Everything Since Puerto Madryn

First of all, we know a fair amount of friends and family read this and Luke and I are getting upset with the lack of comments. Comment, people!

At our last post Luke and I had basically finished up our exploration of Puerto Madryn. The cruise has been a blur of laziness so let's see what I can recall over the last 5 days or so. We have been hanging out with Jamie, our friend from the hostel in Palermo and we also met a few Aussies that I think we mentioned earlier. They are all pretty fun but since they are all with their families, and Luke and I are bastard cruisers our schedules often conflict. We've met up in the Sports Bar a few times and hit up the hot tub. Anna, one of the Aussies, went up to the cruise director to try to organize a dinner for people 20-30 years old. The outcome was Luke, me, Mike and Anna the two Aussies, Jamie, and these two newlyweds who live in Berkeley. So it was kind of a bust because we already knew most people, but the newlyweds (Grant and Fang) are really cool so it was good. We had dinner then later that evening played King's Cup in the Sports Bar.

At some point, Sandy (Jamie's mom) signed Luke and I up for a murder mystery dinner, which ended up being pretty fun. The setup was 8 people per table, and we each chose a character. They gave us books with character descriptions, the murder story, a few clues, and a question to ask someone and a response to a question somebody asks us. There were four courses, and with each course there was a new clue, question and response. I was the murderer and knew it from the get go, so only I was allowed to lie. At our table was myself, Luke, Jamie, Sandy, and Sandy's friend Carol, then Sally and John in their 60s from Texas, and Garrett. Garrett is the biggest tool Luke and I have ever met. Hes 20 and from New Jersey, and very blue-blooded. Since his character was an ass just like him, Luke and I turned murder mystery into "make-Garrett's-character-look-like-the-murderer mystery" instead and by the end almost everyone thought it was him. Somehow we turned his entrepeneur character into a selfish, arrogant, gay, raging jealous and impotent oil tycoon. It was hilarious. I don't think he got what we were doing, and Jamie invited him to join us for beers later that night. We tried to play King's Cup with him, but instead he bragged about how he's going to Antarctica and how he has a suite with a jacuzzi, mostly all of this directed to Jamie. I think since Luke and Jamie and I have crude humor, he thought it was okay to just be an idiot. I'll omit some of the wierd things he said, but the night ended with Jamie telling him: "There is no chance ever of you and me hooking up, ever!" and ditching him at some other bar.

Since the last post, we have visited three more cities. The first was Stanley in the Falkland Islands. Stanley was very pretty and the cold weather was a nice change. We decided not to do any excursion and just walk around. Stanley is a British city that was the center of a war, because Argentina feels it belongs to them but the locals and England disagree, so it was neat going to a museum and seeing all the pictures and newspaper clippings during the British-Argentine war of '82. There were tons of sweet trucks on this island. Luke is probably going to post photos of that. Eventually we bumped into Anna and Mike, then went to a pub to drink some beer. Oddly, the bartender spoke like no English and just spanish, so we took a risk and ordered what looked like a local beer. Instead it was some crappy hard cider. Oh well. We were also dying on the boat to shore from the ship, because they were playing some very innapropriate music but nobody noticed because everyone is South America. I forget the name of the "artist", but the chorus goes "I wanna f*** you, f*** you..." and the driver was just blasting it. We found that very odd!

Luke and I finally got tired of hearing about everyone's sweet excursions in these cities, so we signed up for a hike in Ushuaia. Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world and is in Argentina. It looks a lot like Alaska, its very beautiful. We asked the excursion planners if it was a good hike and they said yes. Well, when we got on our bus there were about 15 people over 50 years old. Turns out for NCL, "hike" is more like a leisurely stroll where people ask questions every 3 minutes that causes the line to stop. At first we were annoyed, but eventually we went to a very beautiful area so it worked out well. We also played some dumb game because we were bored at first. There was this really loud woman from New York getting high off of birds, and she had her whipped husband by a leash, so Luke and I kept getting in between them just so see if he'd keep strolling and enjoy the hike. Instead, he would squeeze by every time and follow her. It was probably a mean thing, but c'mon. The boat left at 1:30, giving us not enough time to explore the city. I would seriously love to return and just hike around the terrain for weeks.


Today we are in Punta Arenas, our first city in Chile. Its very cool. It is the southernmost Chilean city, and we have plenty of time. To make a long story short, we negotiated a tour around the city from $10 per hour, and it was guided by a local girl Roxanna who was studying English at the University. The whole thing was a little sloppy, but it was nice to be guided by honest locals and not a strict cruise-organized tour. Now we are just relaxing on the internet in some cafe. On the ship, using the internet is about $45 per hour, and anywhere offshore its more like 1 or 2, so we save it all for when we are off the ship.