From Salta in North West Argentina we started our overland leg of the journey up to and through Bolivia and into Peru. Bus travel in Argentina is easy as the buses are normally luxurious double deckers with toilets and all-you-want-help-yourself-coffee, someone told me that the night buses have beds and red wine on offer! We wanted to go on the Tren a las Nubes (Train to the Clouds) which is one of the world's greatest and highest train journeys climbing to 4475m (about 14,680 ft) but we decided against it as it was too expensive and we would have had to wait another 3 or 4 days for it as it only goes every few days. The Quebrada de Humahuaca is an intensely beautiful and varied gorge running some 100 miles to the town of Humahuaca ... read more

Learning Spanish is ‘murder’, there’s no other word for it! We’re here in Cordoba to attend a 4 week language school. The school is great, our teacher, Blanca, is great, the students are great but the learning is ‘muy dificile’! The whole experience brings back long-forgotten memories of school: homework (and the pressure of getting it right), repeating conjugations of verbs (o, as, es, a, amos, an), little games in class (eg using flashcards), silly simple sentences (‘the dog is in the house’), publicly being put on the spot, the mind going blank and then internal panic! On the 24th April we arrived in Cordoba, Argentina’s second largest city, about 500 miles north west of Buenos Aires. We flew with Aerolineas and for some odd reason managed to find ourselves in first class along with one ... read more

The Travelodge I stayed in (Denise had already returned to London) was just round the corner from Westwood Village, not a quaint little village as we would understand it in Britain, but built-up, commercialised and with 6-lane highways running through it! Nevertheless it has a lot of character with palm tree-lined avenues, lots of little restaurants, and Mexican-influenced architecture. The houses in the residential sector are all unique, ranging from the small hacienda-style to mock classical collonaded mansions. There's a large Iranian community here, which surprised me (for no good reason other than the effect of listening to George Bush's anti-Iranian vitriol) and there's one main street which is full of Iranian restaurants and shops, interspersed, bizarrely enough, by Jewish artefact shops. The 'village' is also home to some cool art deco cinemas, often with only ... read more

One fine day in L.A. I (Gerry) decided to visit the Getty Center in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. I reckoned it was only 4 or 5 miles away so I set off walking, not always an easy thing to do as most US routes are set up for cars not pedestrians. I didn't pass a single person and on long stretches there wasn't even a pavement, but I had the company of thousands of cars driving along the world's busiest road, the 405 Santa Monica Highway! The Getty Center is a museum and art gallery built over 750 acres by the J.Paul Getty Trust. The building itself is an architectural wonder (although I wasn't overly impressed with it). Most of it is made from a light-coloured stone called travertine, 16,000 tons of it! ... read more

In New Zealand we learned that the Cook Islands had been hit by 3 big cyclones in 10 days. Normally there's only one in every few years! We reckoned we were safe as there couldn't possibly be anymore, but to be on the safe side we made sure our accommodation wasn't on the beach! We left New Zealand on the 27th February and arrived in Rarotonga (the capital and the biggest island in the group) the day before (you have read it correctly, as we cross the international dateline we go back a day)! We were picked up at the airport with the thick, acrid smell of multitudenous bonfires burning as people disposed of broken branches and debris from the cyclones. Our host informed us that another cyclone was heading our way in about 3 days ... read more