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NZ Road Trip: To Windswept Wellington
The excitement of a road trip is always enhanced when an evocative route name is involved, so you can picture our joy when we discovered that our journey away from Taupo would take us along the Volcanic Loop Highway and on to the Desert Road, you can’t get much more evocative than that. For forty minutes or so we hug the shores of the lake before we pull away to pass through the volcano belt which provides great views of the largest of them, Tongariro, with its almost perfect peak. From there it’s through the heather-clad rocky desert before we regain pastures and hills as the coast comes ever closer.…
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Condors In The Colca Canyon
A trip out to the Colca Canyon is on most travellers’ must-do lists while staying in Arequipa, but Michaela plays a blinder by finding a 2-day tour which is linear rather than circular and ends in the place which is, handily, our next destination anyway. So we leave Arequipa in the morning sunshine with the canyon and its resident condors in our minds, hoping we get lucky enough to see one or two. We head now back up into high altitudes, in fact at no time in the next nineteen days will we be below 3,400 metres above sea level. We’ve dubbed this part of the trip “the cold section”…
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Inside The White City: Tales From Arequipa
Ever since we arrived in Cusco we have seen, in virtually every main plaza and next to most tourist sites, women in traditional dress holding on to a cute baby alpaca, inviting tourists to pay a fee to pose for photographs with the two of them. The baby alpaca is impossibly cute, the lady resplendently colourful, but do NOT be tempted to part with cash. The horror behind this facade is that the alpaca has been taken from its mother while it should still be suckling, and is then fed artificial milk as a substitute. Horrifically, this kills the little treasure and most of these exploited animals die in pain…
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Days In Guinobatan…..This Is Dry Season?!?
Having chosen this time of year because all of the guide books and websites call it the dry season, the continuing downpours have surprised us a bit – we expected tropical showers but what happened in Guinobatan was something else. First came rain, then some sunshine, and then…..wow. Picture those TV images of monsoon rains, then imagine 48 hours without the smallest pause. Our tiny river became a torrent, streets became flooded…..all ending with crazy scenes at an airport. It unfolded like this…. The heavy rain which blighted Banaue has followed us here, hammering down through the firsr night and into Tuesday morning, swelling the river and delaying our start…
- Cape Verde, Central America, Greece, Independent travel, Outdoor Activities, Panama, Photography, Spain, Travel Blog
Volcanoes And Us
Amazing scenes have been unfolding on the TV screen recently, the Earth itself cracking wide open as bright orange fire laps around buildings and rivers of molten lava surge with unstoppable power through the darkness. This is, of course, the latest eruption in Iceland, the land of fire and ice, captured live and beamed in graphic detail straight to our news channels. Michaela and I have always been fascinated by volcanoes, but then who isn’t? Before we’d even met, Michaela had visited Etna and I’d trudged up the slopes of Vesuvius, and we’d both watched the intriguing sight of bubbling sea water and marvelled at what may be going on…
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264 And Counting
Being just a little bit addicted to making lists, we have kept a note of every city, town and village outside of Great Britain where we have stayed since we started travelling together in 2011. Not a list of everywhere we’ve visited, that would be too long a list, but a list of every place where we have stayed overnight for at least one night. One night, though, is enough to qualify. The number currently stands at 264 at the end of the year, so we’ll be hoping to push it beyond 300 during 2024. Putting the 264 into alphabetical order, the list runs from Acton (California) to Zermatt, in…
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To A Land Called Fire
Having from breakfast time till 4pm to make our way back down the island, we take a leisurely scenic drive down the east coast before turning inland across to Praia, rather than retracing our steps through the mountain ranges. Just before we leave the coast, we take a short break in the very appealing town of Pedra Bodejo where a great looking restaurant on the clifftop makes us wish we needed more than just a fruit juice. And so by mid afternoon we’re back in Praia, car returned to the rental company, ready for the earliest morning start of the whole trip for the dawn ferry to our next island,…
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El Valle: A Town Inside A Volcano
Panama is the 23rd country of the world in which we’ve driven cars and there’s no way we could ever describe it as one of the hardest. Away from the most rural roads which can be a bit sketchy, the highways and even B-roads boast good quality, smooth surfaces and very little traffic compared to home. At times the PanAmerican resembles an empty Scalextric track as it rolls over and around the hillsides. Our next destination, El Valle de Anton, is reputedly the largest settlement in the entire world which is located inside the caldera of a volcano, and as we make our approach on the steeply dropping hairpinned road,…
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Cartago: In The Shadow Of Irazu
Our arrangements for the journey from Tortuguero to our next base are a bit on the sketchy side. The instructions are to be down at the riverside at 8.30am and ask for Kendall, who will take us in his boat to the nearest point where the road meets the river, at La Pavona one hour’s ride away, where we are to ask for a man named Robert, who will drive us to San Jose. After that we have to find the bus to Cartago. At precisely 8.30 a man in a blue polo shirt approaches us saying “La Pavona?”. He isn’t Kendall but he knows which is our boat. Later,…
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La Fortuna: Lava Flows And Laughter
With mountains and volcanoes meaning a lack of decent roads, transport options from Monteverde to the Arenal region are limited, with the road option being long and laborious. Most travellers therefore take the route known locally as “jeep boat jeep”, although these days due to its popularity the “jeep” bits are by minibus. A 90-minute ride along unmade roads which are really nothing more than farm tracks brings us to a muddy slope at the edge of Lake Arenal, where large white egrets hunt for fish and swallows swoop overhead. There is a regular stream of minibuses depositing travellers here, bringing enough people to fill several of the little boats,…
