Day 494 Navimag to Puerto Natales - Day 3
Denizens of Navimag
More about the fascinating denizens of Navimag’s Esperanza. They come from all walks. They are truckers moving cargo; couples – younger and older, pre-marriage or empty-nesters; single wanderers, even a few toddlers; travelers from Switzerland, Chile, Germany, Argentina, Canada, the US, France and the Netherlands. They have traveled on vacation, or on week and months long excursions, some with plenty of money, others pinching their pesos. But everyone enjoys the astonishing world we all are witnessing, and as the hours pass strangers become friends.
In the South Pacific
Edging south to Puerto Natales, Earth slowly twisted away from the Austral sun and put on a show. Great scarves of slate gray clouds rode slowly across the sky. Below in the dying sun, silver pearls of light rippled on the water. Nearby mists had set in and enshrouded a bank of mountains, threatening to swallow them like a strange animal. The land along the channel with its endless mountains and valleys went on forever and lay far off, the serrated edges of great upturned knives. I have never seen any part of the world that looked like this. The water, the land, the sky all around, as majestic as anything earthly could be. I struggled to hold it in my mind. I did not want to let the feeling go, though I knew it would and I knew my words could never do it all the remotest justice; no photograph or memory could possibly keep a grip on it. I realized in one stroke how happy I was to witness this, and how sad to know it would pass.
Sailing on Navimag’s Esperanza, a 4-day and 3-night navigation across some of the most pristine channels in the Chilean fjords.