Where We Are Gently Encouraged To Get The Heck Off The Ship So They Can Clean For The Next Batch Of Cruisers

And We Enter The Final Week Of Our South American Adventure

January 1, 2026

Day at sea. Everybody is recuperating from the night before. I realize I’ve come down with Andy’s cold.

January 2, 2026

This was supposed to be a tender day in Punta Del Este, Uruguay, with a planned excursion boat ride to see yet more sea lions do nothing. Unfortunately, the weather was rainy and windy and deemed not safe for tender operations, so the port was canceled and we have yet another day at sea. At this point, I reached that moment that I can only describe as “antsy”: too many days on a ship and – in particular – too many days at sea. On this itinerary we missed: the Magellan Straits, Punta Arenas, and now Punta del Este – about half the itinerary. Now I just want to get back to dry land, where we have more control. I spent a could chunk of the day artfully arranging vacuum packed bags in my suitcase of what’s left of my clean clothes.

January 3, 2026 Disembarkation day

Disembarkation day is always a bit of a mess, especially when we’re walking off the ship and going back to the hotel where we stayed 2 weeks before. I had arranged with the hotel for a taxi to come get us, instead of us having to stand in line for whatever taxis were available.

We had breakfast in the restaurant for the one and only time this cruise, then went to wait with other people who requested assistance navigating the incredibly steep ramp off the gangway. That process worked pretty well. I was safely deposited at the bottom of the gangway, and the bus took us back to the cruise terminal, where we found our bags. Cruise staff helped us to get our bags to the curb to wait for our taxi.

Who had no idea where we were, because we didn’t know until that very moment that we would be at Gate 3. After a bunch of back-and-forths with the hotel and the cabbie, the cabbie found us by calling me and watching to see what phone rang. Rather clever, I thought.

We arrived back at the hotel in no time, where the front desk told me they did not have a reservation for us for January 3. Um. What? This had all been confirmed several months ago. They had a reservation for June (?!?). But it was all good – they had a room available for the dates we needed it. {Side note: eventually I had the time to go back through all the correspondence and found my original email asking for “3 January 2026 through 7 January 2026”, followed by the hotel’s response confirming the dates with a confirmation number. There was another email where I used “3 Jan” instead of “3 January”; I think this is where they saw “Jan” and thought it meant “Jun”. Anyway, luckily it was not an issue.

The view from our room on December 19 was several HUGE air conditioning units. The view from this room was ever so much better.

We had lunch in the hotel’s restaurant. It’s just not our “vibe” or something. And my head cold had hit hard; nothing looked or tasted appetizing.

We went out afterwards looking for a pharmacy to buy some over the counter head cold stuff, which turned out to be more difficult than one would think. There’s no CVS-like store in Buenos Aires. The small pharmacies fill prescriptions and display skin care products. We found a bigger pharmacy that had a couple of things I was looking for.

Which called for ice cream, of course! We went back to Freddo and tried different kinds of chocolate. Still fabulous.

Feeling adventuresome, we walked further away from the hotel in search of a souvenir store. The one we found didn’t have anything interesting. But it was across the street from a shopping mall, so we tried looking in there. Nothing but clothing stores. And the bathroom.

We decided to have dinner at one of the sidewalk restaurants. We picked a random steak house. We noticed a huge brick wall across the street that turned out to be the big cemetery we’ve hears so much about. That was on our list to the next day on our 6 hour city-tour.

I was fading quickly, so we went back to the hotel and I just went to bed. I hoped to shake this cold before our Big Day on Tuesday, when we fly up to Iguazu Falls and back on the same day.

Tomorrow: city tour