Weebly, where we used to host this blog, has always been a bit of a pain to use, and seems to be getting worse and more expensive. A lot of the...

Quick notes on food and drinks: Orinoco - we went three days in a row. Long queues at peak hours but it moves pretty fast and you can always get a...

Notes on where we ate: Origen Mezcaloteca Mercado de 20 November - good local stuff; Smoke Alley is intimidating and very meat heavy La Olla - went...

We ended up in Mérida almost by chance, as it’s one of the closest places you can fly to from Havana. This was fortuitous, as it’s a really nice city...

I really wanted to visit Chixulub because of the impact crater, but of course you can’t see it at all. It is quite a nice place on the shore of the...

First, a big caveat: this was all drafted in 2019 and not published until 2025. A lot of things have changed since then, not least that the US...

The first thing to strike me in Cuba was their evident love of the Rule Of Three. Every self-respecting organisation, it seems, has adopted a...

I’ve pretty much given up dead-tree media this year, with the exception of a couple of cheap second-hand books I picked up along the way and then...

We had planned to stay just one night in Bogotá before catching the morning flight to Havana, but we weren’t sure how difficult it would be to get a...

Susan and I started debating our travel philosophy before we even left Singapore. She was very much in favour of spending at least a month at a time...

This travel sketchbook started in October 2018, the previous three months I was drawing on loose papers originally thinking it’ll be a lighter...

I’ve used Lonely Planet for a long time. Back in the 1990s they were often the only halfway-reliable [1] source of information about out-of-the-way...

This meta-post represents the boundary between what was published in 2019 (and subsequently moved over to the new site), and what was drafted on my...

Almost everything can be booked on line nowadays, including bus, train, and plane tickets. There’s much less consistency, though, over whether you...

I’m writing this far too late to give you anything resembling an accurate picture of Quito. What I remember is that it was high up, rainy and cold...

We booked an “eight day cruise” (actually seven nights, arriving late and leaving early; hence also equivalent to a four day trip plus a five day...

We started our final day with a 6am trip to North Seymour before breakfast, and found frigatebirds. These are the only seabirds not to have...

André mutinied on our penultimate day. We had all assembled on Bartolomé and were half way through Rafael’s interminable briefing when André decided...

Five days of snorkelling in dodgy rental fins had irritated my right toe, and one ear was feeling unpleasantly full all the time, so I spent the day...

Most of the people on the boat left on the fifth day. The boat had come in to Puerto Ayora harbour the night before, giving everybody the opportunity...

There’s not a great deal of wildlife to see on Floreana except for the flamingos. These are the American variety (Phoenicopterus ruber), bringing our...

Española is the most southerly and one of the oldest islands in the Galápagos. Almost the entire world population of waved albatrosses breed here,...

We got up early on day two so that we could have breakfast at 6 am and be off the boat before hordes of tourists descended from a massive...

Susan spent a lot of her time on board drawing people. “Yate” is Spanish for “yacht”, by the way. Our friendly crew. Rafael certainly had an amazing...