Describe the aspects of your itinerary that you thought worked really well.
Transfers and hotels selections were, overall, pretty good
Describe the aspects of your itinerary that you thought needs improving
Punta Arenas - probably doesn’t need a transfer from the ship to the hotel as the hotel was right at the end of the pier - it took longer to find the driver; load the luggage; and drive to the hotel than it would have taken us to walk! We might have had a different view if it was raining! Puerto Vara - not sure of the name of the company that provided the transfers and day trips, but I suggest Chimu look for another supplier! On the first day we were ‘upgraded’ to a full day tour (which I think was code for ‘you’re the only ones on the half day tour so its cheaper for us to put you on the full day tour’). So, in addition to the Frutillar Tour, did a complete loop of Lake Llanquihue and visited another German town (Puetro Octay) and a waterfall (Salto de Las Cascades). Nice but not sure it was worth the time (which was probably why Chimu didn’t include it in our itinerary. The tour guide for the day spoke very little English and we needed to rely on the driver to translate which presented a few challenges. The restaurant where we stopped for lunch wasn’t all that great given there were lots of options during the day (lunch wasn’t until 2pm). Note, lunch for both Jude and I cost $41,000 Chilean Pesos (two set menus at $16,000 plus drinks). The guide for the second (planned) full day tour could speak English but chose not to. She would talk for about 20 minutes in Spanish and then about 3-5 minutes in English. Clearly we were not getting the full translation. When we ask her to swap between English and Spanish is smaller blocks (as a most of our guides did when speaking in multiple languages) she was very rude and told us she’s get to the English when she’d finished the Spanish - and then continued on in Spanish for another 10 minutes. This was the day when we’d pre-booked and paid for lunch. The guide was originally planning to go ’somewhere cheap’ until we told her we’d prepaid for lunch, following which we ended up at the same place for lunch that we stopped at yesterday and had the same set menu plus drinks - definitely not worth $55 each (or USD$35) - learning experience - don’t pre-pay for lunch. Easter Island Suggest finding alternative accommodation. Ohana Hotel is about 30 minutes walk out of town. The hotel is very new (so they family must have been running another hotel for 27 years!). The driver (who owned the tour business) advised during the airport transfer that Ohana Hotel only serves breakfast, not lunch, and sometimes dinner (which turned out to be either pizza or a set menu ($40,000) on alternate nights). There is another hotel 5 minutes walk up the road where we had a really nice lunch/dinner on the first day. We lunched in town between the two half day tours and the full day tour included lunch - so no problems there. That just left us to sort out dinner, pizza one night and then we were stuck with the 3 course set menu on our last night because it was raining - a lot - and we’d already spent the day getting soaked through and has just dried out, so heading off to the hotel up the road or trying to find a taxi into town weren’t viable options. Thus we were required to pay for a 3 course meal when we only had two courses - the main course being shell fish (the hotel did offer us arancini balls as an alternative- hardly a main course and too heavy after an included lunch).
Were you satisfied with the efforts taken to minimize environmental impacts during your trip?
