MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Cruise ships company promises covid-free tours to Patagonia

“Inside the ship “the spaces are wide, so it is a totally safe trip,” Guillemard said.

The cruise ships company Cruceros Australis Friday launched during the International Tourism Fair (FITUR) in Madrid what they announced as “totally safe trips,” such as navigating the virgin landscapes of Patagonia.

“They are uninhabited places full of glaciers and penguins that can only be reached by boat and we are the only ones who disembark in the region,” Australis' manager for Europe and Asia Frederic Guillemard told the Italian news agency ANSA.

In landings to the glaciers, the groups of travellers will be even smaller and inside the ship “the spaces are wide, so it is a totally safe trip,” Guillemard said.

Cruceros Australis, which covers the route between Punta Arenas (Chile) and Ushuaia (Argentina), plans to set sail again on September 15 after the strike forced by the one and a half year pandemic. “We had no cases of Covid, but in March 2020 we had to stop because the ports were closed,” Guillemard added.

In October 2020, the company planned to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the Strait of Magellan with a special cruise, now rescheduled for January 2022. It is a musical journey in which “for the first time in the history of the Strait, the Renaissance music within the fjords,” Guillemard went on.

The four-day program offers three concerts with instruments and songs from the Magellan era by soprano Mariví Blasco and musician Juan Carlos de Mulder, the company announced.

Cruceros Australis, like the entire Latin American tourism sector, is aware of the sanitary measures adopted by the countries of the continent, which in turn will wait to see how the European summer unfolds to establish them, Guillemard explained.

For Guillemard, “the ideal is for tourists arriving in Chile and Argentina to be vaccinated” in September, by which time most of Chile's population “will have been vaccinated.”

At FITUR 55 countries were represented this year compared to 165 with half the usual number of companies. Exhibition staff needed to produce a negative covid result.

Source: ANSA