Navimag & fjords of Chile

Ok, so now it's time to tell you a bit about our Navimag voyage...

We boarded on Thursday night, although we didn't set sail until the early hours of Friday morning. We were really lucky in that we'd paid for a shared cabin but ended up having a 4 bed one to ourselves because the boat wasn't full. Good thing really as sharing a very small space with 2 strangers could have been a bit of a challenge!

After our initial safety briefing we saw the film Motorcycle Diaries, which follows Che Guevara's travels through South America as a young man. It was a really good film, and especially interesting for us as we had visited some of the places it included. I have to say that it did make us long to head back to Peru, amongst other things. It also hit home just how far we had travelled, and all in all was a great way to spend a slightly odd evening in port.

At our briefing, we had been told by the very helpful guides that they would let us know what was going on and when was a good time to head to the outside decks - and they weren't making it up! At shortly before 7am on Friday morning we had the first of the soon to be infamous "Señor Pasajeros/ Dear Passengers" announcements to let us know that we were passing through the narrowest part of the journey. We dutifully got up, wrapped up warm and headed out onto the deck. It was an attractive area, but after a few minutes we were glad to retreat back to the warmth of our cabin!

The first full day established the pattern of 8am breakfast, 12.30 lunch and 7.30 dinner - the food was definitely more than enough fuel for our much less than normal activity levels, although not great variety wise. Unfortunately the weather wasn't brilliant either - and remained as such throughout - so we spent a large amount of time indoors. That said, as you can see in the pictures, some of the scenery was pretty spectacular and it wasn't all grey skies. Even when it was bad, we could see lots of snow tipped mountains rising up from the dark waters.

One particular highlight, on day 2, was the Amalia glacier. As this single photo shows (I hope) the view made facing the cold and wind worth it!

We were also lucky to meet a great bunch of fellow travellers on board, and we spent a great deal of time sorting the world out, and generally just relaxing...need I mention the wine?! The photo below shows some of the generally very far from stressed group in a pretty typical "relaxing in the bar" formation!


However, as I have already mentioned, the sad turn of events on Sunday evening really impacted on the trip as our ship headed back to help out in the rescue. I should add that the scheduled bingo took place shortly after our abrupt reverse of direction - at best surreal. It was also bizarre to say the least to be out at sea late at night surrounded by several other vessels all searching for survivors, as flares were thrown out to illuminate the sea.

Although the word fjords creates an impression of calm waters, we did spend time in open sea and the storms were quite intense, so it wasn't too surprising to us that a smaller boat just couldn't cope with it. Some of those helping out in the rescue attempts really shouldn't have been out there in a thunderstorm either! It was an odd situation in which to find ourselves, and needless to say the sight of of the wreck floating alongside us as we had breakfast on Monday morning was upsetting. On the positive side, the crew of our ship handled the situation really well and we didn't feel unsafe ourselves despite some of our fellow passengers suffering heavy doses of seasickness.

To conclude I'd say that the whole experience was another memorable one, but not always for the best reasons and it certainly wasn't as we had expected it to be (no wildlife - maybe we've already seen too much?). Much of the problem was the weather but despite this, the extent of the many islands dotted along Chile's coastline was definitely worth seeing. As for the ferry experience? One of our fellow travellers did comment that they now understand what it must be like to be stuck in the Big Brother house, which just about sums it up!

And finally, a few words of advice from Andrew for anyone who may want to do the trip:
For those who may be reading this to figure out, are you going to do this boat trip through the fjords I have this advice. The trip was enjoyable, we did see some beautiful things, but for the price I would recommend investigating other means.. If however price isn't your driving force and you do want to go for this trip, bring along plenty of entertainment (books, cards & travel stories), just in case the weather is bad (which happens more often in summer).