We were up at about 5:30 am. I had slept like a baby. Sarah not so much. Our hotel had an awesome buffet with potatoes, beans, spinach, pancakes, sausage. They were all prepared differently than back home but all still good. A cab picked us up at 7:30 to go to the Kenya Walking Survivors office. We got to experience rush hour in Nairobi. Of course there was the heavy traffic where there really aren't rules, but what really stood out was the amount of construction.  There were thousands and thousands of people building stuff everywhere and mostly by hand. There were also thousands upon thousands of people walking to work. And these weren't short walks. Everybody looked like they were walking miles. But that didn't impact their attire. Everybody was very well dressed with dress ... read more

So begins the last stop in our 3 month trip. We arrived in Quito at a bus terminal we weren´t expecting to be dropped off at, leaving us to wonder exactly where we were. Thankfully a information kiosk was available, open, and able to point us to the public transit system that would take us into town. We chose to spend our time in Old Town Quito because 1) it seemed way cooler and 2) safer. Forty minutes later we pushed and shoved our way off the bus and arrived at parada Santa Domingo from where we began the exhausting hostel search. An hour and a half later I was on the brink of a meltdown, Matt was Grumpy McGee, we were sweaty and exhausted yet still we had no hostel. Everything we looked at was ... read more

The long awaited departure from Guayaquil had finally arrived and we returned to the ankle-spraining bus terminal to hop a ride to Riobamba. The 5 hour trip took us away from the hot & humid city and up into the lush and much cooler Ecuadorian highlands filled with farmland and rolling hills. We took a cab downtown to find a hostel, agreed to the first reasonably clean and cheap one we saw, then walked/hobbled to the train stain a few blocks away. We planned to take a rooftop train ride down ¨devils nose¨, a steep switchback mountainside outside of Riobamba. After finding out the price had increased significantly ($11 to $25) and that it was no longer possible to catch the train from Riobamba but instead a 2hr bus ride outside of the city, we declined. ... read more

Sarah and I were up and on the deck at 5:30 to watch the sunrise. It was a bit cloudy so we did not get a spectacular sunrise. Still, it was nice to look out over the glass-like ocean as the colors changed. To the north we could see Chinese Hat and the new lava flow on Santiago. It feels like ages since we were there, yet at the same time it was like yesterday. We motor east now, for our last visit, a dinghy tour around Daphne Major. It is a pretty small island so the boat tour did not take long. About 10 years ago it was possible for small groups to do a land visit, but not any more. It sounded like there are a ton of blue footed boobies that nest in ... read more

Success! I do not know if we are all just getting use to the boat, but everybody handled the 11 hour motor well. We arrived to our anchor spot at Punta Espinoza a few minutes before 7. We are anchored about 200 meters off the shore of Fernandina, yet we can still see the bottom of the ocean., Just in the few minutes of taking in the scenery before breakfast we saw two endemic species, the lava gull that was flying around the boat and landing on the dingy, and the flightless Comorant swimming and fishing in the water. The Comorant can really hold its breath a long time. There were also two sea turtles and a sea lion near the boat. That combined with beautiful views of Fernandina on the west and the Wolf and ... read more