Saturday, November 27th, At Sea from Valparaiso to Porto Montt

Although during the night the Veendam was ploughing southwards against the Humboldt Current and therefore pitching a bit, I had a good night's sleep. We finally roused ourselves around 8 a.m. for some breakfast because we intended to do water aerobics at 9, but unfortunately the ship's pitching was enough that they kept the pool closed and canceled the class. Darn!

Instead, we changed into our hiking outfits and hiked a couple miles on the promenade deck. It was a unique experience as the ship really was pitching up and down stronly enough that out on the bow I would feel almost weightless for maybe 5 seconds as the bow dropped off the top of a wave, and then really solidly planted onto the deck for maybe 5 seconds as the bow ramped up from the bottom of the next one! Wow, almost like a roller coaster! That plus the constantly changing "uphill" and "downhill" slope of the rest of the Promenade Deck as we walked the rest of the 1/4 mile loop coupled with the roughly 50 mph headwinds made the walking more difficult, but also a lot more fun!

We broke off at 10 o'clock to attend a presentation on the shore excursions, and that was also very well done. We were attracted to a tour of the Lake District at our Puerto Montt stop, so we signed up for that as well as additional tours in Punta Arenas, Chile, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Afterwards we had an early lunch so that we could attend "Missy's" 12:30 Spanish Survival Kit session. She had a well-organized page of notes that began with the different vowel and consonant pronunciations of Spanish and then proceeded on to some of the basic phrases necessary to communicate. Since her plan was to offer more advanced sessions on each sea day, I decided to attend them whenever possible so as to gain some familiarity with the lingo.

At 2 p.m. we joined Chris Fisher in the main theater to hear his presentation on "Things to See and Do in Puerto Montt". Since Chris was a naturalist by profession and not the head of the shore excursion team, he gave a more general overview of the history, culture, and scenic opportunities of Puerto Montt and the Lake District around it. We thought his presentation was very well-paced and the slide show he had constructed was interesting and thorough without being overwhelming, and as an ex-professor I know how hard that is to do! His presentation style was also quite professional and engaging, which made sense as he had prepared and starred in TV shows about nature, so all in all it was very different from the morning session but another 1st-class presentation.

Taking a break back in the cabin we downloaded pictures and film clips from Monika's camera and then cleared it while we waited for the "Walk A Mile" session on the promenade deck with "Lifestyle Prince", the nickname of the buff young stud who lead our pack of walkers for a few laps around the promenade deck. That gave us a bit more exercise before we dressed up for dinner. As this was a "formal" night, I brought out my tuxedo and Monika donned one of her fancy dresses. Although the tuxedo was a cumbersome thing to bring with, at least I only had to bring ONE of them, unlike Monika who had to bring three fancy outfits, one for each of the scheduled formal nights for our cruise.

During dinner we met Nancy and Doug, the last pair for our 6-person table, and we all talked and enjoyed the view directly out over the stern from our table (#37) while we enjoyed our meal. After dinner we attended the Captain's reception where he introduced the officers of the crew in the theater forward just before the evening show.

The production show on the Veendam was quite different from larger ships we had cruised on as it relied far more on singing than on dancing. Correspondingly, the cast had a quite different composition, being comprised of 6 singers and only two dancers, which was a reversal of the usual preponderance of dancers over singers in the troupes we had seen on previous ships.