And so here we are Blogfans, the end of our fantastic three months in South America has come to an end, today we head to Central Amercia with Panama City our chosen destination! But just before we leave, we have time to tell you all of our week in the Galapagos Archipelago, WHAT A WEEK!!!!!!!!!!!

We set sail on the Angelique sail boat, constructed in 1895, thankfully overhauled in 1975, inhabited by us two and 9 others in 2009. It was an Aussie fest for the first four days of our tour with four other shipmates originating from Down Under, for the second half of the week we were invaded by Belgians and Dutch, throw in a few Swiss and an American and also the great crew, including the BIGGEST chef we have ever seen, he was HUGE, and we were good to go!

The week was just undescribable in terms of the volume of wildlife we saw. Of course first mention must go to the sealions, our travel stalwarts throughout the trip, we saw them EVERYWHERE, but they were adorable. The highlight for many of us was one particular snorkel where a sealion was literally playing with us in the water for a good 20 minutes, swimming up to each of us until it was right in our faces then suddenly swimming away, jumping out of the water and twisting back towards us again - amazing!

We also saw soo many amazing birds. Neither of us have historically been big bird fans, but these were very cool! There was the red footed booby with a painted face, the blue footed booby which whistled and danced when it wanted to mate and the frigate bird which blows this thing under its chin up to the size of a basketball!

We also spent some time snorkelling with white tip reef sharks and galapagos sharks, which although we were told a million times were vegetarian, you couldn´t help but have the Jaws theme tune going round your head when they started swimming around you!

Finally the amazing giant tortoises and turtles must get a mention. We saw Lonesome George, the last of his species and went to the highlands where giant turtles live in the wild, you can see them just chilling out next to the cows! In water though they are so graceful and serene! The best thing about all of the wildlife (even the fish) is that it is not afraid of humans at all, so you can walk right up to the lizards and birds and they won´t move!

Each day brought different islands with completely different scenary, some barren and dry and some tropical beach paradises! We also visted the ´post office´ which has existed since pirate days. It is literally just a barrel and people put messages and postcards in there with no stamps and if you see a postcard for somewhere near you at home you have to take it with you and hand deliver it. So we took one for someone in West Sussex, unfortunately as we won´t be home until Feb they may be waiting a while!

Mid week involved a few beer fuelled evenings in port, as our attempt at ´ring of fire´ while the boat was massively rocking at sea didn´t go down too well! All in all it was a fantastic week and definitely one of our highlights!

So now it´s time to say adios to South America and embark on our adventure northwards...

Hope everyone is enjoying the run up to Christmas, we still get surprised when people say it is next week, it just doesn´t feel like it in the sunshine! Lots of love xxxx