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...

Exciting today really. Firstly the sun came back and the wind disappeared which made it very pleasant to be out on deck. We were still quite well covered i.e. long sleeved t shirts and trousers but, really pleasant conditions. And we're further south now than we've ever been and probably ever likely to be. Certainly, by the time we get to Punta Arenas tonight we will be as near Antarctica as we are ever likely to be….. well…. You never know….. Anyw...

Art class has just finished. I have found a seat in a huge leather wrap-around armchair in the Crow's Nest Lounge which is high on the bow at the top of the ship, deck 13. I've pulled the chair up to the glass wall in front of me and it is as if I am perched right over the sizeable white-capped swell six stories below. It's quite mesmerising. I have a book but I find I cannot look away from the sea which today seems limitless. The sky outside is cloudless bl...