Another great day that continues our love affair with Chile. It didn't start well. The alarm woke us up at 0630 and we leapt up to breakfast on the top deck just as Aurora was pulling into the bay in front of Puerto Montt. There was a distinct - and I mean DISTINCT - smell of old fish. Plus, it was grey, raining and thundery….. Not a good day to have organised a tour for 16 people to ascend volcanoes and visit waterfalls and lakes. Met the rest of m...

Didn't set an alarm this morning and therefore didn't stir till about ten to nine. Unheard of! Our cabin is so quiet and as it has no window, once we put the light out, it's a blackout. So, great sleep. Had a quick breakfast and then scuttled off to bridge. Our last lesson before Valparaiso. Our usual partners didn't arrive and we ended up playing in a four with two of the instructors. That was a bit scary. Plus we were learning how to bid and play sl...

When we looked out this morning, we were slap bang in front of the largest glacier in the Southern Hemisphere outside of the Antarctic: The Pio XI Glacier. 41 miles long and 2000m high. An extraordinary blue wall of ice-water. Like a great tidal wave frozen in time, a scene out of The Day After Tomorrow, when the world freezes in a second…. Blue, blue ice walls with white crystalline shard toppings, deeply crevassed and streaks of grey where the glacier h...

Woke up this morning to the boat rolling a bit and realised we must have emerged into the Pacific from the Magellan Strait. Sure enough, outside there was a nice swell and quite a cold wind. Well, let's be honest: a very cold wind LOL. We were due to enter the fjord leading to the Amalia glacier at around 10am and knew it would calm down after that. The Chilean fjords are just amazing. Great soaring cliffs, some are bare rock, some green and thickly woo...

Well…. We are totally blessed, that's all I can say! Woke up to a brilliant blue sky and crucially NO wind at all. We took a tender across to the port and walked the few blocks to the office of Solo Expediciones, the company that run the boat trips out to Magdalena Island. The news was good - the trip was on! Punta Arenas makes a good first impression. It has a frontier flavour as you would expect for a town more or less literally at the end of the w...