The Navimag Boat Trip

The Navimag
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This blog is a bit longer than we like to write, but it is at least pretty amusing, so if you have some time it is hopefully a good read.

Instead of taking a thirty hour bus ride up the infamous Ruta 40 through Patagonia, we decide that a four day ferry ride from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt, Chile, would be a once in a lifetime experience...We now hope that it was.

We had been told that the ferry trip would ultimately be determined by weather, so we were obviously optimistic that we would have the picture perfect weather that is advertised on the brochures.  We did not.  The first three days on the boat were met with driving rain, 50mph winds, and dense fog.  On any standard cruise ship this would have been easily combated with drinking, watching movies, and maybe gambling.  On a South America transport ferry, however, this meant that we were forced to sit in the mess hall that was build to hold 3/4 of the ships total capacity. We sat in the mess hall for 15 hours a day playing cards and eagerly anticipating the next meal that would break the stagnation of playing a thousand hands of the same card game.  Thankfully, for the first two and a half days we were in inside passages that kept calm regardless of the harsh weather.

Happily Getting On..Unaware of What's to Come
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We were not so lucky on the afternoon of the third day when we finally entered open water.  The winds were creating such big swells that after only two hours of trying to cross a gulf the ship's captain decided to head inland and park for the evening in some protected cove.  We woke up on the fourth day feeling like we were levitating in bed.  Trying to avoid sea sickness we quickly took some Dramamine and headed to the bridge to see what we were up against.  The 60 mph winds were creating 30 foot swells that was throwing the boat all over the place.  Because we needed to get to Puerto Montt the captain pushed on for 12 long hours through the relentless weather.  About half of the people were above deck either puking off the edge or taking video of the bow diving underneath enormous waves (including our captain, who was also filming the event...bad news).  The other half of the people were below deck puking in the common bathrooms, which because of the high water had overflowed from the sewage storage tank and was releasing a smell that was so vile, so disgusting, that a mere whiff made you want to puke even if you weren't sea sick.

The Navimag 2
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One of our poor roommates, a nice lady traveling with her husband, had gotten on the ship battling food poisoning that see contracted the night before.  Just as she started to get over the food poisoning we entered the open sea and she came down with terrible sea sickness...we actually never really saw her outside of her bunk.

Puerto Montt, which is just an armpit of a city, had never looked better to anyone in there lives as it did to the 150 people disembarking from the Navimag ship.  Giver our experiences on boats thus far on the trip we think that this will likely be our last voyage. We are definitely not boat people!

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We are off to Peru in a couple of days where we hope to provide everyone with some funny, at least for you, stories.

Adios!