Today's our travel day to Izmir. We wanted to take the ferry across the Sea of Marmar then the bus to Izmir but apparently that only runs in the high season after May. The alternatives were a 10 hour bus ride or an hour flight for $20 more. So the flight it was! We planned an hour and a half for the cab ride to the airport since we have no idea about traffic, but on this Sunday morning it only took us 12 minutes (plus a few more when I thought the driver was aski...

Well, I'll have to admit not knowing much about Turkey... so the first thing I did was look at a map. I was suprised to learn that in addition to Greece and Bulgaria, Turkey boarders Syria, Iraq and Iran - quite the Homeland Security no-go list! It also shares boarders with Armenia and Georgia. Istanbul lies on the Bosphorus - the strait connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmar which drains into the Mediteranian and the official dividing line between Europe ...

A Long, Long Way Home <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogge r/4126/1903/1600/92-Ushuaia%20Harbor.1. jpg" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"><img class="yui-img" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger /4126/1903/320/92-Ushuaia%20Harbor.1.jp g" border="0"></a>And so starts the long trip home. The next day I flew from Punta Arenas, to Ushuaia, Argentina on the Southern shores of...

The next day was a bit colder and a whole lot windier with small snow squalls every once in a while. I figured we must only have a 50/50 chance of being able to fly out in this weather as there were even darker clouds on the horizon. Despite the weather, we bundled up and started out along a rocky ridge toward the Drake Passage so see more marine life. Alejo packed extra wind pants and goggles just in case the weather got worse. We marched through the s...

At 8:00am I got a call that the flight to Antarctica would be delayed, possibly until the afternoon. Then at 9:00am, I got a call saying, "Get ready, we´re leaving immediately!". We took off, but an hour into the flight, our guide, Alejo, told us there was a down grade in the weather and we had to land in Port Williams, a small outpost on an island just across the Beagle Channel from Tierra del Fuego. We touched down and spent an hour checking out the...