Paradise, buses and too much food

Mancora 21^st to 29^th of November

(Photos courtesy of Dellen and Sarah!)

We arrived in Mancora at around 5:30am after an awful overnight bus ride which included loud music until 1am, extreme air conditioning and 2 hours waiting in line at the Ecuador/Peru border in the wee hours. We had the intention to stay for 2 or maybe 3 nights, no more. Little did we know, at such an early hour after such a hard night, we had landed in paradise. A moto taxi dropped us at the Guacamayo Bed & Breakfast, a beautiful, out of the way accommodation which provided the perfect place to relax. Coconut palms, hammocks, balmy weather, a swimming pool and super friendly hosts. Rooms made from bamboo and mosquito nets that made me feel like we were sleeping in one of my childhood cubby houses. We got stuck.

To be quite honest there was very little to do in Mancora, but that was the beauty of it… it is the perfect place to do very little. Walks, cocktails, fresh fruit juice on the beach, beers in the pool, reading books in the hammocks… if we had of consulted a doctor after the Galapagos, it would have been just what he ordered! We got into a lovely little routine of getting up for breakfast, back to bed for a read or a movie, out for a walk to the beach, through the town to look at the artisanal market (where I may have doubled my jewellery collection), a platano con leche juice on the beach, to the fruit and veggie market to buy some mangos and fresh veggies to make dinner, back to the hostel for a relax in the hammock after a swim, back to town for a cocktail on the beach or a banana bread at a sweet little café… no wonder we couldn’t leave!

If I wasn't being so silly this would be a really cool photo!

One item that James left out from his blog on the Galapagos was the beautiful people on our boat, the laughs, the Lexicon, the Uno… Our boat housed a unique breed of tourist with beauty in their hearts and nature in their minds, and not too much money in their pockets… you get to know people pretty well when you spend 8 days and a few bouts of sea sickness together on a pretty tiny boat… which is why when we heard the wonderful, not so chavy, Dellen and Sarah were coming down to Mancora in a few days we didn’t need much encouragement to extend our stay.

The only change this made to our routine was that it now included a couple of late nights out, one with just the girls, spending the night dancing with 15 year olds and scamming free drinks, and a second to the full moon party at ‘The Point’ – one of a chain of party hostels. It really felt like a ‘holiday’ in the traditional sense of the word. 

The four of us in the moto taxi, yes, I am on the luggage rack!

We also took a little moto taxi out to the local hot springs, a small mud pool in the middle of nowhere, around half an hour out of town, which we had to ourselves while the sun went down and the stars came out to play. Though after that trip I have no doubt that a motorbike was not designed to take 5 adults!!!

Coating ourselves in the medicinal mud at the hot springs!

Mancora Beach

Full moon party, the few photos I could salvage!!!

Sarah and I out the front of the hostel.

The full moon party did have free face paint!

Dellen and James, pride of the Union Jack!

Looking a little worse for wear, but having a ball!

And a little look at our hostel! 

One of my favourite places in the hostel!

Eventually we did have to leave, though we could have easily stayed another week or two, so we booked a bus, said our goodbyes and hopped on a 20 hour bus ride with quite sore heads from the night before.

Mancora to Santiago 29^th December – 3^rd January

There really isn’t a lot to say about our journey from Mancora to Santiago… a total of 70 hours driving in busses through costal desert. The most notable event was our lunch in the 6 hours we spent waiting in Lima for our next bus. We were dressed Sunday best, hippy pants, baggy t-shirt, fat headband, thongs (or flip-flops for the Brits!), but we were up for some decent grub. In all honesty I don’t want to say how much we spent on that lunch, I am a little ashamed, but it was worth it for the best spring rolls we have had our entire trip and some delicious dishes in a very fancy Chinese restaurant filled with white Limeños whose pockets were bulging with cash. We felt a little out of place but or bellies were happy.

Just for records sake I’ll recount our trip very quickly, we could have stopped and stayed a night here or there, but I think we both just wanted this journey over and done with as quickly as possible, and really I don’t think we could have done it much quicker!

Bus from Mancora to Lima – 20 hours

6 hour break in Lima

Bus from Lima to Tacna – 20 hours

Overnight in a dingy hotel in Tacna

Collectivo Taxi for border crossing – Tacna (Peru) – Arica (Chile) 1 hour

Bus from Arica to Santiago – 30 hours

Santiago 3^rd – 5^th December

Arriving in Santiago we were pretty exhausted, ready for a decent meal and a comfortable bed. We took a taxi to a neighbourhood where we could find a couple of hostels, tried to grapple with the crazy currency to pay the taxi driver, and then walked and searched for a hostel. (Un)Fortunately before we came across suitable accommodations we came across suitable dinner, a steak house called Las Vacas Gordas (The Fat Cows). We ate, we drank, we were merry. We saw on the menu a 900 gram steak and thought, well, why not, it’s a lot of meat but it’ll be worth it… (un)fortunately they didn’t have this cut in stock, only a 1.4 kilogram alternative, it was fate. It was amazing, but, to share a piece of meat that big gives some reality to the theory of being so hungry you could eat an entire cow. And when we were stuffed full of meat and beer we noticed that in fact, we did not have a bed to retire too. Luckily there was a nice, but expensive, hostel up the road. We fell into bed and set the alarm for 20 minutes before the free breakfast finished, though when we tried to eat breakfast we found our bellies were still full of steak. 

Hungry???

The following day we headed out to walk the streets of Santiago, a little preview, to find our way around and see some of the sights. We wandered the streets and came upon Santa Lucia Hill, a beautiful little park which we later found out is actually reclaimed land, it was an ugly rock outcrop in the centre of the city, used for a rubbish dump, before being transformed by prisoners doing hard labour into the beautiful gardens that it is today. We heard the cannons fire at midday and took in the beauty of what was once the garden for the rich folks who lived in the neighbourhood, but is now open and accessed by all.

A fountain on Santa Lucia Hill

We then bought some cheese and crackers, salami and wine and made our way (by mini bus) to the top of the San Christobal Hill. We had our little picnic while looking over the city, a great way to top off a lovely day, just a taste of what I now think could be my favourite city in South America. 

The view from San Christobal Hill

And a crazy big spider we saw when we
were walking down the hill!

The majestic and amazing creation of evolution - Las Islas Galapogos.

 Tuesday 13th of November 2012 to Wednesday 20th of November 2012


What can I say about the Galapagos islands???????


They are the single most amazing place I think I have ever been to
The water was crystal clear
The air was fresh and salty
Birds of all types, shapes and sizes
Sea lions that swam and played while you snorkeled
Iguanas that could could swim
Fish of all colours of the rainbow only meters from your face
Turtles that curiously looked at you and swam next to you
Sea cucumbers that squirted when taken out of the water
Starfish that were prickly, soft and as big as a dinner plate 
Coral reefs with fluro sea anemones and urchins
Lave floes that rolled for kilometers and kilometers 
Tortoises that weighed twice as much as a person and live longer than 160 years 
Underwater caves full of fish that you could swim through......

These are only some of the things which we saw and did while we cruised the Galapagos islands for 8 days and 7 nights in a tiny boat that was at the mercy of the temperamental seas of the Pacific ocean. We snorkeled every day, twice!!!!
We landed on beaches full of sea lion (lobo marino in Spanish)  colonies and saw mother sea lions that had given birth only hours before and watched their pups take their first drinks of milk.
We watched schools of King angel fish swimming around our boat and sharks swimming around them.
We watched amazing sun sets over the ocean and watched the stars and moon come up
We looked at incandescent  phyto-plankton when it was dark.

A map of the main Galapagos Islands......

ENJOY THE PHOTOS, THERE WERE MORE BUT OUR CAMERA WAS STOLEN!!!!!!

A Galapagos pelican

A black sea turtle

The pelicans and the turtle were hunting for fish in this cave

Ghost crabs, they are EVERYWHERE!

A juvenile sea lion

Mother and pup, the pup is only about 1-2 days old

Getting up close and personal with a juvenile on a beach colony

It's such a hard life, eating and sleeping all day......

A male and female red footed booby. They have just come back from the ocean
looking for fish for their young

Frigate birds following our boat

A Yellow Galapagos Warbler, even when the close up the birds are so tiny

Our tiny boat when compared to the ships that plow the waves, this one
can take only 16 people, the bigger one 120+

Sergeant fish swimming around our boat

A shark looking for an easy meal!

A lucky bird contemplating a feed of fish and joining the shark

A male Galapagos land iguana, distinctive by it's yellow face and lower body

The same 'little' fella, these iguanas grow to 1 meter in length

A curious little pup, maybe 2 or 3 weeks old

A female Galapagos land iguana eating a prickly pear

A juvenile Galapagos night gull, the only sea gull in the world that hunts it's prey at night

A lil' bub!!!!!!

A female Galapagos land iguana

One of the many islands we visited

Male and female land iguanas squaring off for a prickly pear

The winner, with a devout fan, one of the many Galapagos lizard of many species

A pelican, Galapagos land iguana and a night gull

This is a Red Billed Tropic Bird, nesting in the rocks.

Nazca Booby flying in from catching his dinner

 A frigate bird, they steal food from other birds

High five!!!!

Attention on deck, the 'capitan' is on the watch

The capitan and his officers

Why swim when you can sail a boat???

Getting some air

Sun baking on the sand, so hard!!!!

' Maybe if I close my eyes, they'll go away'

Two of the luxury cruisers, a ticket on one of these costs $8,000 for 8 days

Mother and baby

Alpha Male sea line going for a wash after rolling in the sand

Another curious little pup

A male alpha sea line keeping watch over his harem!

Kisses for the baby

More ghost crabs

Up real close with a pup, it didn't mind one bit we were so close

Cleaning her little fella

'Who you lookin' at???'

The vertebrae of a long dead whale 

Hanging at the beach with friends, Galapagos marine iguanas taking advantage of the sun

Galapagos marine iguanas

Marine iguana

Marine iguana

Marine iguana

Lying in bed

Catching up on some zzzzzz'z

Another trying to

'Great success'

A conch shell at sunset

A pup with it's friend

Probably the most interesting thing for me was seeing the tiny little birds that make the Galapagos islands so famous and rewarding to go to, the minuscule Darwinian  Finch. We learnt the difference about the finches while we were on our tour, where the different ones live, in relation to the specific islands out of the 70 different islands that there are, how they live and the why they have the different beaks that they do. Here is some simple information that you can easily get if you go on a tour, or, like I just did now, off the internet

• Darwin's finches (also known as the Galapagos Finches or as Geospizinae) are 13 or 14 separate combinatory species of Passerine birds (related to American Emberizidae or Tanagers rather than European finches) related to a group that Charles Darwin collected on the Galapagos Islands during the voyage of the Beagle.
• Thirteen reside on the Galapagos Islands and one on Cocos Island.
• The birds are all about the same size (10–20 cm).
•  The most important differences between species are in the size and shape of their beaks, and the beaks are highly adapted to different food sources.
• The birds are all brownish or black

There are also many different sub-species of each one of these finches, as they continue to evolve as they have done for hundreds of thousands of years. The most interesting type of them all, which was my favourite, was the 'vampire finch'. This little bird is a type of short beaked ground finch, and has adapted through the years and ended up by surviving through the drinking of the blood of the many Blue footed boobies and Nazca boobies that are also only found in the Galapagos area. They also eat nectar from the prickly pears of cactus's and seeds and insects.  

One of 'Darwin's finches', looking for food.
 I'm not too sure what type this one was.

A Darwin finch with excellent balance

This bird let me follow and watch it for about 10 minutes 

There were 100's of these birds, and every one was brilliant to look at

I don't have many photos of these birds, only a few, but to see them close up is amazing, and you really can see the differences in their beaks, their different colours and sizes in the birds.

The same is with the amazing giant tortoises. They have evolved through thousands of years to be different species and specific to certain islands in the chain. To see them up close in their habitats and lands is breath taking, and you can't help but feel so small in the world, and tiny and insignificant when compared to the other types of life living on this planet.

Completely blown away at the size of these creatures,
this was the first tortoise I encountered

Brenna and her new 'biggest' and best friend

HOLA!!!!!

This tortoise is probably 100 years old or more!!!!!!

Having a 'mud bath' in the literal sense

We did so much more!!!!!!
It's too hard to explain ALL of what we did, but I can tell you one thing for certainty, it was the most incredible experience of my life!!!!!!!

James.............