Sunday, March 4, 2018- Cruise Day 40; San Antonio, Valparaiso, Viña Del Mar

Sunday, March 4, 2018- Cruise Day 40; San Antonio, Valparaiso, Viña Del Mar

We awoke to find our ship slipping beside a large containership into its slip in San Antonio.  This is one of the most important shipping ports in Chile in terms of volume of freight.  Cruise ships used to call directly on Valparaiso, which has the infrastructure to support cruise ship operations (hotels, airports, public transportation), but 2 years ago, the longshoremen went on strike, stranding cruises ships for weeks and severely disrupting the cruise ship industry, so now the cruise ships call on San Antonio, which is about a 90 minute drive from Valparaiso.  

We had breakfast in the buffet to get to our excursion departure in time.  Today, our tour bus took us through the industrial streets of San Antonio and across the countryside to Valparaiso.  Chile has very modern highways, although they are toll roads.  The countryside looks a lot like northern California in the Napa Valley area.  There are also lots of eucalyptus tree plantations.  This part of Chile is a major wine producing area, which should come as no surprise since the climate and geology looks so much like Napa Valley.  There are also lots of scotch broom, which seems to be taking over the entire planet.  There does appear to be an unusual weed that grows along the highway that looks like a giant thistle with seed heads the size of a large fist.  Maybe these are a variation of artichokes. 

Our visit to Valparaiso consisted of driving through the streets past notable landmarks including the city square with a large monument, an ancient customs house that has withstood bombardment by the Spanish Armada and countless earthquakes, several funiculars around the towns numerous hills, and hills covered with colorful ramshackled huts, houses and buildings.  

Our next stop was Viña Del Mar, a fashionable and more modern seaside resort town with broad avenues, high rise apartments and hotels.  It looks very european and is much less grafitti covered than any other major South American major city we have yet to see.  The Fonck Museum in Viña Del Mar contains a large collection of artifacts from Easter Island, which is part of Chile’s territory.  There is even a real Moai out in front of the museum.  It’s not a huge as I might have imagined them to be, but they come in all sizes.  This one was probably 10’ tall, and is displayed outside because it is too big to go in the building.  Miraculously, the taggers have left this bit of real estate alone.  The exhibits inside were very interesting and included a collection of shrunken heads, and a two headed sheep.  

Our final stop was at the seaside restaurant Chez Gerald, where we had a lunch of white fish with a shrimp hollandaise sauce, rice and salad.  Of course, there was complimentary Pisco sours and Chilean wines flowing, so we had a pretty good time.  However, we ended up sleeping most of the bus ride back to the ship.  The ship was scheduled to depart at 5:00PM prompt, but our buses returned more than 30 minutes late.  It’s a good thing we were on a Princess excursion, which guaranties that the ship will wait for our return.  

The ship disembarked 400 passengers and took on 400 new passengers in San Antonio, so we had to do another muster drill- our third and hopefully last one during this cruise.  We are starting to feel a little trepidation that our cruise will be over all too soon, even though this is our 40th day and counting.  If we won the lottery, we would be perfectly happy to just continue to cruise indefinitely.  

They had a nice prime rib dinner to greet the new passengers on board.  We had a new comedian Jeff Bromberger come on board who did a mostly standup comic show.  It was moderately entertaining, and he did some funny celebrity impressions, including one of Jack Nicholson as the captain of the ship.  The Patter listed Jeff Nease as the comic, so there must have been a last minute substitution.  We also welcomed onboard a new cruise director to replace Martin.  Natalie from Sydney Australia is no stranger to the Island Princess as she was cruise director on the Island Princess during the last Alaska Cruise season.  

Tomorrow, we arrive in Coquimbo (La Serena), Chile, our last Chilean port of call.  We have an excursion booked to visit a Pisco Distillery (as if we haven’t had enough Pisco yet).