Day 3 · December 22, 2027 · Buenos Aires and the Río de la Plata
The ship is bound for Antarctica. She spends her first two days on a river.
The Majestic Princess lies alongside the port on the north edge of downtown Buenos Aires. She sails this evening.
Go up on deck in the morning, look over the rail at the water below, and you notice something.
The water is brown.
Why the water is brown
The Río de la Plata carries an enormous load of sediment. Most of it comes down the Paraná River from the north. Estimates run between 80 and 160 million tons of sand, silt, and clay every year.
Tides and wind keep stirring it, so the sediment never settles for long. Ships headed for Buenos Aires need the channel dredged constantly to stay open.
The result is water the color of milky coffee, all the way to the horizon.
Is the Río de la Plata a river or an estuary?
Here is a question geographers still argue about.
The Río de la Plata forms where the Paraná and the Uruguay rivers meet. It runs about 180 miles from there to the Atlantic. At the confluence it is roughly 30 miles across. At the mouth it opens to about 137 miles.
Most geographers call that an estuary, which is where a river meets the sea. Argentines and Uruguayans call it a river.
If you side with Argentina and Uruguay, you are looking at the widest river on earth. If you side with the geographers, you are looking at the widest estuary on earth.
Either way, you cannot see the far bank. Uruguay is over there somewhere.
The silver that was never found
In 1516 a Spanish navigator named Juan Díaz de Solís sailed into this water looking for a passage to the Pacific.
He tasted the water and found it fresh, so he called it Mar Dulce, the freshwater sea. He never found a passage. He was killed on that voyage, near these shores.
The present name came later, from a story about a mountain of silver somewhere upriver. Río de la Plata means River of Silver. Explorers went looking for that mountain for years.
Nobody found it. The name stayed anyway.
Sailaway from Buenos Aires
Go up on deck for the departure and stay there.
Buenos Aires is flat, so the skyline stands up clearly behind you for a long time. Sunset on December 22 comes just after eight in the evening, and the light lasts.
Somewhere in the night the ship clears the last of the brown water and reaches the Atlantic. When you wake up on December 23, the color has changed.
Three days at sea
Three days at sea now, and two of them are Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
The ship turns south. Every day from here, the water gets colder.
