On the morning of January 21st, we got a four-mile cardio walk in following the same route through various parks and then grabbed our belongings at the hotel to get a local bus from the area near the hotel to the cruise terminal in Buenos Aires. We arrived at the terminal around 11:30am and it was complete chaos. My understanding is that the port is not the smoothest when even just one ship is in port, but today there were three full-size ships and the infrastructure is just not built for that. We finally boarded the Sapphire Princess at 3:15pm. My bag is a little heavier than Sandy’s and somehow she keeps managing to pick mine up – especially when we are navigating stairs. I assure you it is not intentional on my part, but it does make me laugh. We needed a snack so we went to the Trident Grill onboard and had chicken tacos, then we unpacked and got settled into our stateroom – we had an inside cabin. The last few cruises we have done, we’ve found ourselves preferring the inside cabins not only because they tend to be a ton cheaper, but we like how dark the room gets for sleeping.
We were excited for dinner tonight because, by coincidence, Brian and Carrie got off the Sapphire Princess this afternoon and the scheduling worked that we were able to meet them for dinner in Buenos Aires because we don’t depart until tomorrow. Brian and Carrie are sort of our travel mentors – when we decided to tackle this chapter of our lives, we found their YouTube channel (Brian and Carrie) and started watching everything we could to help with our logistics. They do a great job on their channel and we would encourage others to check them out. We feel like we know them from watching all of their videos. It was awesome to meet them in person (and they are just like the videos!). We took the local bus to Baum Catrina to trade stories over beers and a delicious Mexican dinner. After around three hours together, we bused back to the port and called it a day.
The next 16 days were on the Sapphire Princess and it is easily one of the best cruises we have ever taken. I’ll cover highlights here, but before going too far into detail, if you’ve ever had even a passing interest in getting down to Antarctica, I can’t emphasize enough how amazing this particular cruise was. The Sapphire Princess is a great ship to travel on, but I think the biggest asset was the captain – Todd McBain. He has been completing Antarctic voyages for more than 20 years and he is the best captain we have ever had, and many passengers (far more experienced than we are) made the same comments. If you can make it happen and get on a cruise he is leading, you will not be disappointed. This is a far more economical way to visit Antarctica than the expedition ships – I know they are also incredible but talking with people on this cruise who have done both types of trips, this was definitely the right way for us to make the trip. I’ll get to the Antarctica specifics later in this journal entry.
This particular cruise left Buenos Aires at the end of the second day onboard, spent three days at sea, traveled the Magellan Strait, spent one day in Punta Arenas (Chile), traveled the Beagle Channel at sunrise where we saw a series of beautiful glaciers,
spent one day in Ushuaia (Argentina), spent a day and a half crossing the Drake Passage to the south and a day and a half crossing back to the north, spent four days scenic cruising around the Antarctic Peninsula, spent one day in Stanley (Falkland Islands), spent two more days at sea, and spent one day in Montevideo (Uruguay).
From a port standpoint, Punta Arenas and Ushuaia were okay. We think we will be back to both of those in the coming weeks so we didn’t do too much. We loved Montevideo – it’s a town of more than a million people but was very quiet. We did the hop-on hop-off bus tour and got to see some really great areas that we would love to stay in whenever we came back and do Montevideo and Uruguay properly.
Stanley was a tough day, mainly because the weather was very windy – gale force winds slowed the process down of getting from the ship to the dock (we had to use water shuttles) and so we didn’t have as much time to do the things we wanted to do in Stanley. We did get out to the beach and saw one King Penguin taking a nap.
We walked around Stanley until the rain came down hard. It’s also very difficult to find wi-fi in the Falkland Islands (one business owner said he pays $300 per month for just internet services), which meant that we couldn’t get done some of the things we had planned to do once we had wifi again. We didn’t pay for wifi onboard the ship – it just wasn’t worth the cost.
The shows on the ship were good. Overall, not the best entertainment ever on cruise ships we have been on – I think Royal Caribbean owns that one. But there were some exceptional performances – Salvatore Hansard was our favorite. Brilliant performer. Carlos Nebot was also great. Jez Danion did some balancing tricks (think circus-like performances) that were insane if we had been on dry land and the fact he was doing them on a ship going through some pretty rough waters was mind-blowing. Since we couldn’t watch our normal evening TV shows (we have been watching Cheers lately), we spent most evenings before sleep watching the reality series called The Real Love Boat, which was a dating show a couple of years ago on a different Princess cruise ship. It was fun to watch especially while we were on a Princess cruise (which the original Love Boat series was filmed on).
The food onboard was very good. We could always find what we wanted. For dinners, we did a mix between the buffet and the dining room where we got to know Michael, Emmanuel, and Ronald pretty well through our nights in the dining room.
The ice cream was really good. I never found out if they make their own or if it is a certain brand. Overall, the service and the entire cruise staff did a super job. The fitness center was pretty well-equipped for the number of passengers. There were times when it was quite busy, but usually it was not a problem to use the equipment we wanted to use at any given time. The Promenade Deck offers a chance to get good walks in – although sometimes it is incredibly windy (over 50 miles per hour at times). Three laps around made for a mile so we did our workouts outside sometimes.
As far as crossing the Drake Passage, both times we got the Drake Lake (instead of the Drake Shake). Headed south, it was a little choppier but nowhere near what it can be. We were grateful for that. As a matter of fact, the worst time was shortly after leaving the Falkland Islands – we went through a good size storm with heavy rain. That was the roughest water we had and Sandy felt a little nauseous. She was fine when she would lay in bed with her eyes closed and not move. All in all, the waters cooperated.
Now getting to Antarctica. People kept talking about how amazing it would be and so you would start to get a little worried that it was being over-hyped. Well, that is not the case. The scenery is beyond compare. Alaska might have some similarities, but the icebergs, the mountains, the amount of snow, the glaciers, the penguins, the whales, the seals – it’s all on a much different scale than what we experienced in Alaska. For four days, we cruised around seeing different areas of the peninsula. We saw research stations, fjords; the captain took the ship places he had never gone before (and where no ships of this size have ever traversed) – it is all dictated by the status of the ice coverage in the sea. This cruise had five Antarctica experts onboard with different specialties – birds, fauna, history, geology, and geography – and a captain who was always willing to try something new while never compromising safety. Another highlight of our days in Antarctica was when the six staff members from Port Lockroy (a UK research station) joined us onboard and talked about their six months living at the base and answered questions from guests. They have no running water on their base, so it is a pleasure for them when a ship comes by and they can come on board for a warm shower and hot food – especially taking pizza back to the base with them. Weatherwise – yes, it is cold but we were just about ok with our normal traveling wardrobe. The temperature was always between 30 and 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Sometimes we could only stay out for a few minutes if the winds were particularly high, but without the wind, we’d usually be ok for up to an hour outside before going in for a bit to warm up.
Here is a sampling of the many pictures we took during our time down south. We saw countless icebergs. The picture with the iceberg behind the deck gives some sense of size. The picture is from deck 15, which is around 100 feet above the water level – the iceberg is taller than deck 15, which means that what you can see above the water line is only one-eighth the total height of the iceberg – meaning another 700-plus feet are below the water level in this case.
We saw tens of thousands of penguins – here are a few on an iceberg. I’d guess we maybe saw 20-30 humpback whales, usually seeing their backs and then their tails as they went for a dive.
It’s not easy to see, but in this picture is one of the only man-made structures on the peninsula (other than research stations) – it is the bust of Captain Pardo, who rescued Shackleton’s crew after they spent the winter of 1915 trapped at this spot. If you look close, you can see a fur seal relaxing at the base of the monument and then of course, tons of penguins.
This map was provided to us after leaving Antarctica to show where we spent our time.
We met some great people during the cruise. Several from Australia and also a couple from Stuart, Florida. They were traveling with a group of friends. Marie and Bill live in Stuart and Bill is a 101-year-old World War II veteran. He has such life inside him still. He was front row at every show and sometimes would dance along with the performers. It was an honor to meet them and hopefully we’ll cross paths again. They’ve already booked the same cruise again for next season. I think it will be their fifth time down to Antarctica – a couple of times on a cruise ship like this one and a couple of times on the expedition-type cruise.
The ship arrived back into Buenos Aires this morning around 7am and we were off the ship around 10am. We walked a few minutes to the bus stop and took the bus to the Jorge Newberry airport. Check-in went fine and then we checked on our refund from Flybondi because they had changed our flight to one we could not take – no problem to get the refund. We relaxed and got some work done in the airport lounge until boarding our flight. The flight left Buenos Aires at 4:30pm and arrived into Puerto Iguazu a little after 6pm. We collected our bags and took a shuttle to our hotel – the Merit Iguazu Hotel. For dinner, we walked 12 minutes to Holy Beer where I had a burger and fries, Sandy had grilled chicken, and we shared 6 tiny beer tasters which led to pints of their honey beer. The cruise was absolutely amazing and it’s nice to now be moving to our next spot – checking out Iguazu Falls tomorrow.
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