Happy New Year!

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I hope you had a great Christmas and holiday and are now back at school raring to go for 2008. I travelled to Puerto Rico over Christmas. We visited the island of Culebra, also known as one of the ‘Spanish Virgin Islands’, for a bit of a break and to do some diving. Culebra is a tiny little place with only about 2000 residents. Everyone knows everyone so when we found ourselves without transport on Christmas day to go out for a slap up meal, a friendly taxi driver who was having the night off, agreed to leave his party just to ferry us to the restaurant and back. He then sat down and had a drink with us to celebrate the occasion!

After a few days of sun on the beach, we headed up to the mountains in the centre of Puerto Rico to explore some of the beautiful forests and highland lakes. The windy roadsides are dotted with little cafés, with chickens digging around in the dirt floor under the tables. You have to be careful driving around the narrow steep roads, as cliff sides of pale creamy rock tower upwards on one side and canyons plunge downwards on the other to rivers filled with rapids. We were welcomed by the local kids who showed us their natural waterslides and rope swing into the river close to the hotel.

I arrived back in the BVIs at the beginning of January to start the new semester, and now the new set of students are aboard and learning the ins and outs of Ocean Star and life aboard.

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