Well, another city that didn’t overwhelm us. Our guide was very enthusiastic, but he just couldn’t make up for the overall rundown feeling to the area, even in the center where they’ve fixed things up. There are 5 or 6 universities in the area, which is good. We walked through the fish market which was an exercise in how long I could hold my breath. And again there are stray dogs everywhere. It seems to be endemic to Chile since we‘ve seen it in every Chilean city. Apparently people feed them, but don’t take them in. One of our guides said that there is no encouragement to neuter, in fact she said it was against the law to catch and neuter strays, although I wonder if that could possibly be true - maybe there was a language miscommunication. Coquimbo has a lovely cross on a hill given by the Catholic Church in 2000 to commemorate the new millennium. We didn’t get close to it because the roads are too narrow for buses. It was built in a poor area with the hopes that it would improve the area, but it hasn’t worked. We were told twice not to walk to it, but to take a taxi if we wanted to go.
I forgot to mention that were were about 3 hours late docking yesterday in Valparaiso because when we arrived, there were 5 of those huge container cranes parked at our berth. Our ship is so tall that they would have hit the upper decks so we had to wait for them to be moved. The first one wasn’t working so they had to push it along the tracks with the second crane. They ended up moving all 5 down to where the smaller Holland America ship was berthed. Now, wouldn’t you think that someone would have figured out this problem before we arrived? Some of the people who were getting off the ship had flights out of Santiago that they missed. The Captain, actually he’s a Commodore, was able to delay our departure by a few hours to make up for the delay, but that didn’t help the departing passengers who had arrangements. Ah well.
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