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After sailing from Chile around South America for two weeks, we reached our final destination in Buenos Aires, Argentina where we disembarked the Radiance of the Seas and headed to the trendy Design Hotel in the Centro district. We had decided to meet up with some friends (Brian and Judy) in Buenos Aires and stay for three days in order to have enough time to see most of the city’s attractions and attend a tango show.

Located on the southern banks of the Rio de la Plata, the Ciudad de Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre was founded in 1536 by Spanish explorer Pedro de Mendoza, and eventually expanded through waves of immigration from the Mediterranean-based countries of Europe. As a result, Buenos Aires was built with European-style grand plazas, broad boulevards and beautiful buildings, which is why the city is often called “the Paris of South America.”

While Buenos Aires is a huge city filled with 13 million residents called “portenos” (people of the port), the main tourist areas are concentrated near the waterfront in seven compact barrios – the Centro, Monserrat, La Boca, San Telmo, Recoleta, Palermo and Puerto Madero. We chose to start our tour in the nearby historic Plaza de Mayo in Monserrat, a pretty park created in 1580 that houses the Piramide de Mayo and is surrounded by several grand buildings including the 19^th-century Casa Rosada (Pink House), the 18^th-century Metropolitan Cathedral and the colonial-era Cabildo (town hall).

The site of the Casa Rosada was originally a fortress, and later evolved into the Presidential Palace for Argentine leaders including Juan Peron. In 1951, Eva Peron appeared on the palace’s left balcony to tell adoring crowds in the Plaza de Mayo below that she was withdrawing her candidacy for vice-president (she was ill and died of cancer the next year). Madonna used the same balcony in the movie “Evita” when she sang the film’s theme song “Don’t Cry for me Argentina.” Our tour guide Sebastian told us that while the inside of the main Palace is usually closed to the public, it was now open for a special exhibit (a small museum in the back of the palace is open from 2 to 6 on Mondays to Fridays). This meant we got a rare glimpse of its beautiful courtyard and interiors, which include a stained glass skylight, busts of each President and an opulent wood paneled and red velvet elevator.  

Our next stop was the Caminito pedestrian walkway in the Bohemian neighbourhood of La Boca, which is surrounded by colourful houses, pretty cafes, and street vendors selling their handmade crafts. The street is lined with sculptures, murals, engravings and tango dancers who perform and pose for pictures with tourists for a few pesos (as our friend Brian and I were walking by one of the tango dancers, she grabbed us for a couple of impromptu tangos on the street corner!).

The working class people of this neighbourhood are passionate about their local soccer team, the Boca Juniors, and a number of store fronts are proudly painted in the team’s blue and gold colours. The team’s stadium is just a few blocks away, and during game days La Boca turns into a giant block party with fans tooting car horns, waving flags and dancing in the streets. However, while La Boca is a fun place to be during the day, the neighbourhood is still a bit rough around the edges and is not a safe place to roam after dark.

After a day of touring, we decided it was time to watch one of Buenos Aires’ famous tango shows, so we booked a table at the ritzy Faena Hotel in Puerto Madero for its evening show called “Rojo Tango.” The sensual and steamy tango is a uniquely “porteno” dance that many believe was invented in the brothels of the city’s poorer barrios like La Boca to keep customers happy while they awaited their turn with a “lady of the night”. Today the dance is synonymous with Buenos Aires, and the city is filled with tango schools and dance halls like the Academia del Tango and Confiteria La Ideal which keep the tango legacy alive.

Our show in the intimate Cabaret room of the Faena Hotel was a spectacular blend of traditional tango dancing with “nuevo tango” from the repertoire of the late Argentine bandoneon (small hand-held accordion) player Astor Piazzolla, who incorporated elements of jazz and classical music into his compositions. The show was preceded by a marvelous dinner of Argentine beef and copious amounts of delicious red wine from the nearby Mendoza region.     

The next morning we took a taxi to the barrio of San Telmo, which is the city’s oldest neighbourhood dating back to the arrival of Pedro de Mendoza. The barrio originally housed the city’s wealthiest residents, but when yellow fever struck in 1870 the elite moved further north and their elegant homes were converted to tenements called “conventillos” to house poor immigrants arriving from Europe.  

Today, San Telmo is filled with colonial-style buildings, tango salons, street performers and on weekends, one of the best open-air antique markets in the country. We began our stroll through San Telmo at the Plaza Dorrego, which is the oldest square in the city and home to dozens of vendors selling antiques, curios and handmade crafts. From the Plaza, we walked north along Defensa Street stopping to watch various street performers including a puppeteer and a full orchestra of young people called Ciudad Baigon playing tango music. By now we were hungry, so we slipped into a small “parrilla” (open-air wood-fired grill restaurant) on Defensa for some grilled meats and beer.

After lunch, we decided to visit the exclusive barrio of Recoleta with its tree-lined avenues, fashionable boutiques and trendy restaurants. The centerpiece of Recoleta is the elegant Alvear Avenue, which houses a number of 19^th-century mansions, exclusive designer stores, and the beautiful French-chateau style Alvear Palace Hotel. The neighbourhood is also home to the Recoleta Cemetery, where many of Argentina’s heroes and celebrities are buried, including Eva Peron.

The Recoleta Cemetery covers four city blocks and has more than 6,000 mausoleums, some big enough to pass for a small church. Of course, the most popular site in the cemetery is the tomb of “Evita” who was buried here after her death in 1952. While her body went missing for 16 years after her husband Juan Peron was deposed in a military coup in 1955, it was eventually repatriated to Buenos Aires and returned to the cemetery behind a marble fronted vault containing a number of plaques. Interestingly, her husband’s tomb is not next to Eva’s, but is instead located at the more formal Chacarita Cemetery with other national heroes including the great tango icon, Carlos Gardel.

After a wonderful dinner that evening at one of the city’s best parrillas called Cabana las Lilas in Puerto Madero, we returned to our hotel early so we could get an early start the next day. Of course, at night “early” in Buenos Aries means before midnight, as most “portenos” don’t go out for dinner until at least 9:00 p.m., and usually stay up until the wee hours of morning sipping cocktails or coffee.

Since it was our last day in Buenos Aries, we decided to spend it seeing some of the monuments and buildings we had missed, including the beautiful Teatro Colon (which was still closed for renovations), the Vittorio Meano-designed Parliament Building, and the landmark Obelisco built in 1936 to commemorate the city’s fourth centennial. The 67.5 metre high obelisk stands in the middle of the amazing Avenue 9 de Julio, which spans 110 metres and is the widest boulevard in the world, boasting some 16 lanes of traffic.

It was now time for a final meal in Buenos Aires before we left for the airport and our 12-hour flight back to Toronto. Coincidentally, it was my birthday, which meant we had a convenient excuse for a blow-out lunch in Puerto Madero with plenty of free-flowing wine.  After close to a month in South America seeing some of the most spectacular scenery in the world, it seemed like a fitting way to conclude our marvelous journey of discovery, and a wonderful way to celebrate my 55^th birthday. 

 After sailing west from Punta del Este along the mighty Rio de la Plata, we arrived the next morning in Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital city and cultural soul.

Squeezed between two continental giants — Brazil to the north and Argentina to the south — little Uruguay was first settled by the Spanish and Portuguese in the 17^th century. The Spanish eventually built a fort in 1714 as a bulwark against further expansion of the Portuguese colony of Brazil, and began to recruit immigrants from the Canary Islands in 1726.

By the late 1700s, Montevideo had grown into one of the most important ports in all of South America, and was a key link for trade between Spain and the New World. In 1811 Uruguay rebelled against Spanish rule and eventually gained independence in 1826.

Today, Montevideo is an eclectic mixture of peaceful plazas, beautiful beaches, grand government buildings, and decaying mansions that are surrounded by water on three sides. While it may have seen better times, Montevideo is still an interesting and engaging city, particularly in the colourful “Old City” near the port.

While the ship offered several interesting excursions outside the city, including one to the old Portuguese town of Colonia del Sacramento some 2 ½ hours to the west, we decided to do a walking tour around the Old City just a few steps from our berth.

Our first stop was the nearby Mercado del Puerto, the city’s old market which now houses a number of wood-fired grill restaurants (parrillas) that serve a variety of barbecued meats, empanadas and local wine and beer in an old-world atmosphere. The market is a favorite with merchant sailors and cruise ship staff, and several waiters on the Radiance had told us they were planning to eat there.

Since it was too early for lunch, we walked south along the narrow, winding streets of the Old City to the Plaza Zabalia, where we found the nearby La Museo Historico Nacional. The museum, which is housed in and around the former residences of the country’s first president and other national heroes, traces the history of Uruguay from its indigenous tribes, to the colonial period, and up to the present time.

We continued walking along the pedestrian-only section of Sarandi Street until we found the Plaza Constitucion, a beautiful park that serves as the heart of the Old City. The park is surrounded by a number of colonial era buildings including the early 19^th century Cabildo (the town hall where Uruguay’s constitution was signed),  the Museo Torres Garcia (which houses the works of some of Uruguay’s most famous artists) and  the beautiful Metropolitan Cathedral (an 18^th century church built in a Spanish neo-classical style).

Our next stop was the gorgeous 19^th century Teatro Solis on Calle Buenos Aires, just a few blocks from the Plaza Constitucion.  Montevideo’s main theatre and opera house, the Solis was built in two sections between 1842 and 1869. The theatre is the oldest still in use in South America, and was fully restored in 2004. It hosts Uruguay’s most important cultural events, and is the site of the Museo Nacional de Historica Natural.

After leaving the theatre, we walked a few feet along Calle Buenos Aries to the Plaza Independencia, which was originally the site of a Spanish citadel. The old 18th-century gate of the original citadel is still standing at the entrance to the park, providing a vivid reminder of the city’s old fortifications. There’s also a large statue in the centre of the plaza dedicated to General Jose Gervasio Artigas, the hero of Uruguay’s independence movement.

By now our feet were getting tired, and our stomachs were starting to growl. Throughout the morning, the winding streets and colonial-era buildings of Montevideo’s Old City had provided a feast for our eyes. Now it was time to return to the wonderful parrillas of the Mercado del Puerto to feast on some of the best barbecued pork, beef, chicken and sausage in South America.  

We awoke to the sound of the Radiance of the Seas dropping her anchor into the gorgeous harbour of Punta del Este at the southernmost tip of Uruguay. As we pulled the drapes open and stepped onto our balcony, all we could see were sand dunes, beautiful beaches and expensive-looking condominiums hugging the shoreline. If we hadn’t just double-checked our itinerary, we could have sworn that we were looking at the ritzy art-deco community of Miami’s South Beach or somewhere on the exclusive shores of the French Riviera.

Located on a small peninsula where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Rio de la Plata some 85 miles (140 km) east of the nation’s capital of Montevideo, Punta del Este sits on 31 miles (50 Km) of breathtaking waterfront. Before it was discovered by South America’s glitterati, the series of small towns that became Punta del Este were nothing more than tiny fishing villages with pretty coves, beautiful beaches and spectacular water views.

Today, Punta is a sizzling hot vacation spot for the rich and famous from Montevideo and Buenos Aires who flock here from November to March. Many of them live in expensive condos that ring the coast, and some even arrive by private yachts which they tie up at the Puerto Punta del Este yacht club near the town’s gastronomical zone of trendy restaurants and bars.

Since Punta and the surrounding region is easy to navigate, we decided to wander around in our own rental car (US$75 per day).  Our first stop was the Faro de Punta del Este, the town’s 45-metre high light house built in the mid-1880s which is one of the few remaining historical buildings left in the city. It sits across the street from the Victorian-style Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria, an old but pretty church painted sky-blue and snow-white.

The port of Punta del Este is just down the street from the church, and that’s where we found fishing boats unloading and cleaning their daily catch, including Corvina, Bratola and Raya. As the fisherman filleted the fish, huge “sea wolves” (sea lions) bobbed up and down in the harbour next to the pier, anxiously waiting for the fishermen to throw them scraps.  If you get to the pier before noon like we did, you’ll get a close-up look at the local community of sea wolves and save yourself the cost of the eight-km boat trip to the nearby Isla de Lobos (Sea Wolf Island).

Instead of going to Isla de Lobos, we took the 15-minute ferry across the harbour to Isla Gorriti, a beautiful public park with pretty beaches, a forest of marine pines, a lighthouse, and the remains of several historical buildings. The island also provides a spectacular view of Punta’s pretty skyline and its sensational beaches, which are usually filled with bikini-clad senoritas, vacationing families and vendors hawking beachwear, sodas and beer.

After spending some time shopping at the chic outlets on Gorleo Avenue and in the street market of Plaza Artigas, we decided to get back in the car and head 25 km east along the coast to the quaint village of Jose Ignacio. This small seaside-town sits on a beautiful expanse of beach on the Atlantic Ocean, and has recently become the “in place” for the rich and famous who want to escape the busy streets and beaches of Punta del Este. While there, we had a delicious lunch of chilled carrot soup and grilled Corvina fish at a wonderful restaurant called “Parador La Huella,” which sits on a sand dune overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The restaurant and its location were recently featured in an episode of travel writer Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” cable television show.

We decided to make our final stop of the day at the Casapueblo in Puerto Ballena, just a few kilometers west of Punta del Este. The Casapueblo is a stunningly beautiful hotel that sits on the western edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. Its organic design by Uruguayan artist Carlos Paez Vilaro evokes the modernista style of Barcelona’s Antoni Gaudi, and features a white-washed façade of terraced apartments, gothic-looking spires, a rabbit-warren of hallways and staircases, and varying shapes of balconies and windows. It also has a museum that is open to the public, and like the hotel, provides spectacular views of the sunset. 

By now, it was almost time to return to our ship for the overnight voyage up the Rio de la Plata and our next port of call in the bustling city of Montevideo. We were looking forward to seeing the nation’s capital tomorrow, but for now we just wanted to savour our final few minutes in Punta del Este soaking in the spectacular scenery of the sizzling seaside village of Punta del Este.

The snow-capped peaks and mighty glaciers of Tierra del Fuego basked in the elusive Patagonian sunshine as our ship sailed along the beautiful Beagle Channel on its way to the remote Argentine port city of Ushuaia.

The 150-mile waterway is named after the British ship HMS Beagle, which twice sailed through the channel on her voyages of discovery in the first half of the 19^th century. On her second voyage in 1832, Charles Darwin joined the crew of Captain Robert Fitzroy as the ship’s naturalist, and found 30 unique species in these pristine, frigid waters.

The first European to visit Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego was actually Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan who had been sent by Spain’s King Charles V in 1520 to find a route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. As he sailed in to the straits that separate mainland Chile from the island of Tierra del Fuego and would later bear his name, he was amazed by the many fires lit at night along the southern shore by the indigenous Indians.  

As a result, Magellan named the island “Tierra del Fuego” (Land of Fire) and decided to land on the continental side of the strait safely away from the very tall and strange-looking Indians that he derisively called “des patagonies.” The word eventually morphed into the official name for the most southern and remote region of Chile and Argentina – the Patagonia.

While their voyages were three hundred years apart, both Magellan and Darwin were astounded by the primitive nature of the Selknam and Yaganes people who inhabited “the end of the world.”  After Darwin’s reports, the Anglican Church of England’s Patagonia Missionary Society established a mission outpost on the bank of the Beagle Channel in an area the Yaganes called Ushuaia.

Lucas Bridges, the son of the first missionary, grew up among the Yaganes, learnt their language and admired their culture so much that in 1948 he published the definitive book on their life in Tierra del Fuego called “Uttermost Part of the Earth.”  Tragically, the tribes of Tierra del Fuego, who had survived for 12,000 years in one of the world’s most unforgiving areas, were eventually driven into extinction by western diseases brought to their shores by Europeans.

Today, visitors from around the world come to Ushuaia to see the rugged beauty and natural wonders of Tierra del Fuego, and to begin their cruises to nearby Antarctica. In fact, the day we were in port there were two small expedition ships tied up at the pier getting ready to begin a cruise to Antarctica – the Prince Albert II, and the National Geographic Explorer.

The Martial Glacier lies just 7 km north of Ushuaia, and can easily be reached by taxi. It has a chairlift that takes visitors to the top, where there are fabulous views of the surrounding countryside. The nearby Tierra del Fuego National Park is a 63,000-hectare reserve that features majestic peaks, pristine rivers, and the beautiful Lapataia Bay, as well as walking paths that wind through emerald forests and the rocky bays and inlets of the Beagle Channel. The park can be reached by taking the “End of the World” train (Tren del Fin del Mundo), the southern-most railway in the world that slowly winds its way through stunningly beautiful scenery.

Like much of Ushuaia, the railway was built by convicts sent to the region following the Argentine government’s decision in 1844 to set up a prison here for serious criminals, much like France’s Devil’s Island or Alcatraz in the United States. Today, the prison houses two museums – the Prison Museum, which shows the harsh environment that criminals endured; and the Maritime Museum, which tells the story of Ushuaia and its relationship to the surrounding islands and the sea.

We decided to discover part of that sea-going relationship by taking a catamaran cruise along the beautiful Beagle Channel. Our catamaran picked us up at the dock and took us past the Isla de los Pajaros (Bird Island), where we saw hundreds of cormorants, including some nesting in the nooks and crannies of a nearby rock. We also cruised alongside Sea Wolves Island, where there’s a colony of sea lions that we found basking in the pale sunshine on the edges of the rocky outcrop. The sea lions can climb the steep face of the rock because they are able to both sets of flippers, something seals cannot do.

After watching the sea lions, our catamaran sailed past Faro Isla Eclaireurs, which is locally known as the “Lighthouse at the End of the World.” We would be passing by this lighthouse in a few hours on our way out of the Beagle Channel and further south to Cape Horn, but for the time being we were content to admire the spectacular scenery, fauna and wildlife just as Charles Darwin had done nearly 200 years before us.

Surrounded by walls of tall, craggy rocks and snow-capped peaks, the Radiance of the Seas slowly made her way along Chile’s Pacific coast through the majestic fjords of southern Patagonia and into the historic Strait of Magellan.

We were now sailing in the path of Ferdinand Magellan, the great Portuguese captain who discovered this narrow and wind-swept route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on behalf of Spain in 1520. The 350-mile long Strait of Magellan was an important discovery because it provided ships with a safe inland passage protected from the frequent storms around the waters near Cape Horn some 200 miles to the south.  And until the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, the Strait and its port city of Punta Arenas bustled with commercial activity.

The Strait of Magellan is far less busy today, but it still provides safe passage for ships too big to fit through the Canal, and to a handful of cruise ships that bring tourists to Punta Arenas to see the amazing diversity of Patagonian wildlife, including the charming Magellanic penguins.

There are two colonies of penguins near Punta Arenas at Otway Bay and Isla Magdalena, and both allow visitors to get surprisingly close to the birds and their nests. There’s also plenty of wildlife on the windswept pampas outside of the city; we saw condors (the second largest bird in the world at 15 kilos and a wing-span of 3.2 metres), grey foxes, falcons, geese and an ostrich-like bird called a “Nandu.”

We took the ship’s excursion to the Pecket Harbour Reserve in Otway Sound, where there’s a colony of some 10,000 Magellanic penguins who arrive from the southern coast of Brazil and the Falkland Islands every September. The penguins prepare their nests in small burrows, mate, lay their eggs, and then brood the eggs until the chicks are born from mid-November to mid-December. After the chicks have moulted their baby feathers and learned to swim, the penguins begin returning in late March to their winter feeding grounds on the coast of Brazil and the south Atlantic islands.

Penguins live 25-30 years, and always come back to the place they were born for the mating season, and always with the same mate. Penguins usually lay one or two eggs, and males and females take turns sitting on the nest and then feeding the young with regurgitated fish.  Adult male Magellanic penguins weigh between 4.7 to 5.2 kilograms, and stand about two feet tall.

The reserve has a roped-off boardwalk that leads around the colony to the beach, where there’s a viewing porch to watch the penguins slide into Otway Sound in search of food for their off-spring. There are also stopping points along the path where visitors can watch penguins waddle back and forth across the grass to their burrows just a few feet away.  While timid if people get too close, these beguiling penguins are not shy about poking their heads out of burrows, standing straight up, stretching their wings, and squawking a few arias just to let you know who’s in charge.  These amusing creatures really are as comical and cute in real life as they are in the Disney movies!

After spending an hour at the reserve, we returned to Punta Arenas where we did a quick tour of the city. Located on the gusty north shore of the Strait of Magellan and settled in 1843, Punta Arenas is the capital of Chile’s Magellanic and Antarctic Region XII. It’s also the southern-most city in the world of its size (150,000 people) where the winds sometimes get so strong that officials have to put ropes in the large Plaza de Armas for people to hold as they walk through the square. In fact, the weather is so inhospitable that two previous attempts by the Spanish to create settlements here failed miserably.

There are several points of interest in and around the Plaza de Armas, including a bronze statue of Ferdinand Magellan with a Fueguian native Indian sitting at the base with a leg dangling over the side. Tradition holds that sailors who kiss the big toe of the native will have a successful crossing of the strait, although almost every visitor now touches the foot for good luck. Just up Avenida 21 de Mayo there’s also the newly renovated Teatro Municipal, which is modeled after the beautiful Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.

By this time we were getting hungry, so popped into a marvelous restaurant called Puerto Viejo on O’Higgans street right across from the local headquarters of the Armada de Chile near the waterfront. The restaurant serves marvelous local seafood and barbecued meats cooked on a parrilla (open fire grill), and has a wonderful selection of Chilean wines. We ordered the grilled meat plate, and had a delicious assortment of pork, beef, chicken and three types of local sausage accompanied by creamed spinach and chunky fries, all washed down with a delightful bottle of Montes Reserva red wine.

After all that food, we must have looked like penguins as we waddled back to the ship!

After cruising from Valparaiso for two days, the snow-capped volcanoes, emerald forests and pristine lakes of southern Chile appeared on our port side as we sailed into the Gulf of Ancud and dropped anchor in Puerto Montt’s Reloncavi Sound.

Located just north of Patagonia in the heart of Chile’s stunningly beautiful Lake District, Puerto Montt is a remote coastal town where the Pan-American Highway from Alaska ends and the only way further south is by ferry or plane – or cruise ship! Nestled between the ocean and the majestic Andes Mountains, the region is part of the zone known as the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” and sits atop two major tectonic plates with more than 1,000 volcanoes, 41 of which are still active. Jules Verne once called it “the land of fire and ice,” but I like to think of it as Alaska with hot chili peppers.

For many years, the volcano of Villarrica has been rumbling and spewing smoke from its steaming crater, giving the impression it wants to explode like Mt. Calbuco did in 1960. After that fateful eruption, the ensuing earthquake was so powerful (9.5 on the Richter Scale with a force roughly equivalent to 100 billion tons of TNT) that it destroyed the nearby city of Valdivia and sent a tsunami racing 200 mph across the Pacific Ocean where a day later it slammed into Japan some 10,000 miles away.

The ancestral home of the Mapuche Indians, the Lake District was settled mainly by German immigrants from Bavaria who were invited to the region by the Chilean government in the early 1850s. They spent several generations clearing land and building towns like Puerto Montt (which they named after President Manuel Montt who had sponsored the German settlement program for the Lake District along with Vincent Perez Rosales), and several villages along Lake Llanquihue, one of the largest lakes in South America. As a result, there’s a strong Bavarian influence on the area’s architecture, culture and cuisine.

Since there isn’t much to see in Puerto Montt besides the salmon fisheries, the occasional seal frolicking in the Sound, and the large craft market by the entrance to the port, we signed up for the ship’s guided bus tour ($69 each) to several small towns along the shores of nearby Lake Llanquihue.  

Our first stop was Puerto Varas, a pretty little town with marvelous views across the water to the snow-capped volcanoes of Osorno and Calbuco in the nearby national park. The town features a number of traditional German family houses built between 1910 and 1941 and finished with wood-shingles made from the local Araguaria tree, which is now an endangered species. There’s a rose-encircled park in the centre of town called the Plaza de Armas, a local artisan craft market, and a statue to Vincent Perez Rosales in a small park next to Avenida Costanera not far from the pier. And during the South American summer (December to March), the area serves as a popular gateway to nearby parks, rivers and lakes for kayakers, fishermen and hikers.

Our next stop was the picturesque lakeside village of Frutillar, which is just a short bus ride from Puerto Varas and apparently boasts some of the highest property prices in the whole of Chile. It has a wonderful beach and is home to the Reserva Forestal Edmundo Winkler, and the Museo de la Colonizacion Alemana de Frutillar.

The museum features an eclectic collection of traditionally built wooden houses including an old mill and blacksmith’s shop, and is situated on three hectares with beautiful gardens that were already in bloom. The houses contain 19^th-century clothing, artifacts and furniture, providing a flavor of what early life must have been like for the early German settlers. There are also several bakeries in town that serve traditional German “Kuchen” cakes made of local fruit, including a smaller version of the American strawberry.

It was now time to return to our ship for the voyage south through the Chilean fjords and the Strait of Magellan to Punta Arenas. The temperature was getting cooler, the skies wetter and the scenery greener, but that only meant we were getting closer to the end of the continent, where we would soon be walking amongst some of the most beautiful natural attractions in the world.  

Darkness had just begun to fall on the Pacific coast of Chile as our taxi made its way down the steep hills and narrow streets of Valparaiso to our boutique hotel in the city’s trendy district of Concepcion. Built on 45 hills overlooking an expansive bay, “Valpo” is one of Chile’s oldest cities and the port of call for the country’s capital city of Santiago, where we had recently arrived from Miami to begin our 14-night cruise around the horn of South America to Buenos Aries, Argentina.   

Valparaiso was first discovered by the indigenous Chango and settled by Europeans when Spanish explorer Juan de Saavedra arrived on his ship “Santiaguillo” in 1536. In its early years, the city was a favorite haunt for pirates and privateers, including Sir Francis Drake who sacked the town in 1578. But Valparaiso didn’t become an important city until it was rebuilt after the great earthquake of 1730, and boatloads of immigrants started to arrive from Germany, Yugoslavia, and England in the middle of the 19^th century. 

Today, Valparaiso is a collection of colourful clapboard houses, weathered Victorian mansions and cobble-stoned esplanades that cling to the sides of cliffs and provide a spectacular panoramic view of the bay and commercial centre below. The city is divided into two zones, the “cerro” or hills, and the “plan” or flat area by the coastline, and they were connected by a series of 30 quaint hillside elevators or “Ascensors” built between 1883 and 1915, 15 of which are still in use.

After a good night’s sleep, we decided to begin our walking tour of Valparaiso early Saturday morning on Paseo Gervasoni, a pedestrian-only promenade lined with elegant 19^th-century mansions including the Gran Hotel Gervasoni, the Mirador de Lukas House, and the Café Turri. The promenade is also home to the top station of the Ascensor Concepcion, where we boarded an old wooden cart pulled by cables along two steel rails so we could descend to the city’s landmark Turri Clock some 70 metres below. 

Walking southwest from the clock along Calle Prat, we came to Plaza Sotomayor and its Monument to the Heroes of Iquique, which commemorates Chile’s War of the Pacific and contains the crypts of several military heroes including Arturo Pratt. The plaza is also home to a number of interesting buildings including the former government palace which now houses the local headquarters of the Chilean navy within its Wedgwood-like blue and white façade, Grace House and the old post office.  

Just down Serrano Street near Plaza Echaurren is the tired-looking Mercado Puerto, the old fish market designed by Gustave Eiffel in 1922 (the same architect who built the famous Parisian landmark). And around the corner lies the city’s cherished Iglesia La Matriz, which has an old wooden sculpture inside known as “The Agony of Christ,” which was a gift to the people of Valparaiso from the Spanish Crown. 

It was now time for lunch, so we walked over to the Plaza Justica to catch a ride up the hill to the Cerro Allegre on the Ascensor El Peral. At the top of the elevator we discovered the pretty Dalmatian-style Barburizza Palace, which was built by a Yugoslavian entrepreneur as his home in 1916, but today houses the city’s Museum of Fine Arts. The museum sits on the edge of the Paseo Yugoslavo, a beautiful terrace that overlooks Plaza Sotomayor and the industrial port beyond. 

Eventually we made our way back to the neighboring district of Concepcion and along the Paseo Atkinson to the Hotel Brighton, where we sat on the patio of the hotel’s fabulous cliff-side restaurant. While we basked in the warm sunshine and enjoyed the stunning views of the bay with the beaches of Vina del Mar in the distance, we enjoyed a wonderful lunch of Chilean Sea Bass, and a mouthwatering grilled steak sandwich filled with garlic mayonnaise, chili and green beans, all washed down with a bottle of local Chardonnay.  

After hiking up, down and around Chile’s colourful city of hills, it was the perfect way to end to a very tiring day.