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Sailing among the Chilean fjords
GATEWAY TO PATAGONIA's FJORDS. At dawn a 12-storey ocean liner glides into the network of natural, giant waterways on Chile's extreme southern coast. As the ship heads eastwards towards the glaciers and miniature icebergs, the ship seems to shrink in size and arrogance, with cliffs and snowcapped mountains towering above it, and its throbbing engines reduced to a cautious tremble. Then, as it comes to the head of a landlocked fjord, it is greeted by the cold silence of rock and ice.
Words can describe neither the atmosphere nor the ambience of this raw, desolate, beautiful place. Nor can pictures. . . certainly those shown here, which failed to capture the senses of rugged power, majesty and peace of the empty fjords.
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A waterfall, thousands of feet high. It pours into the fjord from a glacier that caps a vast area of the Andian plateau in Patagonia. At this distance there is only silence.
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Dawn breaks on the icefields and mountains, where there is no measure of scale except the sound of water falling and ice-cliffs cracking. |
After crossing the Andes in buses and small boats, we set off blithely for the fjords of Patagonia, and the anticipated drama of Cape Horn.
To go South we had to fly North, from the middle of Chile, back to the port of Valparaiso where our ship was waiting. We flew up the coast to Santiago, with the Pacific on our left and the Andes rising as if to reach our wing tip on the right.
Then we sailed from nearby Valparaiso, heading South again, bound for the fjords.
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Their setting is worth days of dawdling. Despite alarming change caused by global warming, the spectacular fjords are still choked with glaciers and silent grey-green ice. We saw the sun at dawn turn lurking snow-mountains from silver to pink to momentarily golden pinnacles. |
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Then Fur Seals seemed to wave to us lazily as they 'sunbathed', each on its own private ice-floe, far below a wall of grey, cracked ice that lies like a concrete cap thousands of feet high behind them on the mountains.
But The ice-cap at the head of one fjord feeds three waterfalls that sparkle down
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jagged ravines into the half-frozen seawater. The ship nudges its way towards the greatest waterfall at the far end, where mountains block our path.
The only measure of the scale of this empty, silent world has to be sound. The roaring waterfall that seems to fill our views so far away it can hardly be heard. |
The wall of ice that seems close enough to touch is resting on a ledge as high as Table Mountain.It is difficult to appreciate the scale of the landscape, but easy to get used to such grandeur.
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A passing ship (foreground, right) reminds you how large are these fjords; how high their snow-capped borders.
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