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As I'm not quite fat or old enough - no jokes please! - to feel comfortable on a proper cruise I've never been on an boat trip longer than it takes to get kicking and screaming to France so I was rather looking forward to the next four days. The ferry MV Puerto Eden is basically a small freighter with a few cabins thrown in. So once the trucks and containers were on board - with fortunately no disgruntled bleating and mooing livestock as usually happens - the 80 or so paying livestock were led into the bowels of the boat, herded onto a hydraulic lift and raised to the upper deck to our cabins. Very QE2.

I avoided steerage by paying an extra US$20 (which, thanks to a favourable exchange rate works out to be currently about 3.75 I think) for which I got a four-berth cabin with shower and toilet. I even had a window. Oh and a heater which would later come in very handy. Being low season the boat was less than half full and I was sharing with only French Franck who, despite his obvious disadvantage, was a very nice bloke. Although most passengers were European there was a good mix of ages from a young Chilean family to a Californian Pakistani couple in their seventies. I don't remember their names (but they looked like they could be a rather tanned version of a Dolly and an Ernie) but he was not afraid of telling everyone where he'd been and that he had lived in London between 1956-9 and only paid five guineas a week in rent before he took five months to drive all the way to Calcutta. I think he told this story to me and several others every day but they were a nice old couple and so much better than a really annoying 'topper' of a Canadian (a 'topper' being someone who can always top your story i.e. if you've climbed a volcano in 5 hours he's done it in four, or if you've got a nice warm hat he has one that is too warm).

After a perfectly acceptable buffet-style dinner it was on with the movie. Appropriately The Motorcycle Diaries is the excellent story of a young Che Guevara and his journey through Latin America. It was during this trip that he had his epiphany and became a revolutionary before getting murdered by the CIA. Sleep was fitful and at about 3am we must have made it out of one of the channels as the rocking kept me awake the rest of the night.

Woke up to wind and rain. And boy was it windy. It didn't stop a few of us braving the elements and watching the mist go past on deck. We were allowed to visit the bridge and check out the radar screens and maps

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