Sunday Jan 16, 2023
Hi gang! Well our itinerary changed overnight and we ended up not cruising by the glaciers but we cruised past more fjords and amazing scenery. We are really loving our rear balcony and all of today’s pictures came from there. So relaxing! They said by the end of the cruise we’ll see more glaciers than we’ll ever want to see.
Today again they had several different speakers which I really like that they offer those. And they do them in the main theater and they are always packed with people! Today the three topics were Antarctica Science, the Beagle Channel and Glacier Alley (which we’ll see the day after tomorrow), and Patagonia.
The Antarctica science one was fascinating about how much a major influence Antarctica has on the rest of the world. It holds 70% of earth’s freshwater and 90% of the earth’s ice. He said that way back in time, South America and Antarctica’s land masses were connected but a Tectonic plate forced through and separated them. Gotta love geology!
We’ll be going thru the Beagle Channel and seeing Glacier Alley the day after tomorrow so this talk was very informative. He talked about how we’ll see 6 major glaciers right next to each other. The glaciers are all named (in Spanish) after countries, and starting from the west are the Espana Glacier, Romanche Glacier, Alemania Glacier, Francia Glacier, Italia Glacier, and Holanda Glacier. Can’t wait to see those!
After the speakers we had lunch and then went to play trivia. We started out getting the first two questions right then only ended up getting 6 points out of 18. Terrible! Oh well, lots more days to play trivia!
After that we went to the talk on Patagonia. I didn’t realize how big of an area of South America is considered Patagonia. It spans both Argentina and Chile and is as large as Texas and California combined but only has about a tenth of the population. It actually has a large Welsh influence due to years ago many people from Wales emigrated there. They also have an area called Punta Tombo that has over 1 million penguins! And we hope to personally meet all of them! Lol. Lastly they mentioned one of the places most people come to visit is Torres del Paine National Park. Our port tomorrow is called Punta Arenas and our excursion will be to go see PENGUINS!! Can’t wait!! Hope everybody had a great Martin Luther King Day!
PS: Pics to come later and they’re all scenery from our balcony!
The Wandering Italian 