Puerto Montt, Chile

            Wednesday, 19 Feb 2020 – We anchored at Puerto Montt at 8:00 AM.  Puerto Montt is a port city in southern Chile with a population of about 246,000, located 656 miles to the south of the Santiago.  Founded in about 1853 during the German colonization of southern Chile, Puerto Montt soon outgrew older neighboring cities due to its strategic position.  The city has recovered from the terrible 1960 Valdivia earthquake, which destroyed much of Puerto Montt and collapsed the port and the train station along with many building and houses.  Puerto Montt has gained renown and grown significantly due to the rise of Chile as the second largest salmon producer of the world during the 1990s and 2000s.  However, the Chilean salmon aquaculture crisis of the late 2000s resulted at least temporarily in severe unemployment and exposed weaknesses in the local economy.

Port Entrance

As usual, we barely made it to breakfast.  Once there, we talked a little with Sandy & Cyril, who had visited this port previously and were not planning to go ashore this time.  On the other hand, at 10:30 AM, Jesse got in the line to board a tender on the port (left) side of the ship; however, the water was so rough that boarding was changed to the starboard (right) side.  Since the downtown shopping area was a 40-minute walk from the port, Jesse had planned to only take a few pictures on the pier and return to the ship; but on the tender, he sat next to a couple that told him a group of shopping booths was only a 5-minute walk from the port in the opposite direction of the downtown.  Jesse decided to visit the shopping booths, but the walk was more like 10 minutes for him.  Although he saw a lot of interesting merchandise, he didn’t purchase anything and was back in the stateroom by 11:40 AM.

When we went to the café about 1:30 PM, very few passengers were there.  One of the staff told us that the majority of the passengers were still on excursions.  The Terrace Café would be staying open past their usual 2:00 PM closing time to accommodate returning passengers.

At dinner, we sat with Julie & Canute and had interesting conversations.  It turns out that Canute is a huge science fiction fan.  After dinner, we returned to our stateroom to await the start of the Presidential debate.  Since we were two hours ahead of EST, the debate didn’t start broadcasting on the ship until 11:00 PM.  We watched the debate as the candidates attacked one another, mostly Mayor Bloomberg.  Sally fell asleep at about 2:00 AM and Jesse finally turned off the TV at about 2:30 AM.