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...

I’m going to break up the Galápagos Islands into several posts, to make it (hopefully) easier to follow, and so that it’s not just a wall of...

Guayaquil is the largest city in Ecuador, and also its commercial capital. We had originally thought that we’d take longer than two weeks to get here...

After the long journey from Peru into Ecuador, we stopped off in Cuenca for a week. This is a rather lovely town back up in the Andes, at around...

Lima is almost 4,000 km south of Venezuela on the Pan-American Highway, but all the way up through Peru and into Ecuador, next to the usual sellers...

We had heard bad things about the big border crossing into Ecuador at Huaquillas, and good things about Cuenca and the Podocarpus National Park near...

Peru is full of amazing archaeology, and also has an almost embarrassing quantity of remarkably good museums. Sadly, this made me into a...