Cruising Chilean Fjords and Amalia Glacier
I am Bruce Good, Seabourn’s director of public relations. I am cruising the Patagonian Passage East aboard Seabourn Sojourn, from Valparaiso, Chile to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and blogging as we proceed.
About mid-day Friday we re-entered the protected channels and fjords that provide a dramatic course southward along the Chilean coast. All afternoon we cruised between massive humps and walls of glacier- polished granite. The scale is beyond my photographic skills to capture, so I won’t bore you with the dozens of images I gathered hoping for the perfect one. The image below I hope conveys some of the Wagnerian character of the rocks—rippled and muscular, furred with scrubby vegetation wherever there are crevasses, and tinseled with lacy ribbons of cascades from the mists above. I had the album Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares on my iPod, and the majestic harmonies and wild, rustic timbre of the women’s voices made the perfect soundtrack for the passing splendor. Just at dinner-time, we cut back west toward the Pacific, and as we encountered the first vigorous swells of the open sea, we passed a huge flock of seabirds, albatrosses, fulmars and shearwaters, bobbing at rest in loose rafts on the rolling silver swells or wheeling effortlessly in lazy circles and figure-eights in the frigid, whistling wind, their wingtips just inches above the waves.
First thing on Saturday, I noticed that we were lying still in the water. I went to the veranda doorway and swept back the drape to a glowing blue expanse of glacier right outside. The clouds hovered over the tops of the peaks, and a shining river of ice curved down the valley toward the glacier face and the sea. The weather was perfect for glacier viewing, with low clouds masking the glare and bringing out the myriad blue colors. Amalia glacier is just one of the numerous ice-flows that make up Chile’s Los Glaciares National Park. Captain Elliott slowly turned Seabourn Sojourn in the ice-littered bay, and sent a team off to gather in a small berg to bring back aboard. Again I am suitably humble about my photography, but I hope the images convey even a hint of how magnificent the sight was. After a while, we left Amalia astern as we threaded our way back down the channels of the incredibly gorgeous and unspoiled Chilean Fjords. Tonight we turn eastward into the Strait of Magellan.
Along the Chilean Fjords
Amalia Glacier from my veranda
Amalia Glacier's "river of ice"
