Tuesday 9th February Sea pretty calm & a pleasant day at sea. The Arcadia is about 80k tons & is incredibly smooth so that one hardly feels any motion. The decor is modern without being obtrusive & the hotel staff is largely Indian while the officers are English as are the majority of passengers. There are quite a few Australians also & we were surprised how many people had joined the ship in Valparaiso. Lunch & breakfast are buffet style o...

Monday 8th February. After breakfast we west off for Valparaiso at about 9.45 in a private car. The route took us out past the airport & our driver pointed out various places on the way. The highway is mainly a toll road which we had been on before when we visited Santiago on a day trip from Valparaiso in 2011. We passed an incredible number of buses at intervals making their way to Santiago, as apparently some people work there but live in Valparaiso. The r...

Thursday 4th February Anna took us to the airport & we took the midnight horror to Sydney. This was fairly painless & we were having a coffee there by 6.30am. Friday 5th February Transited to the International Terminal in Sydney & waited for our flight at 11.30am on LAN via Auckland. The flight was virtually full in a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which proved to be less of a 'dream' than we had hoped. The seats were very closely spaced, seemed relatively...

Monday 14th December Had a good breakfast at the hotel & took a cab to the base of Cerro de Monserrate where we boarded a funicular train car to ascend to the park & the chapel overlooking Bogota. It was a good ride but still a fair walk up the hill to reach it. The highlight for me was that as we walked up through a garden of various plants we saw humming birds feeding from the flowers. Jane & I had seen this near Machu Pichu on Peru but there they ...

Saturday 12th December We had decided to take a friend's advice & visit Villa de Leyva, an old Spanish town about 120k north east of Zipaquirá & we went in style. A driver came for us in a Chevrolet 4wd & off we went but unfortunately he wasn’t too familiar with the vehicle, so first the windows were all locked & then he couldn’t operate the air conditioning. First we drove back along the road we came in on to Chiquinquira, whe...