(Hey look I have service!)
I am currently sitting in my cabin, on L'Austral, heading away from Argentina, through the Beagle Channel towards the Drake Passage.
The Drake Passage named for Francis Drake, a 16th century Privateer. (Y'all know him and love him.)
The flight was- well I talked about it. Ushuaia- DAMN. Coming out of the airport, you're greeted by sky scraping, snow capped mountains, gentle green grass sloping down to a dark blue sea.
Ushuaia knows how to make an entrance, I'll give it that. We took a tour of the town before we got on the boat- turns out about 80,000 people live there. So, duh, smaller than Buenos Aires, but a good sized town! We took some pictures of areas (and I have bad news....loading that pic of Ushuaia took a long time, so I might skip pictures during live posting and add them in after the fact.) learned about the South Beech tree and how Antarctica had them, how the sheet of ice that covered this area extended from the mountains, over the channel, towards Chile... (I've got a map of how the channel looks and why we can see Chile from here. ) Very nerdy, geological tour with a bit of biology (a parasitic fungus found on trees here that is edible in that it won't kill you, but you would eat other things if you could, and a type of bird with like, elbow daggers.) (The ship is really rocking now. )
The tour was great- outside of seeing the town and it's eclectic choices of architectures, I had nice chats with other guests.
Our bus drive Luis and our local guide Coco did a great job and I snagged their pictures.
The Colorado College geologist professor stepped in with her knowledge. And after the tour, we were taken to the docks were there were....3 other? 2 other? Ships like ours waiting to depart. I think they were all extraordinarily fancy, but the ship across from us did have a helicopter pad and helicopter so.... I think maybe they win? but to say that this ship isn't fancy
OH NO
you could not be more wrong sir. First off, it's very french. It is a French ship, but the crew is almost entirely french, after we boarded we were immediately given champagne. Well, first we did the Covid protocols. Proof of vaccination, temperature, pcr negative test...it's becoming very easy to find those papers. But after all that, we were escorted to our rooms where our bags awaited us (after having been sanitized by the way) where we were left to unpack before the reception and safety drills. We met the...steward? In charge of our block of rooms and she gave us a rundown of the room. Very lovely person. Then we had champagne. The reception was wine, champagne, snacks, and socializing. So I chatted with some girls until the safety briefing where we got to do the drill, then we were pretty much left on our own while we began to pull out of dock. I took the time to take pictures of us leaving port, and tested out the NEW 360 camera! no I haven't looked at it but a ten minute video took about half the storage so. We started leaving, I was freezing, (not wearing gloves because.....I was too lazy to grab them I guess? I think I didn't want to miss anything, but there wasn't much to miss. It's a ship pulling out of station. It's gorgeous, don't get me wrong. But without changing lenses it uh, it gets repetitive. Saw a rainbow, saw a second? one, came in around 7ish for dinner where we had a lovely chat with a couple about my parent's age and then we got our PARKAS Thank heck, I'm freezing. I didn't eat a ton at dinner- just trying to not tempt the seasick mistress into pulling me under. (I'm good now...................... but what about a few hours....???)
buut it was good!
and after the parkas and dinner, I retired to the cabin.
we got the day plan for tomorrow so we read that but I'm exhausted.
And now I'm being gently lulled to sleep by the waves.
Guys, it's going to be an amazing trip.
These guys are too fancy to let it be anything but.
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