After our normal early trek to the shower block and breakfast we had our last morning birding in Ankasa. We stopped at the National Parks display area and Ken showed us two aerial photographs of the park taken in 1984, when it was surrounded by Forest and in 2007 when it was an isolated pocket - they have now reinforced its borders to prevent any encroachment - it was originally preserved to secure the water supply and that need is probably greater now than ever ...

We were up for a 5.30 breakfast and a jeep trip deep into the forest, Foster drove us and William was joined by a local ranger/guide,Ken, who could answer all our non birding questions. We stopped by the power line supplying Ivory Coast ( and who beat Ghana in Sunday's Final of the African Cup) and got out to begin our days birding walk in this exceptional rainforest we saw amongst many species the mighty crowned eagle soaring overhead, the great blue billed tura...

We woke at 5am from our hot sweaty sleep and I headed for the bathroom. Luckily last night after thinking there was no water I found the taps under the sink .....so we were able to have cold showers ( there was no hot water and this was probably a bonus after the initial shock!). Breakfast was in the dark - still no power - so we took the table outside into the cool half light and had omelette and toast with some lovely fresh pineapple - the sweetest we have eve...

After our six hour flight from London we were met on arrival at Kotoka International Airport Accra, which is situated on the gold coast of Western Africa and is in the same time zone as the UK. The rendezvous with our guide however took a further two hours as our luggage was one of the last to emerge - it was a full jumbo jet flight and I swear most passengers had 3 big bags and some had large flat screened televisions which were circulating on the carrier. At le...

(Today's photo proves Adelie penguins do fly!) We woke to find on the in room TV map that we were not far from Ushuaia and moving quite slowly as we cannot dock until 6pm. After morning tea was delivered and drunk I headed off to the gym for a pre breakfast workout.....the sun streamed in through the window making it quite hot! At breakfast we witnessed a strange phenomena, hail on one side of the ship and sun on the other eventually the small storm moved acro...