The bus ride to the port at the city of Valparaiso is over an hour long. They play some DVD of a German looking, Americanized; big band meets Yanni meets the Bay City Rollers LIVE. Surprisingly, it’s not very annoying. We are still both pretty tired because… well… it’s our honeymoon. Let’s leave it at that. We both find ourselves drifting in and out of sleep - mostly in. In our waking moments, what we see is much like the trip between Portland and Seaside Oregon, except the variety of tree life is different. In other words, it's very beautiful country.
We arrive in Valparaiso, population: 250,000 +. It’s a big, half circle bay with tall cliff-like walls surrounding. 
Well, not really cliffs, but super steep hillside.
A jumble of multi-colored clapboard houses and weathered Victorian mansions intermingled and embedded on one giant hillside community wherever they may fit. No sign of any class division whatsoever. Its housing plan is so compacted that it appears as if all 250,000 residents live right here on the waterfront. This city is a UNESCO world heritage site. Before the Panama Canal, this was the most important port in all of South America. It’s quite unlike any city we’ve ever seen. The bus takes us to the port for our check-in procedure that takes over 3 hours. (Side note: 12 – 1 liter bottles of Diet coke are a VERY heavy addition to your carry-on luggage!) 
We are finally rewarded with passage onboard the great ship that will be our home for the next 2 weeks: Radiance of the Seas. We find our cabin on deck 7 and are amazed at how much bigger it is than we had expected. And the balcony is perfect.
Off our balcony, we see this ship:
and we imagine the neighbors saying, “But he was always such a nice bear. He always kept to himself and never caused any problems.” We go out to the buffet for lunch and then we head to the centrum (main lobby) for a raffle with many prizes. We ask a couple of ladies if we can join them at a table in the center and order our only drinks of the cruise we plan on buying so that we can have our souvenir glasses. The ladies are both apparently very wealthy widows from Canada and we are enjoying their company. After the last prize is awarded we are off to explore the ship for the afternoon.
It’s one of our best days ever (to this point) as we walk hand in hand discovering the miniature golf course, the rock wall, the indoor and outdoor pools, the casino…etc. We take turns taking pictures of the city from the bow.
There is another cruise ship docked directly behind us. It is the Norwegian Sun.
It is one of the ships we had to choose from for this cruise. It’s on exactly the same time frame going from Valparaiso to Buenos Aires. The main reasons we chose the Royal Caribbean instead were A) the deal we got on our balcony room, and B) the fact that the Norwegian goes to the Falkland Islands and ours goes to Punta Del Este Uruguay. In doing pre-trip research, Todd decided on Uruguay over the Falkland Islands. It is still light out when we see the Norwegian Sun pulling out of the bay.
It is now dinner time. We make our way to the dining room and they show us to our assigned table for 4. We arrive to find a waiter speaking to our two table mates in Spanish. He is introducing us to them in Spanish and they are greeting us back in Spanish. Todd is thinking to himself, “who’s the Einstein that paired this table?” Now please understand this: when we mention our problems with the Spanish language we take full blame for the fact that these are our problems. We in no way expected the people of South America to speak to us in our language. This was going to be part of our adventure for crying out loud. When we do not respond in Spanish our waiter asks us if we speak Spanish. When we tell him no he responds by saying, “Okay. Well this should be interesting.” Almost immediately we find out that the husband speaks English but the wife does not. We are formally introduced to Carlos and Aura from Venezuela.
We enjoy their company very much. We find ourselves communicating to Aura using our mastery of intergalactic sign language as well as through Carlos. They are both very funny and fun loving people.
At 8:15 we are called for the mandatory lifeboat drill, or “compulsory mustering”. At 9:00pm the ship finally departs. The Captain tells us that we are in for rough seas immediately upon clearing the harbor. Swells of 4’-6’ he says. We soon find out that the Captain does not lie. We spend the evening on our balcony swaying to the music of the sea. It’s very embryonic actually; like being back in the womb. We have no troubles sleeping this night. Maybe it is age, but we both remember a day when we would be hurling violently under these circumstances. It would prove to be one of only 2 nights with seas this rough.
Monday. Day 4. We wake up and have breakfast in the formal dining room. We are loving this food! And everyone we meet is so nice to talk with. At 10:00am we meet with a group of people Todd has been chatting with online on a site called Cruise Critic. We meet in the Schooner Bar. This is the ship’s piano bar. We discuss the busses at our first port, and talk about going to the lakes district from there. Lots of small talk and then it’s over. We visit the store to buy some whiskey to go with our Diet Coke only to find out that things, well they are a changing. The new rule now is that you can certainly buy liquor onboard, but you can’t bring it to your room. They keep it safe for you until the end of the voyage. Good thing we toted all that Diet Coke onboard!
We spend the bulk of the day relaxing, not doing much, taking a nap and things along those lines. Dinner comes and we are once again enjoying our table mates company. Carlos buys 2 bottles of champagne and shares them with us. Not wishing to be rude we then buy another one ourselves. We convince them to meet us at the theater that night for the headline act which is a Motown singing trio. When we arrive at the theater he has already purchased a bottle of wine and 4 glasses. Needless to say, we enjoyed the show very much and had a great time, standing up and singing and dancing at our seats and only breaking one of the glasses. The 4 of us were the life of the theater, aside from the headliners of course. Soon, everyone around us was standing and singing and dancing. Upon the end of the finale song, we all decided that the buzz we had going was too good to end the night. We adjourned to the disco, the Galaxy Club, with a 270 degree view of the darkness outside. When we got there, there were only about 6 other tables with people at them, and nobody was dancing. Carlos ordered another bottle of wine and stated that if there were salsa music playing he would dance. Todd related this to the DJ and within 20 minutes of arrival we had consumed 2 more bottles of wine and brought the dance floor to life. By the end of the evening, the total bottle count would be 8. We had a LOT of fun.
Tuesday. Day 5. Sleeping in is this morning’s theme. On our way to lunch we run into Carlos at the elevators. He tells us that he woke up with such a severe headache that he actually ended up with the ship’s doctor this morning. Yikes! We wish him well and proceed to our lunch in the formal dining room where we are pleased to sit next to a couple from the cruise critic site we met yesterday; a husband and wife from Texas. They are really nice and the husband especially is very funny. Extremely dry witted. If you are really paying attention, he will crack you up.
We are cruising along the Chilean coast close enough to see the volcano Osorno clearly.
We spend the afternoon at the bow of the ship taking pictures.
We meet one of the guys from the cruise critic group. Todd asks him if he knows if there was a time to meet for going up to the lake for tomorrow’s port of call. He replies that he doesn’t think a time was discussed at all. We return to our room and continue the photo session from our balcony as we enter the mouth of the Canal Chacao.
We are hearing a strange noise. What is that noise? The following photo is the island we are passing in the canal. If you could look through our binoculars you would see that all of the brown spots on this Island are Sea lions.
That’s right, an island of sea lions.
Looking up we see what we believe to be the ancient Chilean gods taking the form of clouds to wish all canal travelers well.
We believe this because every other explanation for these visions was just plain spooky. There were many more than just these 2. We sit back and enjoy the beauty passing us until dinner time. No Carlos. No Aura. We must have scared them off last night. We’ve got a busy day tomorrow so we head back to the room with no plans to go out on the “town”. We catch this stunning sunset:
As we clear the canal and enter the Gulf of Ancud we see the Norwegian Sun travelling south - away from their day in Puerto Montt. Good thing we’re not in port the same day they are. We adjourn from the balcony and watch movies until we fall asleep.
We are finally rewarded with passage onboard the great ship that will be our home for the next 2 weeks: Radiance of the Seas. We find our cabin on deck 7 and are amazed at how much bigger it is than we had expected. And the balcony is perfect.Off our balcony, we see this ship:
and we imagine the neighbors saying, “But he was always such a nice bear. He always kept to himself and never caused any problems.” We go out to the buffet for lunch and then we head to the centrum (main lobby) for a raffle with many prizes. We ask a couple of ladies if we can join them at a table in the center and order our only drinks of the cruise we plan on buying so that we can have our souvenir glasses. The ladies are both apparently very wealthy widows from Canada and we are enjoying their company. After the last prize is awarded we are off to explore the ship for the afternoon.
It’s one of our best days ever (to this point) as we walk hand in hand discovering the miniature golf course, the rock wall, the indoor and outdoor pools, the casino…etc. We take turns taking pictures of the city from the bow.There is another cruise ship docked directly behind us. It is the Norwegian Sun. It is one of the ships we had to choose from for this cruise. It’s on exactly the same time frame going from Valparaiso to Buenos Aires. The main reasons we chose the Royal Caribbean instead were A) the deal we got on our balcony room, and B) the fact that the Norwegian goes to the Falkland Islands and ours goes to Punta Del Este Uruguay. In doing pre-trip research, Todd decided on Uruguay over the Falkland Islands. It is still light out when we see the Norwegian Sun pulling out of the bay.It is now dinner time. We make our way to the dining room and they show us to our assigned table for 4. We arrive to find a waiter speaking to our two table mates in Spanish. He is introducing us to them in Spanish and they are greeting us back in Spanish. Todd is thinking to himself, “who’s the Einstein that paired this table?” Now please understand this: when we mention our problems with the Spanish language we take full blame for the fact that these are our problems. We in no way expected the people of South America to speak to us in our language. This was going to be part of our adventure for crying out loud. When we do not respond in Spanish our waiter asks us if we speak Spanish. When we tell him no he responds by saying, “Okay. Well this should be interesting.” Almost immediately we find out that the husband speaks English but the wife does not. We are formally introduced to Carlos and Aura from Venezuela.
We enjoy their company very much. We find ourselves communicating to Aura using our mastery of intergalactic sign language as well as through Carlos. They are both very funny and fun loving people.At 8:15 we are called for the mandatory lifeboat drill, or “compulsory mustering”. At 9:00pm the ship finally departs. The Captain tells us that we are in for rough seas immediately upon clearing the harbor. Swells of 4’-6’ he says. We soon find out that the Captain does not lie. We spend the evening on our balcony swaying to the music of the sea. It’s very embryonic actually; like being back in the womb. We have no troubles sleeping this night. Maybe it is age, but we both remember a day when we would be hurling violently under these circumstances. It would prove to be one of only 2 nights with seas this rough.
Monday. Day 4. We wake up and have breakfast in the formal dining room. We are loving this food! And everyone we meet is so nice to talk with. At 10:00am we meet with a group of people Todd has been chatting with online on a site called Cruise Critic. We meet in the Schooner Bar. This is the ship’s piano bar. We discuss the busses at our first port, and talk about going to the lakes district from there. Lots of small talk and then it’s over. We visit the store to buy some whiskey to go with our Diet Coke only to find out that things, well they are a changing. The new rule now is that you can certainly buy liquor onboard, but you can’t bring it to your room. They keep it safe for you until the end of the voyage. Good thing we toted all that Diet Coke onboard!
We spend the bulk of the day relaxing, not doing much, taking a nap and things along those lines. Dinner comes and we are once again enjoying our table mates company. Carlos buys 2 bottles of champagne and shares them with us. Not wishing to be rude we then buy another one ourselves. We convince them to meet us at the theater that night for the headline act which is a Motown singing trio. When we arrive at the theater he has already purchased a bottle of wine and 4 glasses. Needless to say, we enjoyed the show very much and had a great time, standing up and singing and dancing at our seats and only breaking one of the glasses. The 4 of us were the life of the theater, aside from the headliners of course. Soon, everyone around us was standing and singing and dancing. Upon the end of the finale song, we all decided that the buzz we had going was too good to end the night. We adjourned to the disco, the Galaxy Club, with a 270 degree view of the darkness outside. When we got there, there were only about 6 other tables with people at them, and nobody was dancing. Carlos ordered another bottle of wine and stated that if there were salsa music playing he would dance. Todd related this to the DJ and within 20 minutes of arrival we had consumed 2 more bottles of wine and brought the dance floor to life. By the end of the evening, the total bottle count would be 8. We had a LOT of fun.
Tuesday. Day 5. Sleeping in is this morning’s theme. On our way to lunch we run into Carlos at the elevators. He tells us that he woke up with such a severe headache that he actually ended up with the ship’s doctor this morning. Yikes! We wish him well and proceed to our lunch in the formal dining room where we are pleased to sit next to a couple from the cruise critic site we met yesterday; a husband and wife from Texas. They are really nice and the husband especially is very funny. Extremely dry witted. If you are really paying attention, he will crack you up.
We are cruising along the Chilean coast close enough to see the volcano Osorno clearly.
We spend the afternoon at the bow of the ship taking pictures. We meet one of the guys from the cruise critic group. Todd asks him if he knows if there was a time to meet for going up to the lake for tomorrow’s port of call. He replies that he doesn’t think a time was discussed at all. We return to our room and continue the photo session from our balcony as we enter the mouth of the Canal Chacao.We are hearing a strange noise. What is that noise? The following photo is the island we are passing in the canal. If you could look through our binoculars you would see that all of the brown spots on this Island are Sea lions.
That’s right, an island of sea lions. Looking up we see what we believe to be the ancient Chilean gods taking the form of clouds to wish all canal travelers well.
We believe this because every other explanation for these visions was just plain spooky. There were many more than just these 2. We sit back and enjoy the beauty passing us until dinner time. No Carlos. No Aura. We must have scared them off last night. We’ve got a busy day tomorrow so we head back to the room with no plans to go out on the “town”. We catch this stunning sunset:
As we clear the canal and enter the Gulf of Ancud we see the Norwegian Sun travelling south - away from their day in Puerto Montt. Good thing we’re not in port the same day they are. We adjourn from the balcony and watch movies until we fall asleep.
