Hi guys! Sorry this last blog is horrifically late - we have been a bit sidetracked with jobs, apartments, and life in general, anyway here it is... the New Zealand and Australia blog! We arrived in New Zealand in March, flying into Auckland, which is located at the top of the North Island. After the usual hassle of finding somewhere to stay, we decided to check out some of the night life, and found the 'Kerouac effect poetry slam' at a place called the Wine Cellar. It was really good, quite 'jaaazz-club' like, with sofas, wine and a resident Jack Kerouac [View Full Entry]

---

---

Hello everyone, sorry we have been a bit slack in the blog department, but here it is... it's a long one... (click on one of our beautiful photos to see them all in a slideshow!) So... after our New Year's celebrations in Quito we took a trip down into the Bellavista Cloud forest in Ecuador for a few days, sleeping in a geodesic dome up in the canopy, spotting toucans, humming birds, and yellow breasted chat tyrants, all whilst trying to keep dry. We then went on to Otavalo to stay with neil's friend Michaela for a few days at her [View Full Entry]

---

---

Flying over the Galapagos as you arrive is a little disconcerting as the islands just appear to be big, uninhabitable volcanic rocks jutting out of the sea. I was living on Santa Cruz, the most inhabited island, with a lady called Aureola, who is the Avon lady of the Galapagos (no joke!) and is completely 100% off her rocker!! But in a very funny good way (for example I got rudely awoken on xmas day by her bashing me over the head with my christmas present and laughing to herself - luckily it was soft!). I would describe her as a [View Full Entry]

---

---

Said goodbye to Hayley in a taxi, she got out in some dodgy, down town part of Quito, in the poring rain; which we still haven’t escaped, and that’s the last I saw of her. We’d spent the day at "Mitad del Mundo" (middle of the world); the correct one calculated by GPS a few years ago, where there is a small ethnographic/astrological museum called "Museo Solar Inti Ñan". There is another big stone monument called "Mitad del Mundo", it´s 240meters south, and the park it’s in also serves as a homage to all the scientists who had (falsely) calculated [View Full Entry]

---

---

We arrived in Antigua, Guatemala, at night, in the rain, to a dark, empty house; mortar bombs and what we thought was machine gun fire kept neil from sleeping, but Hayley managed to nod off! It was the night before the local elections, and Guatemala is known to be politically unstable (notably one genocidal dictator in the 80´s) so we were feeling quite sketchy the next morning. However, we discovered that mortars and fire crackers where what we heard, and are actually used by the Guatemalans to celebrate, any time, any place, for any reason! Anyway, we met our family, Chochi [View Full Entry]

---

---

Hello everybody, sorry we have been a bit rubbish getting this going, but here it is... A lot has happened since the 6th August so we might be brief about some bits! We landed in Calgary and only stayed a matter of hours as it was bleak and quiet (it was a bank holiday), we got a bus straight to Banff - a mountain town in the middle of a beautiful national park, the mountains rose up each side of the road as we approached, like gnarled teeth. Banff turned out to be very expensive, all the hostels were booked up [View Full Entry]

---

---