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

We're very happy that our flight today was scheduled for a very civilised 1400 hours. I'm sure that Kath and Albert were also relieved that they didn't have to get up at a ridiculous hour to drive their house guests to Manchester Airport! After the beautiful weather yesterday, today dawned wet and overcast which made it easier to be leaving ... even though it was to head back home to winter in Melbourne. As always Bernie wanted to be at the airport nice and early so Kath and Albert dropped us off just before 11.00am. There is a really handy undercover short-term drop-off area which was a blessing with the wet weather. We unloaded quickly, said our farewells to Kath and Albert and then towed our bags into the terminal. We checked in and then had ... read more

Today marked the end of our Aegean holiday so we finished off re-packing our bags this morning ready for our flight back to Manchester. After breakfast we brought our bags downstairs and checked out and then settled in to wait in the foyer for the coach that would take us to the airport. Just as we got comfortable the staff advised us that we needed to lug our bags to the hotel down the street as the coach was waiting for us there. Aaargh, panic stations! We stuffed our tablets/e-readers into our hand luggage and made to get our wheely bags for the dash to the hotel down the street. Kath's bag was sitting in front of a HUGE potted plant and as she grabbed for the handle she slightly misjudged and knocked the handle just ... read more