We make our first landing on santa cruz and walk a tour on a rocky, dry landscape. There is moss, grass, and small trees with greyish wood and little pale leaves. We are totally amazed, as this island is packed with life. I've never seen anything like this before. There are land iguanas everywhere. Probably the most amazing thing here are the birds. The air and the trees are full of them, mostly fregate birds - large elegant birds that already followed us on the ...

Today we start the galapagos tour. I'm sharing the hotel room, and later the ship cabin with Andrew, an guy from Sydney. It turns out that we are the only ones who joined the tour on their own, while everyone else came with friends or family - so I'm glad to a have a guy of similar age and spirit in my room. In the hotel (the Hilton!!!) we met our tourmates. It turned out to be a good idea to take one of the cheapest boats. I already saw myself amongst a mixture...

I spent two days in a Hostel in Quito before moving into the Meeting Hotel for the Galapagos tour. The first thing I did was freezing and suffering from altitude sickness. Quito is about 3000 m high and I came in the wet season, which is a bad idea. It rains a lot and nothing really ever dries. However, the city has rather nice parts - especially Mariscal and the old (colonial) part of the city. It has huge park areas. I visited the "midad del mundo", a monument...

Today I'm flying out, taking the 10-person NatureAir machine from Tamarindo airport (take a look at the Airport building - and yeah, I'm alone there, because I came like 40 minutes before the flight). It's quite an experience to fly over the green hills of Costa Rica, over the Volcanos, and finally into San Jose. In San Jose, I change airplanes and fly to Quito, where the next adventures awaits me... Bye Costa Rica. I thoroughly enjoyed the time here, and will...

Went diving with Liz (Claudio's colleage in the Agua Rica diving shop), and Dave (a canadian dude who works in management of an aircraft electronics company). This time the descend works well and I practice some skills (mask clearance and regulator recovery) with no problems. The first dive is already cool. It's beautiful to swim through swarms of fishes. We see some purple moray eels and a majestic manta ray drifting over us. I though this had to be highlight fo...