Greg and Mandy's Travels

Tuesday

Altitude sickness hasn´t really affected me much, except that I haven´t been sleeping the whole night.

Our day of touring the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Saw lots of Inca ruins and sites that I won´t bore you with here. Shopped at a large local market over lunch. Arrived in Ollantaytambo which is a small inca town quite well preserved and very authentic. Bright inca clothes everywhere.

Was 6th January which is Epiphany and a cultural holiday in catholic Peru. Everybody dresses up and dances in processions through the main streets of the towns and wrecks havoc on the traffic.…

Saturday

Off to the Amazon. After a flight, took a motorised canoe upstream for three hours to a wilderness lodge made completely out of wood. Only 2 hrs electricity each day. Kerosene lamps and candles for light. Mosquito nets at night in 4 poster beds. Open windows to the rainforest. Bar and spa. Very romantic.

Sunday

Being a rainforest, thats what it did. So they cancelled all 6am activities and let us lie in bed listening to the rain in the forest. Sigh. Stopped raining after lunch so we did a rainforest walk and canoe across the lake. Wasn’t as easy as it sounded as the canoe had filled up completely with the rain overnight and had to be bailed out which is no mean feat.…

Friday

Flew to Lima in Peru just in time to join my tour of the Amazon and Machu Picchu. Walking tour of Lima in the afternoon – a typical Spanish city with city square and ornate cathederals. Had a water canon and tank guarding the rich men’s club in the city centre, and only a guy with a machinegun guarding the president’s palace!

Toured the San Francisco monastary and catacombs complete with thousands of bones.

I have this theory that a Big Mac meal costs about the same (when converted to Australian dollars) in almost every country in the world, and I was pleased to see that the Peru Big Mac index was AU$6.…

The Galapagos Islands have been a lot of fun. We have seen giant turtles, swum with seals, seen boobies and marine iguanas, climbed volcanoes and crossed the equator several times.

Having New Years Eve in the capital out on the street.

Internet cafe is closing for New Year so I’ll post more later.
…

Well the Galapagos Islands were a lot of fun. We have seen giant
turtles, swum with seals, seen boobies and marine iguanas, climbed
volcanoes and crossed the equator several times.

Monday

Took a 727, that some other airline had pensioned off, to the Galapagos airport on Baltra Is. Every bag was manually unloaded and sorted while we stood in a tin hut – was charming but not terribly efficient. The our spanish speaking barman found us, found a bus, and finally found the boat. Well actually a rubber ducky to the boat. Lovely catamaran. The old boat sunk last October at 1am in the morning with a cruise on board when the captain found some rocks, and everybody jumped nearly naked straight from bed into the sea, including the deaf passenger who thought she was being kidnapped by the cabin crew trying to wake her.…

Well I finally made it. It was a 30 hour epic journey, firstly to Sydney for a three hour layover, then a LAN Chile flight from Sydney to Santiago, stopping at Auckland for an hour and a half.

Another 3.5 hours in the terminal at Santiago. There’s only so many laps you can walk of the terminal, but there was a Starbucks to relieve the boredom. 7 hours flying north to Quito via a refuelling stop at some small place I can’t quite remember.

Believe it or not when I arrived at Quito my bags were waiting for me on the carousel after all those hops, and the taxi was waiting outside with my name on it.…