Days 323-325 (Callao, Peru)
Last run of week four as we docked at grey and misty Callao on a grey and misty day. Callao is a huge international container port. Completely different to the tiny quays we’d become accustomed to recently, this was the first port not dwarfed by the ship. Quite the reverse, in fact.
We’d been told that two shuttle buses had been laid on for our convenience: one from the ship to the dockyard gates (that gives you an idea of the scale of the place) and a second to the nearby town of Miraflores, which we assumed would be waiting for us outside the dock gates. The first shuttle was waiting for us as we descended the gangway down to the pier, so we boarded it straight away. As expected, this took us to the dock gates, arriving just in time to see the other shuttle make it’s way past us back to the ship.
Cursing our impatience, we walked back to the ship. I’m not sure we were supposed to walk: we got some pretty funny looks from dockyard security officers and the drivers of several large lorries, all of whom wore hard hats and/or high-viz jackets. The bus to Miraflores was already full by the time we got to it, so we had to wait for the next one. Not a good start.
A half hour wait plus a 40 minute drive through some pretty crumby neighbourhoods later, the coach dropped us off right outside the doors of a casino underneath the JW Marriot hotel. We were invited in to use the casino’s loos, should we wish. I didn’t, but still had to submit to having my backpack searched by their security. After a quick rummage, he looked at me and asked: “No gun?” I confirmed that that was indeed the case, but wasn’t entirely sure whether he was checking or expressing surprise. We’d been told that Miraflores, which is effectively downtown Lima, can be a bit rough. Indeed, at the entrance to the bank next door, there were three of those prohibition signs you see with an image of something in a red circle with a red line through it to tell you what you can’t do. They were ‘no smoking’, ‘no mobile phones’ and ‘no guns’.
Directly across from the hotel and casino, which looks out to sea, though we couldn’t see very far on that day, there is a large, underground complex of shops and restaurants. (This seems to be what most cruise passengers want from a shore excursion.) After a quick wander round, we settled on a not too busy bar and restaurant called the Sofa Cafe. Curiously named, since, so far as we could see, we were sitting on the only sofa they had. We ordered some drinks and looked at the menu. It was still a bit early for lunch, and what we’d really come there to do was use their Wi-Fi, which, for a change, was completely free of charge or obligation. In fact, when we asked the waitress how much to use the Wi-Fi, she seemed quite surprised by the question. It was a good connection too.
Several hours, lots of drinks and an excellent meal later, we removed to a Starbucks, from where the bus back to the ship would collect us. I still had a few more blog updates to make, and there too the Wi-Fi was free, though not so good.
A long and slow journey through a great mass of rush hour traffic later, we arrived back at the ship, exhausted but pleased that we’d been able to do all the admin type jobs we’d been saving up since Tahiti.
Dinner that evening was in the Grand Dinning Room, during which we told Branco, an imposing Serbian head waiter we often chat with, what we’d been doing that day and that we were planning to visit the centre of Lima on the next. We explained that our idea was to take the shuttle to the gate, then a taxi into the city and wander round on our own. “Not on tour?” he queried. “What time you return? I check you back safe.” We had visions of him mounting a rescue mission together with Rudi and Milos, both large and from the Balkans, whom you could believe would never enter a city nightspot without weapons.
After dinner, we said ‘au revoir’ to Jacob – the maître D of the Grand Dining Room who had impressed us so much by remembering our names after just one evening – as he was leaving the ship the next day to sort out some visa problem, though we’re hopeful that we’ll see him again in New York.
***
We almost missed out on breakfast this morning, despite being down by 8.30am. For some reason, guests disembarking today – our third change over day – had to be out of their staterooms by 9.00am and off the ship by 10.00. Normally they get until 5.00pm before they’re kicked off the ship.
Off the ship too, things were busy and we were unable to get a taxi from the quayside, and the port gate shuttles were full of passengers with huge amounts of luggage they had to move themselves, including to meet pre-booked taxis, which have to wait outside the dock gates. Again, not what’s happened before. Must check how that’s all going to work at Southampton.
Anyway, we got on a shuttle eventually and almost immediately found a taxi to not only take us into the city, but wait while we saw the things we wanted to see. These included the Cathedral, which contains many fine examples of baroque alter pieces and a museum of religious art dating back to the 17th and 16th centuries. Next door is a beautiful building that had been the Archbishop’s palace (until 1924) and also contains many fine paintings, sculptures and textiles.
Our last visit was to a Franciscan monastery round the corner from the cathedral with extensive catacombs extending right under it. Our tour (in English and included with the price of admission) was a little brief and we weren’t allowed to take any photographs, but was probably, for me at any rate, the highlight of the day. We were shown a wonderful old library, a large chapel and their refectory, all decorated with the most wonderful wood carvings.
The refectory featured a series of paintings of the sons of Jacob: the founders of the tribes of Israel. Juli said, they reminded her of the Zurbaran paintings on the same subject that hang in the Bishop of Durham’s palace in Bishop Auckland Castle. Next thing we noticed was an information panel confirming that these were in fact exactly that, contemporary with and from the same studio as the Bishop Auckland Zurbarans. The information panel went on to say that the ones near Durham, England are considered to be finer and, most probably by the master himself as opposed to these from his school.
Many of the monastery’s walls were decorated with coloured tiles featuring geometric designs that reminded us of the Moorish palaces we saw in southern Spain a few years back. We saw cloisters with carved wood ceilings and walls decorated by beautiful and very old frescos in soft colours, only recently discovered when later oil paintings hanging over them were taken down for restoration.
Finally, we were shown around the catacombs, a series of chambers and narrow passageways that contain the bones of all the deceased residents of the city from when the monastery was built until 1823. That’s a lot of bones. They’re arranged – very neatly – in a series of troughs and in wells several metres deep. When a section of the catacombs was full, it seems the monks simply bricked that part up. Conservators working in the catacombs today are still finding new sections and tunnels. It is believed that tunnels exist extending beneath the square on which both the cathedral and the presidential palace sit, from one to the other, and who knows where else.
Our driver took us back to the docks – via a cash point so we could pay him – and the shuttle bus took us back to the ship. Back on board, we had a (very) late lunch followed by a rest before dinner in the Grand Dining Room. True to his word, Branco looked in on us (he was actually working in a different restaurant that evening) and no one got stabbed, shot, mugged or murdered. All in all another successful day.
***
Day three in Callao (pronounced ‘kaYOW’, by the way) started with run #1 of week 5 (3 x 5’) followed by breakfast, for the first time in Coffee Corner in Horizons. (Quite like it there. It wasn’t very busy and they have a good range of things for a light breakfast.)
After breakfast, Juli stayed on board and read while I popped down to the quayside to use the free Wi-Fi we’d been told had been setup, but either it was too busy with lots of other people trying to do the same thing or I was too impatient. Anyway, I couldn’t get online, so returned to the room, where we watched ‘Captain America’ on DVD. (Pretty good, actually. Another Marvel Comics super hero reimagined for the cinema. Guess we’re going to have to see The Hulk and Thor before seeing all three plus Iron Man in The Avengers. Must try to see Iron Man III when we get home too, and The new Star Trek movie. So much to look forward to.)
Just time for a coffee before yet another guest safety and emergency drill – most passengers first, but our sixth – after which we’d planned to have a late lunch. However the drill was delayed by passengers not returning by when they should have, so late lunch became early tea as the ship finally got underway and headed up the coast to Salaverry.
That evening we had dinner in Red Ginger. This was the first time in 55 days of cruising that we’d had dinner with another couple – yes, we are that antisocial – Georg and Barbara, the German couple we met on the boat trip round Bora Bora, who turned out also to be sailing from Sydney to Southampton as part of an east-bound round the world trip. However they flew to Sydney with only a two-day stopover in Singapore, and will fly home from Heathrow. We’ve yet to meet the only other couple doing Sydney to Southampton – Canadians, we believe – but there’s still over a month to go.
Day 326 (Salaverry, Peru)
By the way, if I’ve got this right, Peru is either country number 33 or 34, depending on how you view French Polynesia. Like tiny St. Barts, it’s an overseas territory of the French Republic, so not a sovereign state, in the same way that Northern Island, Scotland and Wales are countries but, as part of the UK, also not sovereign states. In fact, this whole business of the number of countries is going to get complicated when we get into the Caribbean a little later.
Aruba is part of the Netherlands (officially The Kingdom of the Netherlands). Grenada, St. Lucia and Barbados are sovereign states, so shall count. (They’re part of the Commonwealth too, but then, so is Australia… for now.) St. Barts I’ve mentioned already, and Puerto Rico is ‘an inhabited possession of the United States’, whatever that means, so I’m not sure about adding it to the count or not. Just for completeness, even if we’d gone there, Pitcairn wouldn’t have counted, as it’s one of quite a long list of the UK’s overseas territories, many of which are disputed, of course, and Easter Island did count as an off-shore bit of Chile.
Anyway, even for the countries of South America we visit (Peru, Ecuador, Panama and Colombia, which most definitely are sovereign states) I really don’t think we can claim them as part of any tally when we’re only ashore for a few hours and not even staying the night. (We don’t even set foot on Panamanian soil.) In fact, the same goes for the US and Canada, which means that the whole of the Americas, North and South, should really remain unclaimed by us and are, therefore, still to be explored… until our next trip, that is.
Anyway, back to Peru.
The ship was still tying up in the port of Salaverry, while we were having breakfast, after which we bypassed the town of Salaverry itself and took the free shuttle bus from the port to the main square in the city of Trujillo (don’t ask me how to pronounce it) about nine miles (15km) north-west of Salaverry. With the assistance of a very helpful, English speaking tourist information officer, we found the post office and a bank plus some information about one of the main draws of the city, the remains, 5km from town, of the pre-Inca mud-city of Chan Chan.
After some slightly confusing negotiations, we found a taxi driver willing to take us to Chan Chan, wait while we explored the vast site – we had no idea how long that was going to take – and drive us back to the main square, all for a reasonable sum.
I said Chan Chan is vast, it’s probably more accurate to say it was vast. According to the information we have, its city walls enclosed eight square miles of buildings. We were able to see the remains – the bottoms of walls, mostly – of one of the huge palaces of the era’s nobility. It contained many small rooms and patios, a number of ceremonial courtyards, a large freshwater pond and a complex of burial spaces. We spent a good long time walking around taking photos, and, for a long time, had the place to ourselves. Not, I suspect, because the site is unpopular, but more probably because it’s so large. There’s plenty of space for visitors to spread out.
Trujillo is itself definitely worth more than the quick look we had time for before having to catching the shuttle back to the ship, and we had hoped to explore the city’s 18th century cathedral, one of many historic, colonial buildings around the square. Unfortunately, it was shut that afternoon, so it’s “collection of magnificent silver and gold chalices and bishop’s vestments” remain unknown to us.
Back at the quayside, we had plenty of time to look over the stalls belonging to a cluster of market traders who had assembled near the ship and spend the rest of our Peruvian Sols before teatime back on-board. After that, I watched the whole of ‘On The Beach’ (the Gregory Peck film I mentioned before) while Juli slept.
At some point during the film, the ship left port (no announcement, no ship’s whistle, I just happened to turn round and notice we were moving again) and after the film, I woke Juli with a Gin & Tonic. (I don’t mean I threw it over her, you understand, I mean I had it ready for her.) Dinner was in the Grand Dining Room (crab cakes and Osso Bucco – mmmm) where we met the new Maître D. His name is Kouschek (Indian). Prior to his promotion, he’d been our waiter a couple of times. Without a doubt, he has the best smile on the ship, and we’re very pleased for him. (His smile – even wider than normal – showed he was pretty happy about it himself.)
Day 327 (cruising north towards the equator)
Run #2 of week 5 (2 x 8’) followed by laundry, breakfast, reading, blogging, a light lunch then ‘Amour’: a French film (won awards in Europe and America, apparently) about an elderly couple coping after one of them is partially paralysed by a stroke. Not a lot of laughs, but really well done. Back in Red Ginger for dinner.At about 11.00pm, we saw lights and heard a lot of shouting in the sea under our balcony. When I got up and went outside to investigate, I saw the lights of a mini fleet of what looked to be small fishing boats. One of the boats was whizzing round right by the ship and someone on it was shouting something I couldn’t understand. Then I noticed a long line of floats running directly away from our side of the ship as we sailed along. It looked as if the ship had sailed right over this chap’s fishing net, although the net didn’t seem to be moving with the ship in any way that might suggest the net was snagged on any part of the ship. Shortly after that, one of the two huge searchlights slung under the wings of the bridge came on and started sweeping the sea around us, coming to rest every now and then on other nearby fishing boats. Meanwhile, the ship seemed to be moving relatively slowly. Just 7 knots according to channel 4 on our TV, which broadcasts a live feed of such information. (Also: location; heading; sea conditions; weather, including wind speed and direction; etc..) Don’t really know what happened and the ship didn’t seem to deviate in terms of speed or direction, and before long we had moved away from the fishing boats, so I went back to bed.
Day 328 (Manta, Ecuador and crossing the equator.)
Country number 35. (Yes, I know what I said.) Manta is south (and west) of the capital, Quito, which is not on the equator as I had always thought, but still a little bit south of the line itself. Manta is one of Ecuador’s two main ports, and its third city economically, Manta’s principal industry being tuna fishing and canning. And on the subject of economics, the currency here is the US Dollar. Apparently they adopted the dollar when their own currency collapsed sometime ago.After breakfast (again in Coffee Corner – very popular with and handy for bridge officers) we took the shuttle from the quay to the town’s civic square, where a souvenir market was in full swing. We had a quick look round and could have bought any number of Panama hats in various styles and colours, but the home of the Panama hat is a town to the south east of Manta called Montecristi, and that’s where we were headed.
We’d read about local, brightly coloured, open-air buses called Chivas and made our way to the bus station to see about catching one. However, when we got there, it was all a bit chaotic, so we chickened out and walked back to the square and took a taxi instead. Juli reckons the ship has made us soft and less intrepid as travellers. “Cruise-i-fied”, she calls it.
Montecrisiti is a small town which seems to survive on the manufacture and sale of Panama hats alone. However, it also has a very lovely (and very tall) cathedral, which we spent a few minutes walking round. In front of the cathedral is the main square. At the other end of the square to the cathedral is a statue to/of General Delgado, Montecrsiti’s favourite son. He was responsible for gaining the country’s independence from Spain and, inevitably, became Ecuador’s first president.
Between these two landmarks, which represent religion and politics, comes commerce in the form of many small market stalls, all selling the same things, the main item of course being Panama hats. These come in various grades of fineness and can command four figure prices for the very best. We settled on three more modest though still very fair examples, and if your name is Richard, you might be getting one for your birthday.
Our taxi driver, who looked to be about twelve, was very keen to take us to a viewpoint above the town he said we would enjoy. He was right (though his motivation may have been more to do with the hourly rate we’d negotiated) and we spent a bit of time admiring the view and photographing an old steam train and a very modern looking mausoleum to General Delgado.
Back in Manta, we walked to a cafe that was supposed to have good Wi-fi but didn’t, then waited for the shuttle bus to take us to a large shopping centre that did have Wi-fi but only barely.
Back on board, having missed lunch we also skipped tea to snooze, but made up for both at dinner time in the Grand Dining Room.
Back in our stateroom, the ship now underway again, we sat up in bed with the TV tuned to channel 4, and waited for the location information to show that we’d crossed the Equator, and were safely back in the northern hemisphere.
Day 329 (at sea cruising towards the Panama Canal)
Run #3 of week 5 (1 x 20’. Think that’s the longest I’ve ever run for without stopping.) After running, I read for a while in a covered over, outside section of Deck 14 they call The Patio, before breakfast in Waves. That was followed at 10.45am – as chance would have it exactly 12 hours after actually crossing the equator – by their Crossing the Line ceremony.Much like on Celebrity Solstice when we crossed the equator at sea for the first time, ready and waiting was a (dead) fish to be kissed by initiates (or ‘Pollywogs’ if you remember) and a vat of green slime with which they were to be anointed. As ‘Shellbacks’ (those who have already been initiated) our roll was to watch and cheer as King Neptune and his court did their bit.
To be honest, I think Celebrity did it better and with much more enthusiasm. For instance, on Celebrity, The ceremony was presided over by the captain and his senior officers. (Apparently this is customary.) Whereas, none of the senior officers from our ship were present, only the entertainment staff, who, incidentally, had the slime poured over their hands, not their precious hair dos. Pretty poor show, I say. Mind you, the general lack of enthusiasm could also, in part, be due to the fact that it rained fairly solidly for the duration of the event.
Most of the rest of the day was spent back in our room, where I read a bit more while Juli looked at her photos. That was followed by lunch in the Terrace Cafe (not eating there again – some people are just so rude) with a film on TV for afters. (Parental Guidance. That’s another two hours of my life I shan’t get back.) Finally, in the evening, we met up with Georg and Barbara for dinner again, this time in the Grand Dining Room, and very jolly it was too. (Who says Germans have no sense of humour.)
Day 330 (transiting through the Panama Canal)
Per the day’s schedule, I’d set my alarm for 5.30am so as to be up in time to see the whole thing from start to finish, including passing under the Bridge of the Americas, which is one of those iconic bridges around the world like the Golden Gate in San Francisco or the Sydney Harbour Bridge or our own London Bridge. The Bridge of the Americas effectively connects North and South America and carries the Pan American Highway, a ribbon of asphalt that winds the length of two of the great continents of the world. Some day, we’d like to follow it from Anchorage in Alaska to Ushuia at the southern tip of Argentina.
Lots of our fellow passengers were filling almost every foot of railing. Like us, they were after a good view of the canal and its great locks. These raise and lower something like 15,000 ships annually between sea level on either side of the canal and lake Gatun – artificially created by the damming of the Chagres river – a difference of around 85 feet, depending on tides. The whole navigation including approach channels, locks, cut and lakes is just 50 miles, but it saves ships a journey round Cape Horn at the southernmost tip of South America about 8,000 miles. For this they are charged, according to tonnage, as much as $350,000. Our fair was $264,400 and change. The lowest toll was for a man called Richard Halliburton, who, in 1928, swam through the canal for the sum of 36 cents.
There are six side-by-side pairs of locks in total. At the Pacific end are the Miraflores Locks: a sequence of two pairs together (known as a staircase) where the top gates of the lower pair are the bottom gates of the top locks. These are followed almost immediately (on the other side of little Lake Miraflores) by a third pair, the Pedro Miguel Locks. At the Atlantic end, are the Gatun Locks: a staircase of three pairs. In the middle are the Gaillard Cut (8 miles long) and Lake Gatun (15 miles).
Ships pass through the locks under their own power, but are guided (and braked, if necessary) by electric locomotives called Mules that run on rails either side of the locks. Cables between a ship and the mules, fore and aft, are kept under tension to ensure that the ship remains centred on the locks.
Each lock is 1,000 feet long by 110 feet wide. (Marina is 106 feet wide.) However, currently under construction are a new set of locks (and canals to connect them) which, when finished, will each measure 1,400 feet long by 180 feet wide, and are scheduled to be completed in time for the 100th anniversary of the original canal’s opening next year.
We stood on deck and took lots of photos (and a bit of video that I’ll try to edit together if I get a chance) as the ship was guided up through the first two, but went down to breakfast during the third. (It’s not that exciting.) Between breakfast and lunch, as we sailed along the cut and out across the lake, we watched as several other large ships sailed by. These included containers ships, two car carrying ships and a Disney cruise ship (the Disney Wonder) that blew its musical horn at us: the first seven notes of When You Wish Upon A Star. We didn’t respond.
After lunch – for which we wore our ‘photo shoot’ clothes, supplemented by my new Panama hat – we stood at the back of the ship to watch the process of coming back down to sea-level through the final three locks. Then, as we sailed out into the Caribbean Sea, we went back to our room for a cup of tea and to change for dinner in Jacques, where the chef, by special request, had prepared a treat just for us: ‘Iles Flottantes’ (floating islands).
One last fascinating fact about the canal. Our transit was from the Pacific to the Atlantic, an eastward journey you might reasonably assume. However, because the canal crosses from one ocean to the other at a point on the isthmus between North and South America that snakes back on itself, the canal not only runs more north-south than east-west, but the point where we finished our transit was actually further west than where we started it. Check it in an atlas if you don’t believe me.
Day 331 (Cartagena, Colombia)
We awoke as the gleaming white hi-rise towers of Cartagena’s new city came into view and emerged from the haze.
After breakfast, we walked off the ship (berthed in another large container port) passed through the shops of the cruise terminal and on to the port gates to find a taxi. There were lots of taxi drivers waiting for us, each offering various round-trip sight-seeing tours. But when they discovered we only wanted to a one-way trip to the old city, they virtually blanked us. One disinterestedly gestured for us to try further down the street, where we did eventually find a cab to where we wanted to go. Not a great start.
However that was the only bit of unpleasantness we experienced all day. Far from the dire warnings issued by the ship in the daily newssheet, where we’d read about child pickpockets, aggressively pushy hawkers and other perilous traps for the unwary. Cartagena, and indeed the whole of Columbia, has a reputation for being a dangerous, lawless place run by drug barons. In fact, when the local police brought sniffer dogs on board in Lima, It was straight to the cabins of the few Columbian crew members that they headed first. That reputation, though once well deserved, is now, based on our experience anyway, simply wrong and out of date. The most you could say is that the various street traders we met are keen to make a sale – of course they are – and a million miles from our experiences in many of the other places we’ve been to, Cairo for one. Things have moved on from the era of Kirk Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone.
Once inside the impressive old city walls, our first visit was to the tourist information office, where we were given an excellent map with a suggested self-guided walking tour route clearly marked, followed by a bank to draw out some Colombian Pesos. (About 1,800 to the Dollar.) On the way we passed through a couple of small squares surrounded by elegant colonial buildings from the Spanish era painted in bright colours with wooden balconies and great double doors with fabulous bronze or brass adornments.
The old city – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – contains many wonderful religious buildings, including churches, monasteries and convents. We particularly wanted to see the city’s cathedral, which sits on one corner of the central square, Plaza do Bolivar (Bolivar’s Square). On the way we popped in for a look round the church (and museum) of San Pedro Claver, who was South America’s first saint and particularly well known in connection with his work against slavery.
We discovered that the cathedral was closed (no sign indicating it’s opening hours) so headed for another fine church we’d read about, that of Santo Domingo. Unfortunately that too was closed, though here there was a sign promising its re-opening at 2.00pm. We decided to have a drink in one of the many cafes surrounding the square in front of the church (Plaza Santo Domingo) which is also home to a famous piece of sculpture called Mujer Reclinada (Reclining Woman) one of many piece of sculpture and statuary around the city.
A drink turned into lunch, and at about quarter to three, with the church showing no sign off opening, we decided to move on and began to follow the walking tour. Its route took us along streets and through squares, past parks and many fine buildings we might otherwise have overlooked. Before too long we arrived back at the cathedral, which was now open.
We hired an audio guide, which took us around the small (for a cathedral) church and included stories from the cities past. One of these was how “the corsair” (PC term for pirate) Sir Francis Drake arrived ahead of a flotilla to attack the city, which at that time had yet to build it’s defensive walls. According to the story, he positioned a cannon in one of the doorways to the church and threatened to fire it if his demands (for loot) were not satisfied. The Bishop persuaded the City fathers to resist, so Sir Francis did what he said he would do and demolished a number of the massive stone pillars holding up the roof, which partially collapsed. At which point, the City caved in too. (Apparently the bishop felt rather badly about the whole thing.)
Anyway, Sir Frances got what he came for and pushed off back to England. The City, now broke, did nothing to rebuild or even shore up the church, which was left largely open to the elements. Eventually, after many months of inaction by the City, some festival or other celebrations involving lots of people marching about and letting off fireworks caused the rest of the church to collapse. At this point the city immediately sprung into action and arrested the church’s builder claiming it was entirely his fault that the blessed building had fallen down. Apparently it took the courts two years to acquit him. I don’t know if the original builder got the gig to rebuild it, but someone did, and a lovey job they made of it too.
After the cathedral, we caught another cab back to the cruise terminal, did a bit of shopping and came back on board to go through all our photos. Dinner was in the Grand Dining Room, but only after I changed shirts, as my first selection no longer stays buttoned up round my middle. Salads for me from now on.
[Clocks forward one hour tonight.]
Day 332 (cruising along the coast of Columbia)
Bit of a late start followed by run number one of week 6. However, had a bit of a false start when Juli’s MP3 player, which I’ve been borrowing, failed to yield to my command. Had to play through the podcast on her laptop to get the gist of what I was supposed to be doing, then run in silence. What a time for the technology to fail me just when I need it most. Afterwards (no breakfast for me) I blogged about the last few days while Juli did the laundry and completed another needlepoint kit.Very light lunch, no tea and the prospect of watching Juli enjoying a steak or a lobster or something equally delicious in the seat opposite me at dinner tonight in the Polo Grill, while I nibble on a carrot. :(
So, here we are in the Caribbean anticipating a half dozen more stops at exotic destinations. Next time I write, we’ll be making our way out of the tropics towards more temperate climes. For now though it’s still hot hot hot. Hope things are beginning to warm up for you all back home.
TTFN - N
[Click here for more photos from South America.]
