Friday 22 November 2013

An end can be a new beginning!

In the early morning the passengers from our last cruise left the ship and started their long journeys home- Ushuaia is a long way from everywhere! But just a few hours later our new passengers arrived and in the evening we started our new trip to the Antarctic Peninsula.

It is always a hard day for the crew to prepare the cabins and the whole ship for the new incoming guests. After everything was shining again on the ship, cabins, floors, restaurant and lounges, the luggage arrived and had to be distributed to each of our cabins. 


Shortly after the passengers arrived the check in started.This cruise will be a very special cruise – an almost full Chinese charter. 156 Chinese people people boarded in the early afternoon. After the check in they started to explore the ship. All over the vessel you could hear them laughing, and nearly always smiling even though they were  tired after the long flight from China. Everyone looked like they were on holiday, which they were!



As the weather in Ushuaia had been so wonderful nearly everybody spent time outside on deck when we left Ushuaia. The Beagle Channel was flat like a mirror. The sky was deep blue and the high mountains, the very end of the Andes, showed up clearly against the sky. The highest tips are very sharp, indicating that they were not covered in ice during the last glacial period. Then they would have been surrounded by ice and called “Nunataks” (a term from the Inuit Language). 


The southern beech (Nothogagus) forest that covered the mountain sides down to the will  the last really green vegetation we will see over the next 10 days. We said “good bye” to the beautiful and colorful spring time in South America, and look forward to the more or less icy spring time at the Antarctic Peninsula.