Arica, Chile

Good news, the engines are broken! I know I know, you’re thinking what’s so good about broken engines? The ship is still in working order, but we have to go into dry dock for repairs. We will be in dry dock for 5 days in San Francisco! And what work will I have to do while we are there? None, ha! Well, I’m sure I’ll do a little cleaning and organizing in the broadcast room, but for me it’s a paid vacation. To top it off, we aren’t taking on any guests before we sail to Hawaii. We will pick them up when we reach the islands. So the crew will have 4 days at sea with no guests. We will have the ship all to ourselves. There are going to be parties every night. The only down side is that we’ve cut one of our Hawaii cruises. So we’ll only have one week in Hawaii instead of two. But hey, it’s like a 9-day vacation for me. Yay!

So, now back to my tour of South America. I’m almost done. I’ve got Peru to go and that’s pretty much it for South America. Our last stop in Chile was in a town called Arica. It’s the armpit of South America, and I don’t mean that the town was bad. It was nice and quaint. I mean if you look at a map of South America and look on the Western side to where the land dips inward and then goes strait down, right at that joint is Arica. I went on an ancient ruins tour where we saw old Incan ruins and stopped in a small farming town where I took the pictures of the little girl and her lama and the two characters in a local bar. Then we went to the top of some mountains where a medicine woman did a blessing for the fertility of the earth and some dancers did a traditional Chilean dance, that’s what the feet in the sand are. Arica has a huge desert with a river that everyone lives and farms by. It was an interesting place. Next stop Peru.

Katie