I am Bruce Good, Seabourn’s director of public relations. I am currently sailing aboard Seabourn Sojourn on a Patagonian Passage East from Valparaiso, Chile to Buenos Aires, Argentina. It’s a region I’ve always wanted to visit, and I thought I’d blog from here to let you know what it’s like. Hope you enjoy it.

One of the nice things about this itinerary is its pacing, with relaxing days at sea interspersed between the compelling ports of call. I already wrote  about the scenic cruising in places such as the Chilean Fjords and the Beagle Channel. But sometimes a day at sea is…a day at sea. On those days, the ship’s staff takes extra care to schedule a lot of alternative activities for various interests. Everything from contract bridge to language and fitness classes, deck games, team trivia tournaments and much more is available throughout the day. On Seabourn, these are simply listed in the daily onboard Herald program, and guests are free to pick and choose among them and make their own way to the location at the scheduled time, without irritating PA announcements throughout the ship. On this cruise, executive chef Andrew Soddy has held two cooking demonstrations, both well attended and popular. Chef Soddy is British, with a slightly irreverent sense of humor that guests find very appealing. His first demo was a butter-poached Atlantic halibut dish garnished with clams and mussels in a casserole, followed by his award-winning lemon tart dessert that delivers lemon flavors in three or four different ways on the same plate. His second one, delivered today, concentrated on chocolate and dessert recipes, with special attention to the different ways of preparing and using caramel syrups. Recipes were handed out, as were scrumptious samples of the finished products in all cases.

One of Seabourn’s most popular day-at-sea activities is the Galley Market Buffet luncheon in The Restaurant. Guests enter to find a pair of magnificent dessert buffets center-stage in the beautiful dining room. At the back, twin buffet lines offer an impressive array of salads, cold cuts, seafood cocktails and breads and rolls. Then diners are invited “behind the swinging doors” into the galley proper, where stations have been set up serving roasted meats and fowl, fresh pastas, soups, colorful sushi and a variety of vegetables and side dishes. All told, the Galley Market is a tour de force of temptation guaranteed to please any palate.

Of course, Seabourn guests do not live by bread alone, and intellectual nutrition also finds its place during time at sea. On this cruise, we have heard from two of the top experts in their respective subjects. Dr. John Billingham is a luminary in the scientific pursuit of possible extraterrestrial life in the universe. His lectures unfailingly inspire deep thinking about how little we know and how much we wonder at our place in the grand pattern of spinning bodies in space. Anthony Maingot’s lectures on Latin America shed light on the roles, both obvious and obscure, of economic forces, military misadventures, pure happenstance and human foibles in the unfolding drama of geopolitics from century to century. On Saturday, November 19th, they participated in a fascinating roundtable discussion that had them fielding questions about their own and each other’s specialties from the audience.
As always, these and all activities on board are completely optional, and subject to the urge to simply curl up with good book, a movie on the interactive TV or just a well-deserved snooze after lunch.

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 19th, 2011 at 11:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.