Galapagos Birds — Part I
I know I promised marine iguanas next, but Mike took some outstanding photos on our last day in the Galapagos, so I’m going to wait until he uploads those. In the meantime, I’ll cover penguins, flamingos, and a few other birds. The Galapagos penguin is the northernmost penguin found in the wild. It’s pretty weird … Continue reading
Sea Lions
You’re excited to see the sea lion pics, right? They’re so cute and silly, who wouldn’t want to? Well, sea lions are abundant in the Galapagos. Mike and I have had close sea lion encounters before (when we got Scuba certified in Mexico we dove with them), but we got to spend lots of time … Continue reading
Tortoises
It turns out we have way too many favorite photos from the Galapagos so far, so my next several posts will be a bit unconventional. Instead of telling you what we’ve done day by day, I am going to post some pics animal by animal. I’ll start with a general overview of our cruise in … Continue reading
Origin of the Species
Guayaquil turns out to be a pretty awesome city, though a bit large for our tastes. It has several fancy and modern malls, a few of which might even rival the Scottsdale malls. Mike and I frequented the Mall del Sur because it is close to the house where we were staying, it is where … Continue reading
La Nariz del Diablo
La Nariz del DiabloA Play in 3 Acts The Players: Jackie — a tourist in Ecuador Mike — her traveling companion The Narrator — or just some train conductor guy that Mike took a photo of Act I: Hotel Europa [The scene: a small but clean hotel room (well, clean except for the one rather … Continue reading
Market Day
Well Mike finally got a chance to upload some more pictures, so I’ll fill you in on the wacky and wonderful Guamote market. I think it truly was one of my favorite experiences thus far. As usual the locals woke us up at the butt crack of dawn, though we opted to put in ear … Continue reading
Lonely Planet Sucks!
Well, our plan to bike all the way up the Andes failed, but not for the reason many of you might suspect. My thighs were handling the ascent quite well; in fact, on our first day we made it up to about 6000 feet (around 3000 up from where we started). We made it a … Continue reading
From the Andes to the Amazon
It turns out that our ride from Baños down into the Amazon river basin was not as white-knuckle a ride as the one into Baños. We dropped another couple thousand feet in elevation, but the road was graded nicely. It was also a very scenic route. We started off twisting through mountain roads at the … Continue reading
Traveling Applejax 