The Cruise Vacation that Wasn’t

Santiago, Chile

For months we have been planning a “bucket list” cruise vacation around South America and through the Panama Canal.  We were scheduled to leave for Santiago, Chile on March 11^th.  Since January we have been closely following the political situation in Chile, as well as the coronavirus news. 

As the date approached we were glad to hear that the countries we were visiting in South America had few or no cases of the COVID-19.  We had assurances from Norwegian cruise lines that everything was still set for sailing on March 14^th and the health reports were good. We decided to keep our plans and left for our trip.

As we flew out of Boston the couple next to me was checking their email. They found out before we landed in Miami that their trip to Argentina was cancelled because Argentina had closed their borders. This made me a little nervous, but we continued to Santiago.  Now, remember that last week there were few cases in Chile.  When we landed we were met with teams of people dressed in uniforms and scrubs with respirator masks who had us fill out affidavits about our health and travel history. We had to sign the health forms, which were stamped and examined by other teams of health workers. We had our temperatures taken by laser at least twice as we walked through customs. There were gallon sized jugs of hand sanitizer everywhere.  We hadn’t seen any hand sanitizer at the airports in Boston or Miami.

Life goes on in downtown Santiago

Palacio de las Monedas, seat of the Chilean government

Cable cars in the Parque Metropolitano hills

View from our hotel room. The cable cars
are in the hill right behind the pool.

We had a wonderful time in Santiago.  However, we saw disturbing reports from home about colleges cancelling classes, CDC reports, flights being cancelled.  In Santiago people were enjoying life, without panicking about toilet paper. It was quite refreshing to be away from the craziness.  It was autumn down there, with nice weather and friendly people.  We toured the city of Santiago on Thursday, and Valparaiso on Friday with a tour guide in his own car from Chile Private Tours.  Julio was a terrific guide, and very friendly.  He even offered to drive us to the airport when we found out our vacation had been cut short.  The views of the Andes mountains east of the city were breathtaking.

Valparaiso is the first port after ships round the horn from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. It is known for steep hills reached by funiculars
and the houses are decorated with street art by the local people.

This funicular was built in 1902

After Valparaiso we stopped at an organic winery.  We visited the fields, saw llamas and had a wonderful time in the outskirts of the wine growing region.

Emiliana Winery

Upon returning to the hotel in Santiago on Friday we read our email and saw a message about a flight on Delta airlines returning us to Atlanta on Saturday.  This was a surprise.  Right underneath was a message about the cruise being cancelled.  We tried to confirm our flight to Atlanta, but after two hours on the cellphone (at our expense) we learned that this flight had been changed, and to wait for another email.  Before we went to dinner we had confirmed a new flight to Toronto on Air Canada! 

Pueblo de los Dominicos is full of workshops for potters, woodworkers,
leather workers, jewelers, weavers and other artisans. It has over 200 stalls.
It was a former mission or convent.

The next morning we visited the Pueblo de los Dominicos and did some crafts shopping before flying home via Toronto. We had that one last time to say good-bye to Julio, our tour guide.  It was a sad, long flight to Canada (almost eleven hours on the plane).  In Toronto and in Boston we had absolutely no health screening, questions about travel history, no bottles of hand sanitizer available to the public. We just walked off the plane and into public life. With all the hysteria, why weren’t these two first world countries up to par with Chile on health screening? No wonder Chile has so few cases!

We are home safe.  We will voluntarily “social distance” ourselves for two weeks just in case we picked up a virus somewhere in our travels this week.  We had quite an adventure but never checked off some of our bucket list items.  Hopefully we can reschedule our vacation in the future. 

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To Cite/Link to this post: Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "The Cruise Vacation that Wasn’t", Nutfield Genealogy, posted March 16, 2020, ( https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-cruise-vacation-that-wasnt.html: accessed [access date]).