Chilean Fjords
and
Antarctica
Dec 20, 2025 – Jan 10, 2026
Introduction
After going on a number of relatively “comfortable” trips, going to places new to us but not really all that different, we decided to start branching out a bit. If our plans work out, you will see this trend throughout this year in upcoming trips and it started on this cruise. As you have no doubt seen in the title above, we were headed to Antarctica and, as long as we were in the neighborhood, it seemed logical (to me, anyway) that we should make a pass through the Chilean Fjords.
We looked at many cruises, but only a few of them included both Antarctica and the Chilean Fjords, and we wanted to keep to the smaller ships, so our choices were actually somewhat limited. Another decision point was whether we wanted to do a full “expedition” style cruise, which typically includes about 5 days in Antarctica and at least one actual hike out onto the frozen ice and snow each day, or just what I called a “drive by” viewing of the frozen continent. Because of restrictions to the number of visitors to Antarctica, the “Expedition” cruises were generally limited to ships with 200 or fewer passengers, which also implied questionable comfort levels during the travels across the Drake Passage on the way to and from Antarctica. As Florida natives, we were not keen about a lot of walking around on snow and ice to start with, and the comfort factor helped us settle on a “Drive By” cruise on a larger (but not huge) ship.
One of the possible choices was a cruise on the Oceania Marina, which is the same ship as we sailed on in April to the Canary Islands and Spain. The ship was comfortable and we were familiar with it, the dates/schedule worked well, and the itinerary included all the points we wanted to hit, so we signed up.
Oceania Marina
The cruise turned out to be overall a good, fun, and educational experience. The weather was a bit challenging for much of the trip, but it did clear up somewhat for a couple of days in Antarctica. The winds and cloudy skies were more of an issue than the actual temperatures and, while the trips across the Drake Passage were not an issue for us, I suspect the people on the smaller expedition ships were probably uncomfortable.
One interesting fact that did influence some of our choices was the similarity to our wine tour trip almost exactly a year earlier. On that trip, we started in Buenos Aires, Argentina and ended in Santiago, Chile, with some time to look around in both cities. On this trip we would be going in the opposite direction, starting in Santiago and ending in Buenos Aires.
For this report, I will use the same format as the past several reports with a daily log of our travels, excursions, and other activities, broken up into chapters of several days each. There is a separate chapter on the Oceania Marina, although it will be largely a repeat of the same information from our April 2025 trip.
The “Set-up”
As usual, we made all the cruise arrangements through the “Vacations to Go” travel company and James Bingley there provided the same excellent service as he always has. I made the airline arrangements directly through Delta and the Hyatt Centric hotel in Santiago directly with the hotel, although this deserves a little additional comment.
The Cruise Critic web site (Cruisecritic.com ) maintains a user bulletin board/forum style page (https://boards.cruisecritic.com/) that includes “Roll Call” forums so that people going on a cruise can communicate with each other and coordinate things like excursions, hotel stays, and transfers. Some of the people participating on this roll call were very knowledgeable and helpful, including setting up transfers and excursions. Although there were several very helpful, I want to especially acknowledge and thank Roberta for her work in setting up transfers and an independent excursion. Several of our activities were coordinated through this Roll Call forum.
Because we had recently been to both Santiago and Buenos Aires, I kept our time at the beginning and end of the cruise to a minimum, just getting to Santiago a day early in case of flight delays, and leaving Buenos Aires the same day as we got off the ship.
Getting There and Back
As usual, we had Delta flights in both directions and, this time, both directions were non-stop flights. Our flight to Santiago was scheduled to leave about 8:30 PM on a Friday, and we knew we (or, our Uber driver) would be fighting Friday Atlanta traffic, so we got a very early start and, after checking in, had about an hour to relax in the Delta Sky lounge with a glass of wine or two. There was some kind of delay and the flight ended up leaving almost an hour late. If you ever wanted to see what a nighttime takeoff from the worlds busiest airport looks like, you can check this video. Toward the end of the video you can see the lights from the city of Atlanta at the extreme right.
We were in the “Premium Select” seats, sort of like first class used to be before the introduction of lay-flat seats. We had a dinner served shortly after takeoff, along with a couple of glasses of wine, purely to help us sleep, of course.
Climbing through 25,000 feet on way to 34,000 over the middle of Georgia.
The flight home from Buenos Aires had a scheduled departure of 11:55 PM. We were in the Premium Select seats again and had pre-selected our dinner for the flight. After eating too much for the past couple of weeks and spending time in the LATAM airport lounge with more food and wine, we really were not hungry, but did try to eat a little and drink some wine, purely as a sleep aid (yeah, right!). Unfortunately, I was much more successful eating the meal than I was getting any sleep. I’ll cover the “adventures” we had at the Santiago and Buenos Aires airports as part of the daily log.
The Itinerary
We’ll take a quick look at the full (planned) itinerary here.
Cruise Itinerary:
|
Date |
Port or Activity |
Arrive |
Depart |
|
Sun, Dec 21 |
7:00pm |
||
|
Mon, Dec 22 |
At Sea |
||
|
Tue, Dec 23 |
8:00am |
5:00pm |
|
|
Wed, Dec 24 |
7:00am |
4:00pm |
|
|
Thu, Dec 25 |
9:00am |
7:00pm |
|
|
Fri, Dec 26 |
8:00am |
9:00pm |
|
|
Sat, Dec 27 |
Chilean Fjords (Cruising) |
||
|
Sun, Dec 28 |
Chilean Fjords (Cruising) |
||
|
Mon, Dec 29 |
7:00am |
4:00pm |
|
|
Tue, Dec 30 |
10:00am |
6:00pm |
|
|
Wed, Dec 31 |
Drake Passage (Cruising) |
||
|
Thu, Jan 1 |
Antarctic Peninsula Cruising) |
||
|
Fri, Jan 2 |
Antarctic Peninsula (Cruising) |
||
|
Sat, Jan 3 |
Antarctic Peninsula (Cruising) |
||
|
Sun, Jan 4 |
At Sea |
||
|
Mon, Jan 5 |
8:00am |
5:00pm |
|
|
Tue, Jan 6 |
At Sea |
||
|
Wed, Jan 7 |
9:00am |
7:00pm |
|
|
Thu, Jan 8 |
At Sea |
||
|
Fri, Jan 9 |
At Sea |
||
|
Sat, Jan 10 |
8:00am |
And, so you can get a better perspective of the locations of all these places, I will be using the map below, inserting it at the beginning of each chapter. When we get close to Antarctica, I’ll use a more detailed map of that area for a better look.
Map of the entire area covered on the cruise.
Enough of the “preamble”, let’s get moving. As before, we will first cover our cruise ship and home for 20 days, the Oceania Marina. As mentioned above, this chapter will be lifted almost “as is” from the Canary Islands report, with several updates and changes where appropriate. Once that is out of the way, we will get started in Santiago.
Chapter by Chapter
Chapter 0: The Oceania Marina
Chapter 1: Santiago & Embarcation
Chapter 2: Puerto Montt, Castro, Puerto Chacabuco
Chapter 3: San Rafael Glacier, Chilean Fjords, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia
Chapter 4: Drake Passage, Admiralty Bay. Paradise Bay, Half Moon Island
Chapter 5: Falkland Islands, Puerto Madryn, Buenos Aires
Some closing thoughts
While putting together this report, I have also created a couple of “slide-show” videos from photos and videos taken during the cruise. I’ve mentioned some, but not all, of them during the report, so here is a recap of the videos that are available on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfEN1IH6y2s&t=3s End of the world train and Beagle Channel excursion in Ushuaia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn3vxefJfVE Video Summary of three days in Antarctica
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkgwuAm66WA Penguins: Ya gotta love em (Nothing but Penguins)
In General
Overall, it was more of an interesting and even educational trip, rather than the fun or exciting type. We certainly saw areas and terrain that were very foreign to us, with mountains of ice and snow and animals we had not seen before. We were somewhat disappointed in the weather, with only one day in Antarctica with reasonably sunny and clear skies and the limited visibility in the Chilean Fjords greatly restricted the sightseeing. The almost continual wind and rain while at sea certainly limited our activities.
The Oceania Marina served well as a comfortable traveling platform and our cabin was probably the most comfortable one we have had so far. While the food was of high quality, we felt the seasonings and flavors of many dishes left something to be desired: the chefs need to “kick it up a notch”. The “guest entertainers” also were disappointing. Three different entertainers were “loud vocalists” belting out songs I’ve never heard before from plays/musicals that I’ve never heard of. While we will certainly not cross Oceania off from future cruises, it will be nice to get back to our preferred Windstar ships later this year in Asia.
I hope you enjoyed this trip report. If you have any comments or corrections, please send them to me at: mhammoc@bellsouth.net