Day 18 - Tues 30 Dec Woke up at 6.30 today and it was chucking it down outside! No run for us so a bit of stretching sufficed. We had breakfast at 7 before one last swim (in the rain) and a jacuzzi except the jacuzzi was nowhere near warm that early! Plus we couldn't see anything of the volcano as the clouds had completely covered it up - literally you wouldn't know there was anything there. So looks like we were extremely lucky with the weather. We left La For...

Day 16 - Sun 28 Dec Up at 6 this morning to finish packing and have a quick breakfast before leaving at just after 7 for the airport for our flight to San Jose. The airport was very busy but we managed to get through in time and get a nice sandwich before the very pleasant 1 hour flight. Started our drive up to La Fortuna which was lovely - very green countryside and better roads so far! Took just over 3 hours to get to our hotel, Volcano Lodge, which is lovely...

Day 11 - Tues 23 Dec Got up at 4.30 this morning for our flight to Panama so those early nights did some good! Uneventful flight, only 1hr 30 which was nice so we landed in Panama City before 10am! Got the car and headed out of the airport and almost instantly discovered what crazy drivers the Panamanians are (made us very glad of the full insurance we took out) - they use their horn to do almost anything, will zoom across 3 lanes of traffic and there are are ha...

Day 7 - Fri 19/12/08 Up at 5.30 to get our taxi to Quito airport for our Galapagos flight. We sat next to a lovely german guy called George who had been mountain climbing and actually got to the summit of Cotopaxi which is something like 6000m! Once we landed in Baltra the transfer was a bit manic as it was a bus, then a boat, then another bus but it was very nice weather so no complaints. I think nearly everyone was in a group getting on one of the boats so we ...

Day 1 - Sat 13/12/08 Arrived early at Heathrow T5 for our flight to Miami - had checked in online so expected to go through the Fast bag drop but it was quickly renamed ´slow' bag drop by everyone in the queue as everyone seemed to have checked in online so the queue was the same as it would have been! Flight passed unremarkably which was good, watched a couple of films and had snacks every couple of hours (good old British Airways) and arrived in a very warm ...