January 17th, 2011 by Chris
We finally got around to organising the photos from the trip and choosing a selection to inflict on friends and family. We took those pictures and created a photobook which we’ve now ordered. It took quite a few hours to put together and it’s a bit more expensive than ordering a bunch of prints, but hopefully it’ll be worth it. You can have a look at it if you want. 
September 2nd, 2010 by Chris
So we finally made it home to Oxford. There’s nothing like flying in from São Paulo to make the air at Heathrow seem clean and the M25 seem civilized. We seem to have been lucky with the weather too – it’s been sunny and warm since we got back. It’s taken a while to get used to being home – we’ve been travelling so long that it just felt like just somewhere else to stay at first. The girls complained that it “didn’t feel like home”. But I think we’ve settled in now.
Since we gave some lessons learnt at the halfway point, I thought I should come up with some more. So here goes:
- If we were planning this trip with the benefit of hindsight, we probably would have done it in reverse, with South America first. Travelling is more work there, especially with the language barrier, so it would have made sense to have tackled that straight away. By the last few weeks of the trip we (and especially the girls) were running out of steam a little, meaning we didn’t see quite as many things as we might.
- Don’t rely on hotel internet connections being any good. Just because they provide one doesn’t mean it’ll be cheap, fast or reliable.
- Take one of these pegless washing lines – invaluable.
- Don’t carry a monopod in your hand luggage. It can look like a telescopic baton as used by police. I was told at Rio’s Santos Dumont airport that I couldn’t take it on the plane. Luckily they let me go back out of security to check it into the hold. I can imagine if that happened in the UK it would be a case of “tough luck, mate”.
- Your children may be more concerned about how fashionable they look when travelling than you are. You might need to supplement their wardrobe as you go, just for your own sanity.
- The BA in-flight map thinks that the translation of “Aberystwyth” into Spanish is “Alberto Lea”. Not sure if that’s some kind of in-joke or what.
All I have to do now is process the gigabytes of photos into some sort of sensible shape. This may take some time! Thanks for following along on the journey…
September 1st, 2010 by beth
Imbassai, a small village on the Coconut Coast, about an hour north of Salvador in Bahia. The last destination before flying to São Paulo to pick up our flight to the UK. Warm sunshine, a Pousada set in gorgeous tropical gardens with its own pool and only 10 minutes stroll to a golden sanded beach backed by a line of coconut palms. What did we do? We chilled. The girls spent every hour they could in the water. They were not fans of our enforcement of the no sun exposure between 11.30 and 3pm rule!
We all enjoyed the delights of dozing in a hammock, watching the monkeys playing in the trees.
Slightly less fun were the biting insects at dusk. We managed to get nibbled despite long trousers and shirts, repellents and bed nets. Thankfully there was no health risk, just nuisance value, but it did make me appreciate that bite avoidance tactics are not infallible.
We dined out at the local restaurant, then walked home in the darkness, serenaded by the chorus of frogs in the nearby river.
August 25th, 2010 by Chris
August 24th, 2010 by Chris
We’re back from five days spent in the Pantanal. We have a ton of photos, but the hotel internet connections we’ve had since are not going to cope with my trying to upload them all. So they’ll have to wait for now. We stayed in a lodge which was really in the back of beyond. By which I mean an hours drive on an unsealed road from mains electricity. The girls found it slightly difficult at times as the temperature in the middle of the day was getting up in the high 30s and there were a few beasties around. But our guide, Roberto Queiroz, was excellent and we saw a giant anteater, a couple of anacondas, rheas, jabiru storks, coatis, capybaras and more cayman than you can imagine. The food at the lodge was also better than at our hotel back in ‘civilization’ in the city of Cuiabá. We had trouble finding any decent accommodation as there seemed to be a couple of conferences in town. It’ll be interesting to see how they cope when they host World Cup games in 2014…
August 24th, 2010 by beth
I’ve been so busy travelling recently that I’ve had no time to record my thoughts. Now however the opportunity presents itself – I am taking a siesta in the cool of our room while the hot Pantanal sun beats down outside.
There is a lot to talk about.
In this post I’ll talk about New Zealand. We spent two fantastic weeks there. It is a country with spectacular scenery and nature. I’d love to return in the future. Our first stop was Queenstown in the South Island – you’ll have seen the amazing views we got as the plane approached in an earlier post. Crosscountry skiing was brilliant fun – so much so that we are seriously considering a future trip to Scandinavia to do it again!
We had a lovely time with Keith and Jan in Dunedin. Keith took us to his Marine Lab on the Otago Peninsula. We saw the aquarium there ( the girls specially enjoyed the touching pools)and also had the good fortune to see some carpet sharks that were being monitored as part of a research project. We also took a boat trip out to Taiaroa Head where it is possible to get really good views of the only Royal Northern Albatross colony on mainland. We saw albatross soaring around plus young albatross being fed and taking their first faltering steps. There were seals and some little blue penguins too. We also visited Allan’s Beach on the peninsula in search of sea lions. We didn’t see any but it was the most fantastic beach – golden sands and wild spume. One of my favorite beaches of all.
Jan took us to the Moeraki boulders and then on to see a colony of yellow eyed penguins that live on the cliffs surrounding a lighthouse nearby. We were able to get really close to them in the dusky light. When I get a chance I’ll upload a video.
We also visited Baldwin Street which is officially the worlds steepest street.
Another trip was taking the girls to NZ Cadbury’s World. Rather ironic as we haven’t been to the one in Birmingham. It was very entertaining and we left clutching a bag of Cadbury’s freebies most of which were things we hadn’t tasted before because they are only available in New Zealand. Almost all chocolate bars seem to contain marshmallow – makes them very hard to eat discreetly!
Next up was Rotorua in the North Island. Wow. I had high expectations and they were met. We visited Wai-O-Tapu an amazing geothermic area with clouds of sulphurous steam rising from boiling lakes, spouting geysers and bubbling mud pools.
We all loved luxuriating in the spa pool at our motel looking up at the stars and watching the steam rise from the hot water into the chilly night air.
Learning a Haka and sharing a Hangi meal at Mitai Maori village was another very memorable evening.
August 12th, 2010 by Chris
We’ve been enjoying our time in Rio. It’s just like you’d expect. The traffic is a bit crazy, the beaches are lovely and there are lots of beautiful tanned people jogging along them. We’ve had no problems with beggars and haven’t felt unduly worried about crime. It’s fun just relaxing, having breakfast in a juice bar and shopping for Havaianas. So much fun that it looks like we will be cancelling a side trip to stay in the city and do more of the same…
August 10th, 2010 by Louisa
Rio can be so many places all moulded into one. Hong Kong, Brisbane, Dunedin and yet when you look at the beaches you feel like you are on one of those far off islands in the middle of the ocean where it is always sweltering hot!!! Due to the fact that we have friends living in Rio we went to there house for lunch. Cesar, (the man of the house) who is an extremely good cook, made us a typical brazillian meal of rice, salad, steak and chips. It can get up to 23 degrees but it is not very hot. I hope that all is well at home. louisa 
August 9th, 2010 by Chris
We’re now in South America. The contrast with New Zealand has taken some getting used to. It could have been a bigger shock as we are in Santiago and Chile feels quite European in many ways. (Imagine a version of Spain that took an extra 15 years to emerge from dictatorship and never joined the EU). Santiago is not a huge city by Latin American standards, but it still has more inhabitants that the whole of NZ. It is also quite noisy and busy and our previous stop was in the out-of-season Coromandel peninsula, which is neither of those things. Finally, we’ve got the language barrier to deal with. Our Spanish is mostly based on our knowledge of Portuguese, so it probably sounds pretty odd.
Unfortunately when we arrived here tired and jetlagged the apartment we booked turned out to be lacking in several respects and cold in the night. Put that on top of the culture shock and you have a recipe for some unhappy campers. Once we’d booked ourselves into a nice hotel instead, things started looking up. Now I wish we had longer here so we could see a few more things around the city…
I was struck by the games of chess and checkers going on in the centre of Santiago, with groups of men standing around watching. In this case the competitors seemed to be a beggar and a man in a smart business suit, so I couldn’t resist taking a photo. (Large version to appear on Flickr in due course)
August 6th, 2010 by Anna
We are in Santiago and everywhere we go they give us this enormas meal that you can never finish.
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