The new Celebrity Infinity cruise ship is in itself a work of art. The fineness emerges from each decorative detail, painting, and sculpture. In addition to its five-star services, it has a digital music library, Aqua Spa. At one of the restaurants, the Trellis Restaurant, you’ll be served on fine china, with silver, white linen, and fresh flowers, while a quartet plays softly in the background. The cruise has claimed that the experience for its guest is a reminder that “elegance and civility are not entirely of the past.”
Binod Chaudhary and his wife Sarika were two of the privileged ones traveling with another couple, Dr Naresh Khattar and Reeta from India.
“The Celebrity Infinity is an excellent choice for your luxury cruise ship vacation,” Sarika Chaudhary told Republica. This cruise operates only in January and February.
“After initial seasickness in the Atlantic Ocean, the rest was a journey of a lifetime,” said Binod Choudhary, an industrialist and member of the Constituent Assembly. He described the experience sailing through Antarctica as “truly breathtaking.”
He questioned, “How does one feel climbing Mt Everest? It was thousand times more overpowering there than what I felt when I was at the Everest Base Camp a few years ago.”
On February 17, they reached the tiny Island of Falkland with a population of 3,000 and landed on the Elephant Island, where they saw their first iceberg.
“I was awestruck when I first saw the iceberg,” Chaudhary remarked. Sarika said, “The tortoise-blue iceberg was simply mind-blowing as that was the moment I truly felt that I was in Antarctica.”
They again saw huge icebergs as tall as ordinary hills in Nepal in the Paradise Bay where they sailed past on February 20-21.
“Another fascinating aspect about the trip was the aquatic life, especially to observe sea penguins,” Binod Chaudhary, who is an ardent traveler, said. “To notice peculiar behaviors of these mammals, their survival instincts, were truly fascinating,” he added.
The couple could have experienced much more, but destiny had something else in store for them: The two, in an anxious desire to be on land again, decided to disembark the cruise at Ushuaia, Argentina. They were headed unknowingly for another adventure, this time far scarier and more dangerous.
They flew from Ushuaia to Mendoza, then to Buenos Aires and landed from there in Santiago, Chile, where on August 28, a massive earthquake measuring 8.8 on the richter scale hit the city.
“It was in my destiny to land up in Santiago to bear the brunt of the quake,” Binod Chaudhary said, recalling the days. He said, “Two things led to this. First, due to my father’s health condition, I postponed my trip from February 4 to 12. The second was the decision to break the cruise journey in between.”
The two then narrated the horrific experience of the next two days in Santiago.
“It was 3:10 am when we first felt the shake. Then, within seconds, the entire building started rotating as if we were in a revolving restaurant,” Binod Chaudhary said, adding, “We held each other’s hands and I thought it was the end of life.”
Sarika added, “I was murmuring Sai Ram, Sai Ram all the time. Even in that situation, I thought there was some hope of survival.”
The two were on the 12th floor of Hotel Kennedy. There was no point in running, and after the tremor stopped in about two minutes 40 seconds, they came out of their room only to see that everyone had run down to the lobby. They took the emergency stairs down only to find chaos, cracks in the buildings, and hysteric people. After a few hours, they moved out to check if they could reach the airport. Unfortunately, to their dismay, all highways, air traffic, tunnels were closed.
“We checked into Marriot Hotel. There too, we landed on the 12th floor and experienced aftershocks. It had become too risky. We wanted to get out but did not know how,” Chaudhary said. The worse fear was about what their family members were thinking.
“I had made one call to my eldest son Nirvana just after the first shock, but all communications broke down after that,” Sarika said.
The two finally contacted the Indian Embassy in Santiago on February 29 and on the advice of embassy officials took a night bus to Mendoza and reached Buenos Aires. They then flew from Argentina to Sao Paulo, Brazil, finally reaching Dubai on March 2.
Chile experienced 41 aftershocks since the first quake hit the city on February 28.
“As long as I will live, this journey from the inquisitive Antarctica to the tremors of Chile will stay engraved in my heart,” Chaudhary said, with a sigh of relief.
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