The first few days

December 5th 2009

I am on my way! We left Miami on December 3rd, and arrived in Santiago, Chile on the morning of the 4th, then got a plane to Buenos Aires. We spent they day in Buenos Aires, and took a tour of the city. Although we were very tired, we went walking down a pedestrian street, and found a great little place for dinner, where I had homemade pasta, which was delicious. This morning we woke up at 5, got a plane to the south of the world at 8 with a group of people on the ship. This was interesting, because this was at a domestic airport, where there was very little English spoken. It gave us a chance to get to know some of the other people on the cruise. The flight was long…it takes about 3 and a half hours to get to Ushuaia from Buenos Aires. They also take the “Fasten your seatbelt” rule a whole lot more seriously than flights in the states do. Whenever it got turned back on, they wouldn’t let people get up for any reason, which is different than in flights I have been on in the U.S., where you can go to the bathroom practically whenever you please as long as the flight is not taking off or landing. Some people had trouble dealing with the enforcement of this rule. (I got all the good bathroom gossip because our seats were at the way back of the plane).
When we arrived, Ushuaia was having a nice summer day- it had snowed in the morning, and was at a temperate 40 degrees. It was so cool landing though, over a choppy sea and through snow capped mountains. Although the airport is literally on the water, so I was under the impression we were landing in the water for a few frightening minutes. We went to a national park in Ushuaia, and got to walk around the city a little bit. It is very cute, but man its cold! This cruise has 250 people on it; and from what I can tell, about half speak English, and half speak German. All of the announcements and instructions and messages are in both those languages. There is also a small group that speaks Chinese, (and I am under the impression solely Chinese, although technically you are supposed to speak either English or German, and they cannot guarantee any other languages to be spoken.) We got on the ship, had the lifeboat drill, and we ate dinner with a really nice couple from Washington state that we met at the airport.
After all of that (at 9 pm…its light out so very late here) we had a ship meeting where they introduced everybody, and kind of told us the routine. We are going though the Beagle Channel tonight, and will enter the Drake Passage early in the morning (which are the most treacherous waters in the world because lots of different oceans meet there). Tomorrow there is bird and other wildlife watching, and lots of lectures on different things about Antarctica. They told us to take the nausea medication before bed tonight, because apparently the tough stuff will start in the middle of the night. We applied nausea patches this afternoon, which are supposed to be effective for three days. Other people are using pills, or gels that they put on their wrists. We will see what works.
Well its finally gotten dark out (at around midnight) so I am going to go to sleep. Sun rises at a little before 5am. Since it’s the summer, its light out longer…much longer, since we are at the edge of the world. It really does feel like the world’s end, and that we are sailing into the great unknown ☺