The whale room was awash with grade school students. Staring wide-eyed at the stuffed gorilla, sitting on the floor, sketching and taking notes on the okapi. The three whale skeletons hanging from the ceiling were the capstone. A sperm whale, fin whale and a right whale. I see humpbacks in the wild all the time, and we have some bones lying around the office waiting for a display to be built. But here was the real thing, up close and assembled. It is the baleen thing that has always confused me. Even though I once helped cut baleen out of a [View Full Entry]

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Day 597 (15.11.08) The Islas Ballestas are perched offshore from Paracas just north of where we´d been staying. An hour or so on the bus took us to this little town which was all but devastated last year as a result of a 7.9 earthquake. There is now a huge amount of construction work going on to repair the homes and businesses in the area. Finding our way through the building sites we were soon climbing aboard a little boat that would take us out to the islands and donning the mandatory life jackets (just how extreme was this trip going [View Full Entry]

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This is the second entry of a two-parter about my trip to the Galapagos. It picks up the story half way through the cruise - for the first half, see here. Day 5 Isabela (Punta Moreno and Elizabeth Bay) Day 5 dawned bright and clear - a first - and the volcanic landscape of Isabela met my gaze as I went up on deck for a pre-breakfast gawp. The Galapagos are volcanic islands in a similar fashion to Hawaii, i.e. never connected to the mainland and created by periodic releases of magma from u [View Full Entry]

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I feel shame and sadness in equal parts when I admit that this will be the 1st and only cycling blog of our trip... I was so looking forward to cycle the world!!... reading other cyclists' blogs I made a romantic and naive idea of live on the road... but experience has taught me that I am not as strong... maybe it was the heat, maybe the spiders, maybe the noises at night, but after 200 kms I had to retire from the race... It all started 5 days ago when, full of energy and as exited as a couple of [View Full Entry]

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Its kind of like apples without oranges, Santa without his scary little elves, the Lone Ranger without Tonto, or in some obscure way, God without El Diablo. The story of our time spent on the Indonesian island of Flores would not be complete without first mentioning the time we did on her neighbor, Sumbawa. Having spent just under twenty-four hours on the Island That Shade/Rain Forgot, I am hardly the expert, but when 21.5 hours starts to feel more like a month, you know that it is time to move on. On an island with a landmass larger than Bali and [View Full Entry]

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