1/20/2008 At sea on the way to Valparaiso, Chile

From: Sherman Rootberg
Date: Jan 20, 2008 8:34 PM
Subject: 1/20/2008

1/20/2008

At sea on the way to Valparaiso, Chile

First off, I forgot a few things yesterday, not to mention one small screw up. These ports are not east of the Andes. Of course they are on the coast, west of the Andes. That, as I am sure you already know, was Bobbi’s fault. She is supposed to find mistakes and typos when she proof reads.

The other thing, of importance, I forgot to mention, is the main thing produced in Antofagasta. It has worlds largest open pit copper mine. 20% of the copper in the world is produced here. All over town we saw rail cars and pallets filled with large square plates of copper. They looked like about 4X4 foot sheets. The city looked far too poor for this kind of production.

Bobbi also failed to remind me to mention that we went to the tour desk when we got back. She is messing up a lot. I’m going to have to have a talk with her. This is unacceptable.

Okay. When we got back aboard the ship I walked immediately over to the tour desk. It said it was going open in 10 minutes at 5:00 PM. We stood and were waiting when one of the tour desk people walked in. He had been on one of the buses as a tour director. I was really pissed and was going to give someone an earful. They are all so nice that you just can’t holler at them. They look like they might cry and it really was not their fault. He said he was on bus #4 and had heard about the conditions on our bus. He took our room number and said he would get back to us. As we were walking away, another lady from our bus came to the desk to complain. I am sure they will give us a refund or not.

Today was just a relaxing day. It has been getting colder as we go south and for most of the day a bit foggy. Even though we are close to the coast we could not see land until later in the afternoon. When the sun started to hit the face of the mountains it was very pretty. This must be almost all uninhabited land. We have powerful binoculars and could see no buildings or people. Just lots of sand.

I’ll try to send some pictures from yesterday.