Sandy Dengler’s: Around The World In 80 Years
Man proposes; God disposes.
If you have been following, you know that Cartagena closed its port before we got there. The rest of the world’s ports have pretty much followed suit. Any who disembarked from the Queen Victoria at Lauderdale were not allowed back on, and she took on no new passengers or crew.
Curaçao is cool. In fact, it’s about 10° cooler than it was an hour ago, thanks to a brief cloudburst. It’s the first real rain we’ve seen. These tropical downpours don’t last long, but they’re intense. And because I was under an open roof, they’re great fun to watch. There are a lot of open roofs in Willemstad; most taverns are open air. They have the bar stuck up against the back and then a ramada, or roof without walls, for all the tables and chairs. Everybody drinks their beer and wine al fresco.
It was an engineering miracle that cost twenty thousand lives to build. A boon to modern shipping, it was originally conceived to move large armies quickly. Today you can travel on a cruise ship from one ocean to the other, but it will cost your cruise line close to one million dollars every time it uses it.
Okay, so here’s this tourist boat—a simple barge with 20 or 30 seats in it, pushed by an outboard motor—and we’re cruising a quiet backwater of the Chagres River. I am sitting about in the very middle with a lady to my left and two people to my right. The name of our tour is Monkey Watch and there are the monkeys, a troop of white-faced marmosets on the shore.
For two days, hundreds of Andean Gulls (similar to North America’s black-headed gulls) have been perching shoulder to shoulder along our bow hawse lines. This evening at 5, we cast off the lines and a whole lot of disenfranchised gulls were seriously pissed. They swirled around in the area looking lost, wondering where their perch went.
We are again at sea on our way along the Peruvian coast to Callao. Peru’s coast range looms in the mist to starboard, and now and then you get a brief glimpse of the Andes beyond. Incidentally, we are far enough offshore that normal mountains and hills would be beyond the horizon. That’s how high these “foothills” are.
I got a humongous head cold. My sinuses weighed two pounds apiece. Unfortunate timing: the ship sent us all a rather alarming coronavirus letter about how, if you get any kind of upper respiratory symptom whatever, stay in your room and call the infirmary immediately. I’ve had dozens of these things.
The Sunday before last the chaplain at worship service suggested that if music indeed soothes the savage beast, mayhap singing loudly will improve the weather as we pass the southern tip of South America, notorious for its savage storms. By cracky, it worked. We had excellent weather throughout that portion of the cruise. Indeed, the weather the whole cruise has been marvelous.
I took my life in my hands today, and was fortunate to have emerged unscathed. From Punta Arenas, you can embark upon a tour to Magdalena Island, a penguin sanctuary and rookery. I almost didn’t go. The vessel was way too rickety for comfort. But the appeal of penguins is just too great to chicken out.
On Cape Horn stands a monument commemorating the many lives lost as sailing vessels from 1500 CE onward tried to thread their way around the end of the world. Rocks and shoals lurk just below the surface, and how do you know which channel will take you through all these islands if you’ve not been this way before? It is a bleak and barren maze.
