The first of 10 sea days. It will be interesting to see how it pans out, the longest number I've done before is 5. Linda is now using a wheelchair and a stick. It's nice to see her up and about again. As it's the first day of a new sector, all the menus revert back to the beginning. In the main dining room at lunch, that means dressed crab salad on the lighter options section. Oh yes. Mind you I then blew it by having treacle pudding and custard for ...

Linda hurt her good knee last night, so Rob was going to take her to the medical centre this morning, which meant that only four of us hit Valparaiso. During the night, around 1am, the in cabin tannoy woke me up. There had been a fire on deck 4. I'm still not sure why we were woken up. The city is built on 46 hills and is full of windy, narrow, two way streets. In the cruise terminal, we hired a cab for two hours. He took us round the back streets of Valpar...

The end of week four, seems ages since we left Southampton, but at the same time, it's flying by. Cool start to the day. Finally managed to get my laundry done, so I won't have to go commando on formal nights! The men were trounced by the ladies in BoS. Now the scores are reset and we start anew on Friday. The major topic of conversation after the quiz was the fate of the mad woman, whose eccentricities have continued apace. The latest 'strong' rumour i...

An early start for which I woke up late. Alison, a Cruise Critic member, had organised a tour and we needed to be off as early as possible. In the event, we all managed to get on the first tender. After a brief look at the cathedral, German settlers monument and an umbrella statue (PM gets 2,500 mm of rain per annum), we went to a lookout. PM is a pretty scruffy looking town of about 200,000 inhabitants. Then we drove to Puerto Varas, on the shore of L...

About 14 degrees and calm seas this morning. After my post-breakfast mile I went to a lecture on DNA by Dr Yan Wong from Oxford. Who knew that most Europeans have wet ear wax and most Asians have dry, flaky wax? A quick note about my blogs. If they seem disjointed, that's because I try to write them during the day and then finish off at night just before I post them. That explains the juxtaposition between tenses. Disastrous BoS, men's loss widened ...