Puerto Montt

You travel to the far end of the world and you end up in a boat on Loch Maree.



There´s two things I loathe about travelling; carrying heavy luggage for no good reason and boats.

The Navimag ferry from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt is the longest ferry journey in the world and a necessary one as the Southern Patagonian Icefield lies between the two towns, effectively cutting Chile in two, except by boat. On it´s way the ferry goes through the narrowest navigable channel in world shipping, across the Gulf of Distress, stops in at the only settlement, Port Eden, cutting through a maze of uninhabited fjordland (English Narrows, White Strait) past glaciers calving into the sea, shipwrecks and an active volcano or two. It takes three days. Sometimes fear and loathing have to be swallowed along with the sea sick pills.

To relieve the boredom and presumably to stop us all throwing ourselves into the sea, our entertainment officer, Marcel, was giving lectures, including one on glaciation. Yeah, like that´s gonna work.
"And now I´d like to move onto Glacial Deposition and the differences between fluvioglacial and glacial deposits."
"Man overboard!"
As a geography geek and teacher though, the whole ship is a moveable classroom (with a few non-geographical feasts thrown in) and it was illuminating for me to be listening to the lecture in Spanish on Ice Ages and Global Warming and find myself thinking "I don´t know what he´s on about ... but nice pictures."

We were very lucky to have two very calm and clear days lounging, playing bingo, reading Agatha Christie and staring as Wester Ross floated past. It was incredible how Scottish it looked at times. Well, apart from the ice-clad volcanoes.