After only a few hours sleeping at the airport hotel in Lima it was time to head back to the airport to check in for our flight to Cusco, Peru. Lima Airport was crazy, busy! Thank goodness we had Gina to facilitate our passage through check-in and security. I'm sure it would have taken us much longer on our own! When we passed through security we saw a huge Perspex container that contained sharp objects that have been confiscated. It was quite shocking what people had in their carry-on bags - full-size scissors, not just small, manicure scissors and all sorts of knives, including at least one 12 inch cook's knife that I could see!! Do people walk around all the time with these sorts of things in their handbags and then just forget they have ... read more

Today we went out on the boat again, this time to Santa Fe Island. It took us about an hour and a half to motor over to the island. I know I found it very hard to stay awake as the Altamar rolled gently from side to side as she motored along into a head wind. I don't think that I was the only one who had a little snooze on the way either! On our way were were treated to sightings of some turtles and a couple of sea lions. When we arrived at the island our boat was able to pull into the sheltered bay very close to the sea lion colony. We were ferried ashore again in the inflatable dinghy right onto the beach covered with lounging sea lions. Felipe pointed out the ... read more

We had an early start this morning for our excursion to North Seymour Island. Felipe was our National Park Service guide today. He arrived at 7.00am with a bus and driver to take us back to the other side of Santa Cruz Island to board the boat that would be taking us to North Seymour. On the way Felipe told us that North Seymour Island is located just to the north of Baltra Island and that Baltra Island was actually called South Seymour Island until WWII. It was nicknamed Baltra during the war to confuse the Japanese if they intercepted communications. Since then it has continued to be called Baltra. At the Itabaca Canal we had to don very elegant red life preservers to be ferried across to the motor launch in an inflatable boat with ... read more

The air conditioning in our room didn't manage to bring the room temperature below 20°Celsius all night which made for hot and uncomfortable sleeping conditions. Despite that, and our body clocks trying to adjust to South American time, we managed to sleep for a few hours, although this was interspersed with a certain amount of wakefulness. We set an alarm for 7.00am and managed to get ourselves going about 7.20am so that we could have a leisurely breakfast before meeting our tour guide, Terry, in the foyer at 10.00am. The hotel had a delicious array of fruit, cereal, cooked breakfast and pastries to select from. We did our best to keep our calories in check choosing to start with fruit and cereal with natural yoghurt. Although that's all we would normally eat Bernie was tempted to ... read more

Well, when did this holiday actually start? The line between being on holidays and not being on holidays has blurred for me since I stopped working!! However, the worker in the family finished up at the office on Friday so I reckon that's about when we started our vacation. In which case we spent the first morning of our latest travel adventure finishing off washing and cleaning the house so it would be neat and tidy for the house sitters. We also managed to fit in a walk with Gidget and Finbar before Kerry arrived to have a quick lunch with us before driving us all back to her place. At Kerry's I re-packed my bag after finally admitting that the only way my hiking boots would be going to South America was on my feet! ... read more