Day 22 – Coquimbo/La Serena

Today is Day 22 of the cruise – sadly only 14 days left – but more importantly these next few days will likely be the best part of the whole trip.

We arrived again into overcast, but warm skies in the main port, Coquimbo. Today's tour was $60.00US p.p. which is big savings over the HAL tour – especially since this is a 7-½ hour tour. We head out on the biggest bus yet for our 30 people, so we’ve got some extra seats on our 50-seat bus. We head one-hour north towards the Andes so that we can see a Pisco production plant. They make 36 million bottles per year and 20% of that is slated for worldwide export. Mental note for my return to Vancouver – get the ingredients for a Pisco Sour – great drink.

Then it was back south again for a tour of a wine producer – thankfully everyone was given two bottles of wine as samples – the questions will be – will they let us on the ship with these bottles or do they go to the holding tank?

Every since we’ve crossed into Central America and South America there is really no place I said "wow" – it’s very third world with lots and lots of very poor people. While this is certainly something we needed to see, it’s off the bucket list and we’re not likely to return to any of the cities we’ve visited on the west coast side.

Tomorrow we have a sizeable amount of cruisers getting off in Valparaiso/Santiago – with a new bunch of people getting on for the final thirteen days of cruise into Buenos Aires.