Hola America del Sur!

Garry and I have arrived without incident in Santiago, Chile. We've now been travelling by train and plane for almost 30 hours since leaving Interlaken yesterday morning. Our flight from Frankfurt was eventually delayed almost four hours. This meant that the scheduled transit stop in Madrid occurred at the unholy hour of 1am.

We also had some sort of medical emergency on board shortly before landing in Spain. As a result, we were asked to remain seated at the gate until a team of medics boarded and made its way down the aisle. Soon after we deplaned an ambulance pulled up to the rear exit making for some rather morbid entertainment in the middle of the night. This incident also delayed our departure until after 3.30am.

These cascading delays meant that we arrived in Santiago too late to make our connecting flight to Punta Arenas. Fortunately LAN Chile automatically rebooked us on a mid-afternoon departure which has left us killing time for a couple of hours at the airport. We're now in the lounge making the most of its free wi-fi access.

There's also a small silver lining to this latest delay. Our original flight to Punta Arenas included a transit stop, adding at least an hour to the journey south. Our new connection is a direct flight. We'll finally arrive at the southern tip of Chile around 7pm this evening. How remarkable. In less than 48 hours we'll have travelled from the heart of the Swiss Alps to a town located a few hundred kilometres from Cape Horn. Two hundred years ago the same journey would have taken four months or more.

We've been checking the forecast for Esperanza Research Base on the Antarctic peninsula, located roughly 150km from King George's Island. We board our cruise from this island following a 2.5 hour flight from Punta Arenas. It seems that our luck with the weather may be about to run out. The forecast for the next ten days at Esperanza consists largely of overcast skies, light snow or rain. Our cruise may be rather damp. However I'm holding on to the naive notion that the weather will be a little better a few hundred kilometres west of Esperanza.

• Posted by iPhone
• Location:Armando Cortinez,Santiago,Chile

UPDATE:

I've posted a few photos from Punta Arenas taken during our 36-hour stopover in Chile's southern-most city. We were surprised to discover just how large the city was despite its remote and foreboding location.  More than 155,000 people live in the city and its surrounding suburbs. We'd expected to encounter a small ramshackle town of 10-20,000.

We wandered through town checking out the local sights. This included an impressive statue of Ferdinand Magellan in the tree shrouded Plaza de Armas. The famous straits that bear his name are just a short walk away. While strolling along the waterfront Garry spotted a restaurant, Parrilla Los Ganaderos, grilling unbelievably tender Magellan Lamb on a charcoal spit. Naturally we stopped for lunch.

Our stopover in Punta Arenas wasn't without a few dramatic moments. Our luggage went missing between Santiago and Punta Arenas, no doubt caught up in transit delays we experienced while flying between Europe and South America. 

LAN Chile representatives at Punta Arenas airport gave us a number to call that was never answered and we began to despair that we'd have nothing to wear in Antarctica. However, the staff at Antarctica XXI, our cruise tour company, quickly came to the rescue. They had contacts at the airline who were able to track down and deliver our luggage less than ten hours before our flight to Antarctica departed. 

As the hours counted down, we were also reassured that if our luggage arrived too late, Antarctica XXI had backup plans in place to ensure we'd have suitable clothing for our cruise. This included a standing arrangement with a local retailer who was ready to open his doors at midnight if required. Thank goodness it never came to that.