By Corey Sandler
After a year that included two long adventures in the frozen north of Norway, Iceland, and Greenland, we just returned from a cautious defrost cycle.
A pair of cruises took us on an unusual itinerary, from Montreal in Quebec to Los Angeles in California. Although it would have been interesting to see how many miles per day we could sail across the dry plains of Manitoba, that was not the course we took.
We stayed on the water: the Saint Lawrence River, then the North Atlantic, into the Caribbean, made a transit through the passage between the seas in Panama, and then hung a right into the North Pacific.
Oh, and along the way we swung wide to safely skirt a hurricane coming at us across lower Florida.
All told, one month at sea on a repositioning cruise that brought Viking Neptune from Europe to Montreal to conclude in San Pedro, part of the port of Los Angeles. The ship was due to continue its peregrinations in the Pacific, heading to Hawaii and the South Pacific. But we flew home in shirtsleeves, carrying a warm coat in preparation for a return to chilly Boston.
For reasons unknown to me, our month-long trip began with a predawn flight from Boston to Montreal. The taxi came at 4 a.m.
After settling in aboard ship we went for a groggy stroll in Montreal, one of our favorite places. We once again discussed plans to come back in the cheery, frigid winter.
Our first port of call was lovely Quebec City, which is in many ways more French than France. They use an old dialect of the mother tongue and hold on to tradition dearly. But there was something new in the old town along the river:
We took a turn to port to sail up the beautify Saguenay Fjord, which heads north toward Quebec’s interior. The sun was low in the sky, lighting up the delightfully named Baie des Ha! Ha!, or Ha! Ha! Bay. (The funny name is derived from an Algonquin term that means, “The Place Where Bark is Exchanged.”
In Saint John, New Brunswick we caught some glimpses of the fall colors. The leaves turn first here in the north and then work their way down the coast of New England. But it’s a fool’s errand to try and predict the best day or best place to see them. And eventually a cold rain will turn the page very quickly from autumn to winter.
After stops in Charlottetown, PEI, Bar Harbor, Maine, and Portland, Maine we made the first of two canal transits on this bicoastal journey: through the Cape Cod Canal that connects Cape Cod Bay to Buzzards Bay at the bottom of the mainland of Massachusetts. The sea-level canal shaves six to eight somewhat difficult hours of sailing below Nantucket Island.
We arrived in New York harbor before noon, and I had the privilege of narrating our entrance from the Navigational Bridge, one of my favorite assignments.
And then we headed out of New York and due south down the coast with the intention of docking at Fort Lauderdale in Florida. Except for this:
I am often asked by cruise-wary travelers about sailing in hurricane season, and the answer I always give is this: if you are in a hotel and hurricane is headed for you, that could be trouble. But on a modern ship, with all of the satellite and radar technology we have, we could see the storm way before it could have been a problem.
Our captain chose to speed up our passage down the east coast so that we could get below the storm before it passed over Florida. We had a few bumps in the night, I am told; we slept through it all. The only effect on us was that Florida closed all of its ports as the storm made landfall, and so we were treated to an extra day at sea making a circle below Key West and above Cuba. And then it was gone, and we were safely at the dock.
A day late, but safe and well-fed, we departed due south across the Caribbean Sea to Cartagena, Colombia, a city whose central core is little changed from Spanish Colonial Times. And they do love to party.
None of that is shocking to us, since we have been to Cartagena La Heroica many times, but the serious heat and humidity set us back on our heels. We sought the cool shade of a small animal preserve.
Our itinerary called for us to end the second cruise in Los Angeles (the Port of San Pedro to be specific) and thus we had to get through the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific. We spent the night in the industrial port of Colon on the Caribbean side while we waited for our assigned time to enter the Panama Canal.
I went with a group of guests deep into the south-central jungle to visit one of seven nearly untouched communities of indigenous people struggling to hold on to the old culture One of the ways they do that is by welcoming small groups of tourists.
The last leg of our trip to visit Parará Purú, a settlement of the Emberá people, was in a long and narrow dugout canoe, called a piragua, the only way in and out of the community.
Parará Purú is within the Chagres National Park above the banks of the Río Chagres. Further north the Chagres feeds into Lake Gatun, which is both the engine for lifting and lowering vessels and the waterway for passage between the Atlantic and Pacific.
We were told that the small tribe did not make much use of clothing when they are on their own. Alas, they dressed up–a bit–for us, and performed some tribal dances.
The next morning we arrived at the entrance to the Panama Canal, a transit I have made dozens of times and is still one of my favorite experiences. I was up on the Navigational Bridge giving commentary as Viking Neptune was lifted up about 86 feet in three locks.
Later that afternoon, after we passed through the Continental Divide at Culebra Cut (also known as Gaillard Cut after the American engineer in charge of the digging there) we went back down the stairs through three locks. At Miraflores, two grandstands were filled with tourists watching us watch them.
Thrilled with the excitement, we headed north toward our goal at Los Angeles. In celebration, the sunset that night was extraordinary.
At Puntarenas, Costa Rica I visited an animal sanctuary filled with creatures of all sort including speedy birds and jaguars, and very slow sloths, which for some reason reminded me of our children when they were teenagers.
Our final port of call was scheduled to be at Cabo San Lucas, which is a beautiful setting that has been all but completely recast as a tourist resort. When we arrived, though, the sea swells were too high for us to use our ship’s tenders to come to shore and so we had to leave.
Instead, we added a call at Ensenada, just below the border with the United States at Tijuana. No one could confuse Ensenada with Cabo San Lucas, although I find its gritty reality more interesting.
To bookend our trip which began at dawn in Boston, I was up early to photograph a stunning sunrise at Ensenada.
The next morning we came back down to reality, with a long cross-country flight from Los Angeles to Boston. It’s time now to catch up on some sleep.
All text and photos (except where indicated) are by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you want to obtain a copy of one of my photographs for personal or commercial use, please contact me using the link on this page.
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