Straits of Magellan

Well, we should be in the Straits of Magellan, but we were misled. One of the things I was really looking forward to was watching us sail through the straits. It made up for not actually going around the Horn. However, in the daily program, in small print, it shows that we will only reach the straits at 11:45 tonight, and will go though them over night, to reach Punta Arenas tomorrow morning.

Maybe that explains why it is still warm and sunny, and there is absolutely no sign of land in sight.

To make up for my disappointment I was pleased that we had another full day of interesting things going on on the ship.

The first lecture was by the very entertaining Richard Cowley on “Wild Horsemen of the Plains”, in which he discussed the history of gauchos in Uruguay. They seem like a wild bunch of rather unpleasant people quite honestly.

Jane Austen has always been my favourite author. I was completely obsessed with her when I was a teenager, reading all of her books back-to-back one school holiday. Our daughter’s name is Emma, but not after the Jane Austen heroine of the same name, who I actually thought to be rather unpleasant. However, Emma’s middle name is Elisabeth – possibly a subconscious nod to Elizabeth Bennett who I thought was absolutely splendid. Robert Powell gave an excellent talk on “Jane Austen, a life. A light hearted look at the authoress seen through her writing”. He did a good job of discussing her life story in relation to her writing, as well as reading some of her writings as a teenager, which were very amusing, and showed a very playful side to her.

The third talk was the one we had all been waiting for. Maureen Ryan spoke on “Queen Elizabeth 2 – the ship of the 60s”. She is always very polished, and makes me laugh, although I must admit I became quite teary eyed at times too. Her photos were interesting, but often of a very poor quality – Brian’s are better I think, but then I am biased. I do wish she had played a recording of her unique horn, that’s what I had for my phone’s ring tone, but alas I did the iPhone upgrade and now I can’t get it to work any more.

After all of that hard work listening it was time for lunch, and of course the pub is very convenient for the theatre, so we headed straight there.

I then went to listen to Hannah Kuipers who played her harp for the afternoon concert. I love listening to her, and she was excellent as always. Today she had a very interesting program which seemed to focus on woman composers, and flamenco harp music. A first for me.

Brian had not gone to the concert, so afterwards I joined him in the sun at the Lido pool. It was another warm sunny afternoon, and instead of reading my book the effect of my lunchtime cider kicked in and I fell asleep on the lounger.

We received a notice that due to the fact that we were going to leave Punta Arenas earlier than planned, we were to meet for my penguin tour at 6:50 AM instead of 8:30. These are not my holiday hours, but I would do almost anything to meet the penguins!

So after dinner we decided to miss the show so I could get an early night. We could see lights on both sides of the ship, so we must have been either in, or close to the Strait.