was in the middle of the night when we landed in Bogota, and a
helpful skycap took us to their international waiting room. Lots of work was going on in their airport,
and what we saw was quite modern. We
were at a high elevation, and the evening was cool and comfortable. Our connecting flight to Santiago, Chili came
two hours later, and we met the plane on the far reaches of the airport.
By 5:30 we off
the plane in Santiago. We got our
luggage, and my wheelchair, and on the way out of baggage claim a woman with a
“Holland American” sign directed us to a coffee shop to await our bus to the
port at Valparaiso, about a hundred
miles away. We were off by 8:00, with a
chaperon who said our ship was still two hours from reaching port, therefore we
would have a coffee stop, and a tour along the way, especially in the port
city.
Chili is quite
modern – more so than the other countries we visited. Skiing in the Andes is only an hour and half
from Santiago. Their exports include
copper (we saw an open-face mine) and aluminum, and lots of wine. The country we passed through looked very
much like southern California. Our
guides said that Chili gets virtually no storms: no hurricanes or
tornadoes. Occasionally they get
earthquakes.
Valparaiso and
its neighboring town are full of 1700’s architecture, and before the canal was
built, it is said to have been South America’s busiest city.
The ship actually
started this cruise in Argentina, and many of the people on board had already
been on their voyage for two weeks. They
had been disappointed by the weather when they rounded the tip of the
continent, with weather too bad to make a couple of ports. About four p.m. we were under power and out
into the Pacific Ocean. We went to
dinner at a quarter of seven, told the maitre de we would sit with others, and
joined two ladies. Shortly afterward a
youngish middle aged couple joined us.
All four of the strangers were from Auckland, N.Z., but didn’t know each
other. They were excellent
companions,and we ate with some or all of them several times on the journey,
with a farewell dinner together on the last night.
Susan Finlayson
was about 60, works for NZ Airline, and had met Mary, her cabin mate, just
before leaving NZ, but they were cabin mates.
Mary Reardon was 53, program director of a retirement village. (Both were, or had been married) Robin and
Jennifer have a novelty shop in Auckland, which he described as Angels and
Devils. Robin is also a glassblower, has
a great gift of gab, full of stories, never met a stranger, and we soon enough
had invitations to visit!
At the Next port,
still in Chili, I believe the only reason the ship stopped was for an
archaeological expedition, which we did not take. I didn’t get off the ship, but took a few
pictures of the impoverished town on the hillside from the ship. Richard walked
around a bit.
Next was
Millaflores/Lima, Peru, and we were there two days, so that some folks could
take the excursion to Machu-Pichu. It
involved a flight, an overnight hotel stay, strenuous walking, and it cost
almost as much as the rest of the cruise!
Richard got some wonderful seaside pictures from the cliffs overlooking
the Pocific at Millaflores. On our second
day there we took an excursion called “Lima, Then and Now”. The first part took us to a 1790’s house
right next to the capitol building, occupied since that time by the same
family. (A woman of 101 still lives there;we didn’t see her.) The house was filled with furnishings,
paintings, artifacts, throughout the past three hundred years, and had a
wonderful courtyard, with plants almost that old! The second part of that tour was to the home
of a contemporary architect and his wife.
It was modern, but also had a courtyard.
The point of interest here was a collection of more than 2000 religious
ornaments, crèches, paintings, that he had collected. In the patio courtyard we were served a
refreshing drink by the master himself: a concoction of apricot, blueberry,
white wine, and who knows what else…he said the recipe had been in his family
for 140 years. We made another stop
in Peru, at a town much less desirable than Lima. It was truly a third-world kind of town and
country-side, with people literally living in big boxes on a hillside. The town had a Colombian era church, but not
much else.
After a day at
Sea we were next in Equador. It seemed a
little more prosperous than the last stop in Peru. A change of government in recent years has
evidently helped. Here we went to a
museum, which housed a few artifacts and lots of school-kid art. Then we went about twenty miles inland, to
Montecristi. This is where PANAMA hats
are actually made, and we were able to observe all the steps they take in manufacturing: splitting palm fronds into thin straws,
weaving, which appeared to be labor intensive and backbreaking work – but every
hat is made by hand. They sell from $25
to $500., depending on how much labor is required, how fine the weaving. After weaving the hat is pressed with an old
fashion iron, heated on a stove. We each
bought a hat of the cheaper variety.
The guide also
told us that Peace Corp volunteers had been here off and on since the
60’s. One family stayed, and exports to
America the crafts of Ecuador. We
visited another factory where “vegetable
ivory” – very had nuts of a palm tree – are made into buttons, costume jewelry,
etc.
Another two days
at sea and we were in Panama. Richard
and I took an excursion bus which allowed one to get off and on at certain
spots. One place was a new and extremely
upscale mall. The stores ranged from GAP
to CARTIER’S but the emphasis was definitely on the higher priced stores. (They
did have delicious ice cream) Floors,
columns were all white marble, What
wasn’t marble was shiny stainless steel(I guess that’s what it was).
We had seen the
demonstrations of the canal offices on a previous cruise, but we had not been
through the locks on a ship (Before, we traveled by train coast to coast
through Panama) There were four locks in
all. We started into the canal at 8:00
a.m., and reached the Atlantic about 6:00, so it took all day.
The ship had been
attacked by a digestive virus that made many people sick, so from about the
third day no one was allowed to touch anything that other travelers had
touched. That meant that in the buffet,
we pointed and a n attendant served our plates.
In the dining room salt, pepper, sugar, bread and butter were all
removed from tables, and an attendant provided what you needed. Now coming out of the canal, in spite of all
those efforts, and having antiseptic at every turn of the ship…Richard and I
came down with the ailment. It meant
staying in our cabin and having room service (but we didn’t really feel like
eating) for two days. Fortunately there
was a sea day, and the visit to San Blas Islands, and everyone told us we
didn’t miss much there.
By the time we
reached Jamaica I was feeling fine, and Richard much improved. We took a tour that took us to a church built
in 1790, the oldest in Jamaica, and to a 1790’s home of the Barrett family
(Elizabeth B Browning’s father was born here, her brothers ran the 2000 acre
plantation devoted to indigo and sugar cane)
We were impressed at how the construction of the building captured sea
breezes, making the excessive heat more tolerable. Nowhere else did we see so many blooming
flowers as in Jamaica. Most were
varieties we also have in Florida. But
now that we were back in the northern hemisphere we were back to springtime,
while all the South American countries were having fall.
Our last stop was
at the Cayman Islands, which we have visited four or five times on other
cruises. We had seen the turtles, the
crocodiles and we had been to “Hell”, a volcanic eruption that surely looks
like Hades.
Our flight time
home from Ft Lauderdale was 10:30. But
that time came and went with everyone still aboard the ship, waiting to clear
customs. When we finally got off and
were told we’d have to wait for the next day’s flight to Orlando, we knew there
HAD to be a different way. So at 2:30 we
boarded a US Air flight to Charlotte, with a transfer back to Orlando, and got
to O-town at 8:00 p.m. No grandchildren
available, so we got a cab…only to realize when we got home that we had no
house keys! A call to Brenton brought him from his job at the bowling alley
within about ten minutes. Home safe and
SOUND!
