On the straight and narrow Part 2

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On the Viking trail part 1

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On the Viking Trail

 Off to see our Vikings….

On Labor Day we awoke early and drove to Manhattan to board the Viking Star for our next adventure. After a momentary crises of a misplaced passport we boarded and settled into our Cabin.

The Manhattan Cruise terminal was an interesting reminder of lifer before the jet age when most all transatlantic traffics was by sea.   We wonder what the passengers. The Queen Mary would have thought of the current skylines . 

It is hard to pass the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island without thinking of our grandparents and great parents who passed through all those years ago and trying to imagine what must have been going through their minds. And I am still inspired by the words of E https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emma-Lazarus#ref137327 Emma Lazerus   inscribed on the base: 

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Which brings me to an eye opening read which I just completed 

Home again with a reprise

 It was great to get home again - although the fact that it was 20 degrees colder here than the daytime temperature we had in Antartica did grate a  bit. 

One of the techies on the ship put together a video sharing some of the highlights of our trip.  Chocolate treats for whomever finds the most Zalman sightings.  It's about 4 minutes and opens in another window.

Farewell Video

Thanks for following our adventure.

And then Satiago and home.

    

    

    

And Melanie rides off into the sunset:

oh, yeah... We never did see a sunset 

 

Tories del Paine National Park

 

We used the Singular Patagonia as our launching point into the 

       Torres del Paine National Park

 

For two days our senses were overloaded. 

It was windy.  

  

 

There were cyclists as well as bikers sharing the road and at one point we literally saw the wind blow a guy off his bike.  Apparently it wasn't the first time for him - he just got us, smiled and gave us a thumbs up.

And we remained in awe

                    

                             

Sleeping in a cold storage plant.

 

We had been warned to expect possible delays at the Chilean border and we were not disappointed.  First off we "lost" a wonderful Australian couple that we had befriended.  In their 80's these were people that had worked and traveled around the world.  As Austalians they needed a Visa to enter Chile.  When the tour leader had reminded all the Australians on the tour the night before to confirm they had print outs of their visas everyone had acknowledged they did.  However at the border it appeared that this couple had the receipt for the visa but not the actual visa (which was to have been delivered to them by email a month earlier). Try as they might, the document could not be found.  So it was settled that they would wait at the border as the bus proceeded to deliver us to the hotel - 30 K down the road and then return for them to take them back to Argentina.

Fine, settled, - oh but wait! We were told that you can't proceed without an Chilean guide.  "Of course, we're picking up the guide when we start the Chilean part of the journey tomorrow morning.  We're just going to the Hotel."  We no, you can't cross the border without a Chilean guide. "But all those other buses went through without a problem!"  Irrelevant.  You can't cross.

So we sat for a half hour while a guide was rounded up, drove to the border, got in the bus, drove us 30 feet over the border, left the bus and returned home.  We then proceed to the hotel.

Once we had managed to pass the border we skipped any opportunity to get coffee and kept going to minimize the wait time for the Australians. The tour Leader began to speak about the rest of the day and happened to mention that we would be staying in a hotel that used to be a meatpacking plant built ~1907.  It was active as a slaughterhouse and cold storage facility until 1973 when the land taken back by the government. It then sat  empty for decades until some enterprising outfit decided to turn it into a hotel/museum: The Singular Pantagonia

As you can see, the whole facility was built on a hill, meaning that all processes started at the top of the hill, and moved down till the end in the storage units, which are just off the lake.  this minimized the amount of hauling and allowed them to use clever Elevators and conveyors. 

In this shot, you see the generators and the compressors. When they first started, they used wood to  generate steam. Then they moved to coal, and then finally to natural gas.  It was additive - they just kept installing stuff next to the old stuff. Besides generating electricity for the facility, they also used the steam it to power the compressors which compressed ammonia to cool the freezing and storage units

If you expand this next picture, you’ll see a train engine, which was used to transport product around the facility.

The facility was built so the livestock could arrive be processed packaged frozen and stored until ships came up the fjord to pick up the products and ship it out.  They processed the hides, pelts, etc.  The Cold storage was put towards the lake.  Currently, the bedrooms are the cold storage rooms.  They preserved the machine shop, the generators, the forge, the Tannery and many other areas as museum areas but then also repurposed some for current use.

Here, the forge was repurposed as a bar for during the high season  

This is the view out our window. You can see the dock going out into the lake. And you can also see where the railroad tracks were running left to right before you get to the dock.

This is what a repurposed meat storage unit looks like. 

And we loved how they repurposed materials. Here is a novel use for old radiators.

Gobsmacked!

 We joked about thinking that Patagonia was just a store, and we’re vaguely aware of its existence as real estate. But we had no idea just how incredible this part of the world is. While on this trip we tried to write a little bit every day. But once we got here I believe we began to suffer from visual overload.  Here is a better shot of that Puma:

And then there were the Glacial lakes

And of course the “steps”

No matter where we looked there was more to see then we could absorb. As we approached the Chilean border we saw gouchos and the dogs in action   

Followed by emptiness 

Not that you can call this empty.