Around the world in 367 days

So the other 10%...

1. We booked on a luxury catamaran in the hope that we would avoid sea sickness. Relatively speaking it was pretty stable (compared to some of the horror stories we had heard about for some of the tourist class boats) but there were still a few bumpy rides. Deborah spent most of the first night having in depth conversations with her chosen deity on the big white telephone. I dialled him up myself once or twice but never connected.
2. We met up with some great people on the trip. For the first half we joined up with a number of small groups who had already been on the boat for 5 days and had a great introduction to the islands. For the second half, Ken and Jewel and Deborah and myself remained on the boat and were joined by the Wexler Duffey party (or did we join them???). We were privilidged to become the newly adopted family and enjoyed a great few days of birthday parties, charades (it was "Desert Rose" people!!), card games and sing-alongs (not forgetting 5 more days of the Galapagos Islands thrown in for good measure!!)
3. I love taking pictures of wild life but usually I need to use all of the 18x zoom on my camera to get a (half) decent shot. Out there, you can take a picture of an Albatros on macro mode or even go head to head with a land iguana on super macro mode! Maybe some of Darwin's theories pan out in the end after all!
4. The Millennium and it's crew and guide (Jaime) were great if you've googled this and are thinking about it you could certainly do a lot worse.

Now we find ourselves in Colombia. We had one more night in Quito after Galapagos and then bought our flight tickets for the next day, along with some banana's, at the local supermarket!! I don't think even Tescos are doing that yet? Our first stop was Medellin which wasn't a great introduction but now we find ourselves in Cartegena which is a truly beautiful city. We have loved colonial towns like Granada and Antigua but this one really stands out. The architecture is stunning, with a great location and still relatively non touristy. We are going to spend a few more days here chilling with a glass or three of vino. Then we start heading inland towards Bogota and then a regretable return to Medellin in 3 weeks to fly back down to Quito. From there we start the long overland haul down through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina towards our final port a call in Rio and a flight home in less than 4 months time...

Posted by Alexander on Tuesday, 24 June 2008 at 00:33 | Permalink