Isla Santa Cruz - Sunday 10th June Well, after a very early morning bus ride to Guayaquil and a very short flight we arrived at Baltra airport. Basically this involved a tarmac runway and ´baggage claim´which was literally a pile of bags on the ground yet amazingly enough all our bags came through unscathed (Iberia could learn from this - it is not necessary to leave my bag behind then, when it finally does get it to me two days later, deliver it broken!) We joined the Nationals queue to pay the park entrance fee only to have an irate (and very sweaty) airport man come and yell at us and try to drag us to the tourist queue. We told him we had CENSO to which he replied we could pay the national fee ... read more

Well we started the trip today with the intention of getting to Los Frailes, an absolutley beautiful beach in a National Park. Slight problem being that, as it is a National Park, you can't sleep there - you have to stay three hours away and go up for the day. That, the fact it was a further five hours than the beaches we usually go to and we'd have to pay the National Park fee put us off enough to decide on just going back to Montañita. Ended up in the same hostel as last time and then went out in search of food which was very good although the waiter decided to sit down with us to take the order, forget us for quite some time and then admit to being 'so high' as ... read more

Well I'm past the halfway mark and realised I haven't actually written anything about where I work. When I say realised I of course mean am reminded of that fact at every possible opportunity by certain people who are stuck in England with nothing better to do than check my blog all the time! Ok, my week days are as follows - Adinea from 8.00am until 12.30pm followed by Tadeo Torres from whenever we get there til whenever everything's finished. Adinea is a disabled school about fifteen minutes walk from where we live in Cuenca. I have no idea how many kids there are as I'm still discovering new classes (One of which I walked in on trying to take a short cut back from the kitchens today actually) There is absolutley no rhyme or ... read more

Caught the overnight bus to Quito once again and actually managed to sleep for most of it which is always a good thing. Arrived and walked to our usual haunt of Coffee Tree for breakfast (or in my case chocolate cake and hot chocolate - I needed a sugar rush!) before heading off to find a hostal. Had to tour four hostals before finding one (two were full and two were expensive - a whole $8 a night!) Ended up in Centro del Mundo - a so called 'party hostal' according to the Lonely Planet but looked perfectly alright. Checked in and then split off into three groups to go on a re-con mission about Galapagos which we are determined to book whilst we are here as every travel agent seems to promise 'brilliantly cheap' ... read more

Well we actually have a weekend to spend in Cuenca instead of rushing off somewhere as Lyn from GAP is coming out to check that all our placements are ok. Had the morning off school as well on Friday as the teachers had some meal thing to go to for all teachers of disabled children in Cuenca. Really quite random but I'm not going to argue with time off. Lou and I headed into town to go to an internet cafe to call home before going for ice creams. Really starting to be a bad habit! Next we walked down to the river to find a Panama Hat shop which turned out to be a shop/museum/workshop/cafe so all good. Had fun trying them all on (although technically they are not Panama hats at all, they ... read more