Ecuador

We arrived the following morning to Floreana island, and each morning you would be wakened up by the captains voice over the intercom in your room, to say 'good morning, its a beautiful day, breakfast is ready have a nice day', it was like being at the hi de hi campsite!

we all headed out to floreana island this morning for more animal watching, its fascinating everyone was just mesmerised...

When we got back our cabin mate Darcus who cleans our room had left us some artwork on our bed, he was so nice and all we could manage to do for him was to block up the toilet every day! Quite funny though as we would see him head up to our room when we left for the island with plunger in hand... all Ger of course now, but the toilets were very small...lol

We met some lovely people on the boat as well, some couples were there on honeymoon and others just on trips like ourselves, our friends John and Denise Vincent from Tasmania and Ivy and Chung Wei from singapore became our drinking buddies!

Elizabeth i even managed to find your name sake on the galapagos!

On our last day we were taken to North Seymour island where we got to go swimming again, play football with the cabin crew from the boats and visit the only post office in the galapagos...The blue footed boobie birds were hilarious they were so cheeky and would come right up close to you, it did however start to cloud over on our last day so the lads thought a game of footy was in order, ger and the boys joined in but what they didnt notice was that the crew had remembered to bring their shoes and even though ger played very well (not biased at all) he did leave the pitch with an injury!

He was grand though and motored on... the post office was well cool as it was just a wooden box where people placed their postcards and you didnt need to bother with stamps you just left it there and the rule was then that the next people to come along that live in your area will deliver it for you..! We left with quite a few postcards for dubliners! But everyone got to leave some as well it was great..

The last trip of the holiday was to baltra island itself for our flight back to quito, but not before we got taken to see the famous red chested frigate birds... these guys had it tough but proper order though! Basically they had to buff out their chests when a lady few past and whoever did the best job got the girl... so funny watching them every time a girl flew past the noises and flapping were incredible, and i have to say the ladies were very fussy as not one of them got a sniff! haha Ger reckoned the lynx effect hasnt been properly marketed in the galapagos!

We flew back to Quito for one night and 2 days more in Quito, so we headed back to the secret garden for the free booze! We did manage to get some sightseeing done though, but only because i think we were boring the pants of the guys in the hostel with our galapagos stories.. ah well..
Quito is a lovely palce but the clonnial section and main sqaure are its highlights..

Not to mention the hard workers!...

We had one night left and it just so happened to be ecuadorian theme night withband in the hostel, we had to fly out the following morning for Lima to start our tour of Peru so we took it easy! Poncho city that night as well, myself and Ger havent got one yet but rest assured we will post the pics when we do... very handy numbers i have been telling Ger and well warm at night, although not sure if he is going for it!

We eventually arrived into Lima at 8am a day late as our flight from New York had been cancelled and we ended up staying another day in the city...
We had to wait another 6 hours then for our connecting flight to Quito so we could get our Galapagos trip connection the following morning...so we were exhausted!

We had booked a taxi to our hostel the Secret Garden and all was going well - checked in, signed up for dinner and free booze for the night, until we remembered our (very expensive) Galapagos Islands trip that started the following day at 7am and we had still to arrange pickup and flights etc to the islands!

Thankfully though the manager of the company True Colours - Peter, had left me amil which Ger only happened to notice on the communal notice board.. pure random! God love Peter for he had left a hand made brown handbag for me with all our letters, boarding passes, maps etc and he said said he himself would be at our hostel at 7am to pick us up. He was well sound ... so we lashed into the free beers on the rooftop patio to celebrate!

The following morning as you can expect was hard going and only for Peter taking our luggage and generally being our guardian angel and mother we probably wouldnt have made it to the airport! We did though and the flight was grand as its only 2.5 hours from the coast.

Once we arrived we were all separated and given our yellow/red stickers for each boat cruise, it was like being back at school on a school trip away but we didnt mind as porters were assigned that carried our rucksacks for us - very posh indeed for us two!
Our boat was called the MY1 Coral and we got the bus to take us to Puerto Ayora first before boarding the boat for lunch and start the cruise. The place was gorgeous and the sun was even shining, our first view of island life and it was fab!

The boat was lush, we forgot what it looked like and because we booked it early we got a cabin on the top deck - it was huge compared to the ones in the bottom of the boat so we were well pleased!

Once on board we sat down to a great lunch and afterwards our first trip out was to the Charles Darwin Stationand Santa Cruz island and the gigantic tortoises.. We were dumbstruck when we seen these lads, they were just huge and you could walk in and around them no bother at all! We spent ages here just looking at them and how slow they move, given they are about 100 years old though they were doing well in our books!

Our first day over and it had been awesome we all headed back to the boat and the 3 course dinner and cocktails were waiting, we felt like royalty it was great. There was about 30 of us on the boat and it had been a great start!

The next day we were headed for Espanola island......this island was just full of animals and all the cameras got a fair beating that day! We got to see the famous marine iguanas, blue footed boobies and their flirty dancing, albatrosses on whats called the albatross airport on the island, nazca boobies, swallow tailed gulls, sally lightfoot crabs, yellow finches, hawks, herons, pelicans... the list was never ending and they were all so tame that we were able to just walk through them and past them or even just sit beside them if you fancied... it was truly amazing! And most photos are of all of them flirting with each other.. the place is well cool total cattle market for animals!

We spent a full day here visisting the islands and then in the afternoon we all got into the sea from teh white sand beach and were joined by hundreds of sea lions! These guys were everywhere on the island and they came so close to you as they wanted to play with you, such a great day!

None of us could believe how friendly all the animals were, we got to swim with the sea lions and there were loads of tortoises as well just swimming right past it was amazing, even if some did look meaner than they were!

Everyone back on the boat and again a fab dinner and drinks and more overnight sailing to the next island the following morning for more of the same - Floreana Island!