I'm On A Boat!

When asked the question, “When do we need to be there?” the travel agent responded, “Now.”  That is how we started our adventure upon the Navimag.  We ordered the tickets online several weeks in advance.  The printed departure time on the tickets was 6am but in reality, as we found out, you need to check-in 12 hours in advance and sleep on the boat the night before departure.  After being informed of the correct check-in time we quickly ran to our hostel, pulled half-dry clothes off the line, packed our stuff, and ran for the terminal.  When we got there and finally made it through the long line and were able to talk to someone, we had had some time to think about the situation and I think our frustration was obvious.  They did upgrade us so we ended up getting a semi-private room with a window for half the price. 

The Navimag Ferry took us on a four day, three-night trip through the glacial fjords starting in Puerto Natales and ending in Puerto Montt.  Highlights included seeing dolphins breach the water, Bingo, having SNL’s “I’m On A Boat” stuck in our head for days, amazing views of mountains and glaciers meeting ocean, general relaxing and reading, and the food wasn’t bad either.  The lows would include running for check-in, Dan dropped and broke his point and shoot camera, possible bed bugs, horrible motions sickness and the coffee (Nescaf).

Tamara had an interesting side effect to the voyage. She had “landsickness” where she felt like the ground was moving.  We looked it up on the web and apparently this is a condition that some people don’t recover from for years. Luckily, after about four days of landsickness, it went away. Like most things in life, exercise fixed it. No more boats for Tamara.