Friday, November 26th, Embarkation in Valparaiso

At daybreak we were just above a cloud layer in northern Chile headed south toward Santiago. The ragged, dark brown peaks of the Andes Mountains poked above the brilliant, pristine white tops of the clouds, which was quite a contrast! I was surprised the Andes appeared so brown and desiccated, but I think we were in the latitudes of the Altacama Desert in northern Chile.

The land became slightly greener and cultivated areas started appearing in the valleys shortly before we landed at Santiago, Chile, around 8:15 a.m. We managed to get onto the HAL shuttle bus about an hour later despite having been delayed by the long, slow-moving queue for the new "Reciprocal Tax" that had upped the ante for a Chilean visa by a cool $140 per person! To be fair, that stamp is good for the life of the passport, which made it good for about 5 years in our case. Once we had dropped off our luggage with the friendly HAL folks at the airport, we could concentrate on enjoying our first glimpses of Chile.

The road out to the Pacific sea port of Valparaiso from Santiago, which lies in a valley in the Andes Mountains, is about 120 kilometers long. Although the main road is a nicely-paved limited-access toll road with a speed limit of 100-120 kilometers per hour, the trip took us about two hours. The first hour of the drive was through the dry, dusty valley located between Santiago and the coastal mountains. Much of the land was brown, barren soil, interspersed with the occasional field with irrigated crops. One type of agriculture that did thrive was vineyards, miles and miles of vineyards spreading over the valley floor and even climbing the lower flanks of some of the hills.

We stopped for 15 minutes about halfway through our journey at a small roadside shop for a bathroom break. As soon as we got off the bus we encountered a very friendly but very hungry German Shepherd, a laid-back llama who fortunately did not spit, and an old horse-drawn wooden cart (sans horses). The little shop located there also offered overpriced drinks and snacks, but we forwent those offerings in the sure knowledge that another hour or so would see us at the cruise ship where we figured we would get a quite decent meal (which supposition turned out to be correct!).

During the second half of the drive through the coastal mountain range and its foothills, the ecology changed rather abruptly and completely. The vineyards disappeared and the valleys and hills became covered in a layer of green vegetation. I thought I saw fruit or nut trees on some of the farms we passed, and trees started to cover the slopes and tops of the hills. I was not surprised to start seeing fir or spruce trees on the tops of the hills, but I was taken aback to see stands of eucalyptus trees as mentally I associate them more with southern California or Australia.

The final part of our drive was a scenic tour of Vina Del Mar just North of Valparaiso on the bay that opens out onto the Pacific Ocean. Some of the houses we passed had a curious, almost European type of architecture and we were informed that those buildings stemmed from a wave of European immigration in the late 1800s. Curiously enough, Monika had just found out about a great, great uncle of hers who had according to family legend settled in Valparaiso in the 1880s or 1890s, and we certainly saw some houses that would have looked right at home in Germany!

As we circled around the bay into the port area we saw a small shopping mall across some train tracks, so after we had checked onto the Veendam and dropped our carry-on luggage in cabin 749, we wandered back out of the security zone and walked over to the mall. My new cash card did not work in the mall's ATMs, but fortunately Monika's did so we were able to purchase some of the nice Chilean wine for the next several days aboard ship. Then we vegetated in our cabin until the lifeboat drill at 4:15 p.m., which was conducted in an unusually cursory and perfunct manner--we could not hear the instructions because of the roar of the dockside machinery that was busy taking away the gangplank and moving around various shipping containers. I never even saw the crew member for our lifeboat demonstrate how to put on the lifejacket, which surprised me as Holland America Line usually runs a tight ship in our experience.

Having only had 4 hours or so of catch-as-catch-can sleep on the airplane the night before, I was already starting to run out of gas by that point despite continued infusions of caffeine from coffee and iced tea. But I managed to pry myself back out of bed and get vertical to dress for our first evening meal aboard the Veendam. We met our dinner companions, Nellie and Gregory, who turned out to be Russian immigrants who had left Moscow in 1990 and were now living in Denver.

They had both been alive for, and suffered during, the travails of World War II, so I guessed they were in their 70s but were in very good shape. Gregory was a geologist and still was actively exploring sites in Russia, so we had a good chat about the political trajectory of the erstwhile Soviet Union, which seemed to all of us to be returning to the "strong man" style of authoritarian rule. They were also willing to chat about some of their experiences during WWII--Nellie had been an 11-year-old and sent with her mother from Moscow to somewhere in the middle of Siberia for safety's sake. Her descriptions of a Siberian winter were, um, graphic, and not necessarily pleasant, but that certainly had made her adaptation to the "winters" in Denver very easy to take!

Good food and conversation kept me going during dinner, but as soon as I stopped moving when we returned to our cabin that evening, I really hit the wall. I opened my book of crostic puzzles, but my eyes refused to stay open and finally I gave up and went to sleep.