We left Cuenca with Guy, Lars and Louise and all headed to Vilcabamba which is a small town in the Andes, situated in what is called the valley of longevity as people are alleged to live to very old ages. I say we all headed to Vilcabamba, Lars didn't actually make it as having spent 5 hours on a bus to reach Loja he had to turn aroun d and go back to Cuenca to pick up his and Louise's passports, meaning he spent 16 of 24 hours on buses. I could empathise a littl...

Cuenca was the perfect place to relax and catch our breath after the Galapagos. It´s a beautiful city, with unesco world heritage status, on account of the fact it is teeming with churches (I think about 60) and old buildings. We weren´t exactly the ideal tourists for the town though as we didn´t explore a fraction of what´s on offer and instead spent most of our 3 days here playing cards with Lars, Louise and Guy, who we met on the Rumba. Others came and wen...

Having disembarked from our boat, the Rumba on Wednesday evening we travelled to the island of Isabela on Thursday accompanied by Guy, Lars and Louise who had also been on the Rumba. We all spent Friday snorkelling in the bay, this included a quite breath taking swim down a very narrow channel (just over shoulder width) which was teeming with sharks, about 30 of them sleeping in the warm water. Being this close to the animals was truly memorable. On Saturday Gu...

We`re still here. We returned to Santa Cruz last night fgollowing our 4 day tour and this morning we changed our flight, putting it back to Monday. We have heard really good things about the Island of Isabella so we`re heading there this afternoon. I forgot to mention in our last blog that we`d also visited the Charles Darwin research centre on Saturday where we spent a couple of hours with the ginat tortoises, you can get really close to them and it`s interesti...

We´ve had a really great time here in the Galapagos Islands since arriving on Wednesday, it really is an amazing place. Obviously you´d expect the wildlife to be here but it is everywhere with seals and (little) sharks swimming around the harbour area in amongst the water taxis. We arrived on Wednesday morning to the main island of Santa Cruz and after confirming that England had managed to scrape through to the 2nd round of Copa del Mundo we set about visitin...