Spring Moon of the Southern Cross
37 degrees 16 minutes S 74 degrees 3 minutes W
Near Los Angeles. Los Angeles, Chile.
We have come very far south along the west coast of South America. The ship took on passengers yesterday in Valparaiso who have booked the second half of our cruise, a Valparaiso to Rio segment. From this point until Buenos Aires, a good way north again on the east side of South America (roughly the same latitude as Valparaiso), this becomes a very different sort of cruise.
The segment from NYC to Valparaiso was a more sun and sand sort of experience emphasizing the equator, heat and the desert coastal cities of Ecuador, Peru and Chile. Along with Colombia and Panama, these cities all had a very to somewhat (Chile) typical Latin American feel: bright colors, beetle nut to honey colored peoples, Spanish, poverty, yes, but industrial, fishing, mining and tourism, too.
We head now, though, into a land more similar to the northern parts of North America, or even Scandinavia, a land dominated by archipelagos, fjords, glaciers and mountains, cooler temperatures and, if I’ve read my various books correctly a more indigenous population.
This is the land that lay hidden for centuries to Europeans who could not find a way around Cape Horn. It was Magellan, the discovery of the Pacific Ocean (except of course for those people already living in or around it), who first sailed around Cape Horn and one passage through the very tip of South America bears his name still, the Magellan Straits.
As one writer on a forum for these cruises put it, this is more of an adventure cruise. We no longer head out to ruins or dining with Pizarro shore excursions but now to National Parks, the Beagle Channel and the mountains of Chile, the rocky shores of the Falklands Islands.
This Minnesotan feels his powers returning as we head further south and my cold recedes in time.
