Today, we awoke to brilliant sunshine in preparation for our visit to the fabled, mythic land of Chiloe in the afternoon. The early part of the day was consumed by eating of course and viewing the 350 photos taken by Gonzalo, the ship photographer. Many were absolutely stunning and we chose to compar several.

When we disembarked at Castro, the main port and capital of Chiloe, we decided to bypass the many taxis waiting to provide tours of the neighboring towns of Chonchi and Dalcuehue, opting instead to get some exercise and walk around Castro, gets some dinero and check email after many days being off the grid. That accomplished and Castro being rather disappointing,we inquired at the very nice tourist office on the plaza about visiting Chonchi O Dalcuehue. 'Chonchi, Mas mejor' - so Chonchiit was!

And, then we met our dos young ship doctoras ( one a recent ophthalmologist and the other completing her residency in ophthalmalogy) and decided to tour together and share a cab. We got to know these 2 lovely young ladies -- Karim and Katherine -- much better as we toured Chonchi and then had Onces jungle back on the Skorpios. Kari' is planning to travel around the world and we talked of the places we'd been and where she wanted to go -- Africa, Asia, Australia etc. And, Hawaii -- so we showed them our short movie from our trip to Kauai last July.

And, then the final 'formal' Captain's cena (dinner), which did not get rolling until after 9:00 pm, of course preceded by a lengthy speech by el capitan. It was a shell fish lover's delight!! Barbara was in heaven. My favorites were the salmon ceviche and the chocolate torta! The Uruguayan señor (Ismael) tried oysters for the first time in his life and loved them so much, that was all he ate theentire night! And, when I took his picture eating them, he proceeded to jsbber at mea mile a minute, despite th fact he must have known that my Espanol was extremely limited. Not only that, they seemed to speaka unique dialect. Barbara could not uncerstand a word and even Maria admitted she grokked only about 50% of what they were saying. We had to say adios to our many new friends from the Canary Islands, Chile' Afgentina, Australia and Columbia. I think we will be back.