Sunday, 17 March 2013
The cruise was scheduled to depart late in the afternoon from Valparaiso, which is about 2 hours from Santiago. Since we had most of the day to kill and we had seen pretty much all of Santiago, we booked a tour from Santiago to Valparaiso that dropped us off at the cruise port. We made arrangements with the tour company to pick us up at 9:20 AM. By the way, this is where we reaped one of the advantages of CruiseCritic.com that I referred to on the previous page. We made arrangements with some other folks who we met on the website to share the transportation and tour, which dropped the price from about $100 per person to about $60.
Anyway, aAt 8:20, we were sitting in our underwear congratulating ourselves for being mostly packed an hour before we had to leave, when there was a knock on our door. When I opened the door (after putting on clothes), the man at the door said that the tour company was here. I said "But they're not supposed to be here until 9:20." He said "It is 9:20." To make a long story short, the Chilean government had arbitrarily decided not to go off daylight savings time (which ended the previous Monday), and apparently had not told American Airlines (who told us that the time in Santiago was the same as in Miami), nor had they told Apple, because my iPhone still said 8:20. Suddenly I realized why the streets were emptying out at 9:00 the previous night.
So, we hustled down to the van and started making our way out of Santiago to Valparaiso. As soon as we got out of the neighborhood, the Kalt curse struck. For at least the third time in my travels, we ran into (so to speak) a marathon while trying to get out of a city.
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| They were traveling much faster than we were |
Eventually we worked out way out of the marathon, and headed to Valparaiso. A lot of the area between Santiago and Valparaiso is occupied by vineyards, which made for some nice shots.
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| Headed into the countryside |
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| Vineyards near Valparaiso |
At about 1:00, we reached
Valparaiso, which is built on hills on the coast. The center of the city has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.
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| Along the shoreline in Valparaiso |
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| First view of our ship |
On our arrival in Valparaiso, we took a (mostly) walking tour around town.
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| Plaza Sotomayor in Valparaiso |
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| Tribunales de Justicia |
There were a number of very large houses built in the late 19th century by some wealthy citizens. Here are a couple.
Most of the houses in Valparaiso are brightly painted and there is art
(or graffiti, depending on your perspective) on almost every blank
space.
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| Hillside view in Valparaiso |
After our tour of Valparaiso, we drove to
Vina del Mar, which is a resort town about 10 miles north of Valparaiso.
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| Garden clock in Vina del Mar |
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| Shoreline condos in Vina del Mar |
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| Vina del Mar Casino |
After a brief tour of Vina del Mar, we returned to Valparaiso to get on the ship. The shots below are of Valparaiso from the ship.
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| The large building on the left is the Chilean legislative building. |
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| That's a lot of reefers.... |
The ship itself was very nice and the passengers seemed pretty evenly divided among North Americans, Europeans, and South Americans. We scored a nice cabin with a balcony, and spent most of our daylight hours on the ship in the Thallasotherapy pool, which is indoors and heated to about 100 degrees (a little lower than a hot tub, which they also had). The best part is that the pool was adults only. A less pleasant part was seeing some of the passengers in bathing suits.
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| Thalassotherapy Pool |
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| Outdoor pool |
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| Our cabin |
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| Celebrity Theater |
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| Out on our balcony |
It turns out that Celebrity was having trouble filling some of their ships, so in February, they started offering all sorts of incentives including free (alcoholic) beverage packages. I had booked the cruise in November, so I assumed we were out of luck on that. However, one of the folks on the CruiseCritic web site posted that they had contacted Celebrity and asked for the incentive retroactively, and Celebrity actually gave it to them. With nothing to lose, I contacted Celebrity, and we got a free drink package. What a deal! To top it off, since this was our third cruise on Celebrity, we got a bottle of champagne in our room.
Anyway, I don't remember anything that happened that evening.
Next:
La Serena and Coquimbo, Chile
