Overnight we sailed 283 nautical miles at a average speed of 18.3 knots and at 09:54 we arrived in Puerto Chacabuco where the weather was much more promising than it was yesterday. Bernie looked into using a private tour operator here, but had difficulty contacting them so decided it might be best to book the ship's excursion to Northern Patagonia and Coyhaique City. We drove from Puerto Chacabuco through forested landscape to the Simpson River Reserve and a little further along the road to the Virgin Waterfall. After a brief stop at the waterfall we continued on to Coyhaique City. While the first mountain and valley were quite lush and forested as we continued inland the landscape became much drier and harsher. Coyhaique is the capital of the Aisén region and actually sits high in the ... read more

After less than 24 hours on board everyone is bemoaning the loss of contact with the outside world and the onboard internet packages have been studied. Bernie has signed up for 250 minutes (US$0.40/minute). I would like to get Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu published seeing as we consider those two days to be a tour highlight but, after that, we might wait until we have free internet access again. We were at sea all day today sailing from Valparaiso toward Puerto Montt. Captain PJ (Pieter Jan van Maurik) announced that we were travelling at an average speed of 17-18 knots which is about twice the speed that we cruised around the Northern Aegean last year. I guess the Mediterranean coastline of Turkey and the Northern Aegean Greek Isles is much more compact than the distances ... read more

Today was another day lost in transit. Gina is sick of us being seated at the back of the plane (we have consistently been in row 28 of a 29 row aircraft!) because we take so long to get off the plane and join the rest of the group at the baggage carousel so she negotiated for us to be moved closer to the front of the plane (row 8) on our Lima to Santiago leg. Funnily enough we already had seats in row 5 for the Cuzco to Lima leg. Would you believe it?! There were more Kuna outlets at the airport and one of them had the exact same scarf that I first saw. It was in gorgeous mauves and aquas and featured a stylised llama pattern. Most surprising of all was that the ... read more

After sleeping badly due to worrying about whether our early alarm would go off, we were up as planned at 5.00am to return to Machu Picchu in order to climb Huayna Picchu. We thought that we had ordered 'breakfast to go' but neither the front desk or the restaurant had breakfast boxes for us. Not to worry we just went into the restaurant and made ourselves a very small ham and cheese roll each and grabbed a petite coffee scroll-like pastry. All the serviettes were linen so the staff brought us some aluminium foil to wrap our breakfast in. We shoved our meagre breakfasts into our pockets and headed off for the bus station very excited that the weather was looking perfect for our second morning at Machu Picchu. In preparation for today Bernie purchased our ... read more

Last night/this morning we had to pack enough stuff to take us through the next two days because we can only take a very small amount of luggage with us on Wednesday when we catch the train from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes. After breakfast we headed back upstairs to clean our teeth and pack our toilet bags. We literally set foot in the room when I was struck with a mild bout of TD. OMG, I have to be cooped up on a bus most of the day not knowing when the next toilet stop will be! Bernie had a similar problem the day we set off to visit Santa Fe Island in the Galápagos - although there was a toilet on the boat, unlike the bus which has no such amenity. He took a Travelan ... read more