It was to be the trip of a lifetime, flying to Buenos Aires to join a 14 day cruise to Antarctica aboard the Norwegian Star. Leaving Buenos Aires on 29th Jan 2023, we started off on the wrong foot immediately.

A long story cut short, we did not have visas for Chile, and our itinerary included Punta Arenas on the 5th day of the cruise. We had applied for these visas on the official Chilean Gov website well before our departure, but because of reasons only known to the Chilean Consulate in Sydney, these applications were put on "hold". This omission resulted in about 60 Australian passport holders, all being disallowed to embark on day one at Buenos Aires. I suppose this is what you get for not following the rules to the letter, however, what happened next, was completely unprecedented, and uncalled for.

My wife and friends had arranged embarkation at 12:30pm, and had arrived early. Seeing there was no queue at that time, we were ushered into lines, which were processing 3 cruises at the same time.....you can imagine about 5 - 6 thousand passengers embarking that day.... Read more