Another long update

---

Hello everybody... It seems that the less time we have left the fewer blogs we write... I beleive we left you in Santiago. Well plenty has happened since then.. we only spent 2 days in Santiago, the first was spent in a central park that was basically two small mountains, one with the token huge white statue at the top! We spent the day riding the gondola and hiking around to get different views of Santiago. Unfortunately the Andes that surround Santiago could not be clearly seen because of the smog... But it was a nice walk and a fun day... The next day we spent in the center of the city, although we had the crappiest map ever and opted instead to see a movie in the theater.. I know brutal... The next day we took a bus to a beach town called La Serena which was about 6 hrs away. It had a beautiful little beach, but unfortunately we weren´t graced with good weather and decided to move along the next evening to our next beach destination... We arrived in Iquique after a 20 hr bus ride and decided to walk to find a hostel, we found one on this gorgeous boardwalk through the middle of town... We obviously spent the next day on the beach, Carina got her ass kicked by some pacific waves and I fell asleep in the sun... well deserved after another 20 hr bus ride.... The next day we devised our plan to get to Quito in time for our Galapagos flight, booked our longest bus trip yet, and explored the town. Somewhere in exploring the town we decided to go paragliding, seeing as Iquique is supposed to be the best place in South America to jump off a cliff..... And jump off a cliff we did, with a parachute and a pilot of course...If you ever get a chance to go paragliding, DO IT!!! Its so exhilerating, and you really get soem amazing pictures of the ocean and beach from way up there, if you can compose yourself enough to get your camera out! So, after 6 whole days in Chile on the 23rd of November, we boarded a bus that had seen better days all the way to Lima, 30hrs. And once we arrived in Lima, booked a bus that left thirty minutes later for Guayaquil, Ecuador. This second thirty hour bus trip was rather uneventful except at the border when some random guys tried to get us to pay 20USD for a peice of paper that we already had, saying that it always cost 20 bucks to leave Peru... This was the first time I have ever yelled at anyone in Spanish, I don't know whether it made sense or not, but man did it feel good... We arrived in Guayaquil on the 25th late at night and planned to leave the next morning as Guayaquil was nothing special.... We arrived in the small surfer bum town of Montanita the following day to celebrate my birthday. Our time in Montanita mostly involved eating, buying souvenirs, and of course surfing, or trying to surf. We rented a board, and received free lessons from a man that was watching us (apparently we weren't doing it right) and finally both managed to stand up, and get awesome sun burns, when you're laying on your belly in the water you should apparently wear sunblock. We left after 3 magical days back to the hustle and bustle of a big city. From what we saw Quito is a very nice city with amazing architecture, unfortunately the bus to Quito was slightly less amazing and we slept most of the day. Finally the time had come to go to the Galapagos Islands. We boarded a plane and arrived in Galapagos around noon.... After a very complicated system of transfers, we met our guide, got on the boat, and headed back to land to see the Santa Cruz highlands... We saw huge craters near the top of the island as well as a ton of land tortoises that we huge, some upto 250kg. They were amazing creatures and not shy at all, you could walk up to them, slowly of course and get about 1M away. Pretty cool! The next day after a not so wondeerful sleep at sea we arrive in the island of Rabida. The first thing we saw was sea lions! They also didn't mind if you walk up to them, although after a look at their teeth we thought it better to keep our distance. There was one of the whole ¨harem¨that you weren't able to approach however. They called him the Beach Master and apparently he doesn't react very well to tourists who touch him. After a short walk around a part of the island we went snorkleling along the rocks with the sea lions. They are so playful, they will repeat movements that you make and swim right up to you. The Beach Master only past by once, and didn't bite anyone.. YAY! After that we boarded the boat again for a 2 hour journey to the next island Bartolome. There are two bays across form eachother there, one that you can not swim in, they say because they like for the people who don't go swimming to be able to see marine life, I personally think that because of the abundance of sharks, it may not be a favorite swimming spot. We saw about 4 white-tipped galapagos sharks there as well as a few sea turtles. Then, we went to the other bay for some more snorkleling. This was probably the best snokleling I've done in my life. There was huge schools of parrot fish, yellow-tailed sturgeon fish, eagle rays, trigger fish, a few sharks and of course playful sea lions. There was also a few snake eels and one or two galapagos penguins. After that full day of action we returned to the boat and had a small party with free capriñahs. We were very lucky with a group of all young people, all back packers, every once and a while on one of the islands you could see a big group of really old people with maybe one young couple... we had so much fun!! The next day was mostly bird viewing, we saw red footed boobies with the most amazing coloration in their beaks and feet, and also Nazca Boobies and Frigate birds. The next day we also saw Frigate birds, but this time they were in heat. When a frigate bird is in heat the male has this huge red sack under neath his chin that he inflates. Once it is fully inflated he points in at the sky and shakes for all the lady birds that are flying by... it was pretty cool to see that. A couple hours later our time on the Guantanamera yaght was over.. we flew back to Quito and we are leaving this evening to go to the Amazon for 4 days.... After that there is only about 6 days left, which will be mostly spent getting back to Lima for our flight home!!! We are looking forward to coming home and seeing everyone!!! We will update when we get home and there will be a website with all of our pics.. because we haven't been good about puttign them up.... ciao for now
Roz & Carina

---