My postings to this blog are liable to get less frequent now, despite the improved internet access in New Zealand. This is because we’re gone from spending short periods in each place and going on lots of tours to longer, more laid back stopovers with not much formal planned. We’re still managing to fill our days, but in […]

The journey from Easter Island to New Zealand was as grim as I’d feared. The first leg, Easter Island back to Santiago, gave me a third chance to watch ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, which I’d only watched the first time because of Mr Depp. It also provided a meal (‘probably lunch’) which consisted of tepid […]

Turns out Easter Island does have fast internet access, just one of my assumptions about this place I´ve had challenged. I wasn´t convinced about coming here. Firstly, for reasons our travel agent will be asked to explain on our return, we have to go on to New Zealand via South America (check an atlas – this […]

Santiago is a very different city to Lima, more western, more secular, more affluent. No shanty suburbs here, no lethal drivers in barely roadworthy vehicles; but also no suave mestizo urbanites, no sense of heritage and no decent food. In Peru, a western power conquered but never outnumbered a complex ancient culture (the Inca/Quechua  just being the […]

The main thing which brings people to Peru is the Inca heritage. This meant that once we got to Cusco we were on the tourist treadmill with all the crowds and chaos that implies. Yet despite being trapped on sweltering coaches with stupid Americans (‘No I’m not Australian’; ‘It´s the Andes, not a mountain called […]

All right, it wasn´t a frog. It was a luxury train. But before I tell you about the train, I´m going to tell you about the lake. I wanted to go to Lake Titicaca not because it has an amusing name (though it does if you have that sort of mind) but because the area is […]

Until we arrived here yesterday morning, all I knew about Arequipa was that it had a volcano, was built of white stone, and, at 7,500ft was a good place to start acclimatising the Andean altitudes. From what little I´ve seen in our short stay here, it is a very different place to Lima. It feels more […]

Perhaps the best place to get over jet-lag is a resort in what these days passes for paradise. On my last (and only other) trip round the world, we spent a few days in Fiji at just such a resort, surrounded by other jet-lagged tourists, waited on by staff trained to deal with jet-lagged tourists. The […]

My mate Karen, who is a bit of a party animal, used to get sent to Australia regularly as part of her job. She used to deal with jet lag by staying awake the entire weekend, then boarding the plane at aaarrrgh o’clock Monday morning, sleeping for 24 hours, and getting off fully adjusted to […]

This entry is not writing avoidance. This entry is stress relief and pessimism magic. I haven’t done much writing in the last few weeks because I’ve been planning the Big Trip, a three and a half month round the world holiday due to start approximately sixteen hours from now. I’m not in the habit of […]