Bing Bong!

Just landed. Prepare for dirty students and washing.

Boobies on show!

Today was our last complete day on Galapagos, we visited North Seymour Island today which is the largest bird colony in the group of islands.

We were able to just quietly walk through the rocks and these beautiful creatures just carried on with their business as if we weren't even there.

Later today we managed a final snorkelling trip where sharks, a ray and many fish were spied.

After that it was back for showers and tea - the biggest tea for some of the entire trip; Jess and Cath destroyed the following in about 30 minutes flat:

1 quarter pounder hamburger (each)
1 plate of sausage and mash (mash appears to mean chips)
1 pizza between two

If you hear an explosion in the night, you will know what has happened.

Tomorrow we are off for a quick hike then on to the airport 8-(

Most trips end with some sort of discussion about what people would most like to eat when they return home, If you are a keen parent, perhaps you can indulge your teenager the following:

Ross - Chinese takeaway
Matt - sausage and mash with gravy
Joe & Rosie - whatever is on the table
Tilly - um.. McDonalds
Rhiannon - um.. Apple crumble and cold custard
Catherine - Lasagne
Jess - Beans on toast
Nat - tuna steaks (posh!)
Charlotte - Profiteroles
Pip - Cheese and onion pasty (she is cooking )
Milly - Indian!
Becky - Indian
Louise - Lasagne and pudding
James - Steak and Stilton pie

(not sure you will be so sure when you see their washing pile!!)

A normal picture of Pip

As someone commented that there were 'no normal pictures of pip' here is one we took earlier yesterday. Now we don't usually single out students like this but she reluctantly allowed us to photograph her at the tortoise sanctuary where she was able to spend a few hours with her own kind, and without her usual human disguise:

Lonesome George and friends

Today we visited the Charles Darwin research centre on the island, which among other things, is home to lonesome George who has two or three female companions but still no inclination to make babies. Diego on the other hand is the male who has repopulated Espanola island from 14 to 1000 single handedly (tortoises don't have hands, but we won't say anymore as young people may be reading this) anyway he looked well ummmm exhausted to be honest!

George is in the pic below on the front left by his pool (!)

Iguanas, seals and sharks!

Day, um 3&4 and 5? We are beginning to loose track of the days, never mind.

So day 3 we saw penguins on the beach, some went to see the pirates cave (just a cave sadly, no pirates Ian) plus we spotted marine iguanas

Day 4 yesterday was all about changing the plans, as we were scheduled to hike to a crater but it was foggy and instead we went to tortoise breeding centre, and spotted flamingoes at another lagoon. Plus we
Went snorkelling, and Becky (who can't swim) went too (with a little assistance from kay and her friends .. We are all so proud of her.

Day 5 , today is the day we depart for santa cruz island (our last island hop in the big speedboat ) but not before we did some more snorkelling this time down a narrow gap between the rocks where white tipped reef sharks come to rest - they were literally a few meters below us ... Wow - and Mart's waterproof camera decided to run out of battery, so no pic 8-( boo

More later perhaps if we can find some speeeedy connection somewhere.

Hi to Sabine, we loved your comment - we are also missing you, and we'd like to ask the person who wanted a 'normal' picture of pip what they actually meant???? Wasn't the last group photo normal?

Meanwhile here is a little baby sea lion pup that followed us on our walk today....

From an Isabella viewpoint

Cool kids don't sit outside

It is cool to sit outside at the back of the boat unless we are travelling quite fast, as Rosie found out....

Maybe a photo?

Perhaps this will post - saw these today!

Galapagos! Day 1 & 2

Well, we thought we had better post something, in case you had forgotten about us!

My goodness, what a fun packed two days we have had so far.

First we flew in to San Cristobal island, and visited the Galapagos visitors centre, followed by a snorkelling lesson in one of the sheltered bays of the island. This was aided (and hindered at the same time) by two baby seals, plus a very protective parent who decided to perch on the steps we were using to get in and out - so much so that becky, James and Kay couldn't actually get into the water! Hum.

Very shortly afterwards the peace and quiet (sarcasm) was broken by a shriek from tilly who seems to have a bottom that is attractive to baby sealions, later we snorkelled again at the nearby beach met more sealions and watched the sun set.

Today we set forth in the fastest speedboat on the island (petrolheads will need to know at this point that we had 3 200bhp outboards almost flat out) we visited a small rock island and saw nesting boobies! and did some boat based drift snorkelling. The group again encountered a some sea-lions and we played with one in the shallows for about 30 minutes, where *most* people conquered their fears of baby sea-lions wanting to play. Catherine had extra attention from one which managed to unzip the back of her wetsuit!

Later we visited another crater lake, where Martyn and kay's fog curse struck - we were unable to see anything for the fog 8-(

Phew, I'm exhausted writing this....

Even later we jumped on mountain bikes and cycled from the crater lake to the tortoise sanctuary where we met several of the local tortoises who frankly weren't that interested in us. They also breed then here, and there were some baby ones, about 4 inches across.

Now after all that we are off back to our very posh hotel (with pool!) for a mud removal session in the showers and then some dinner.

We are off to another island tomorrow - Floreana

(sorry no pics today, movistar are not giving us much cellular love on the island and we have veeeerrryyy slooow GPRS only)

Kippers

Well that crater lake walk certainly wore us all out! Just about everyone slept on the bus!

Just had a cracking mongolian meal tonight and are off to Galapagos tomorrow! Woo.

Not entirely sure about the phone signal there we will have to see.

Laguna Cuicocha

After a visit to Otovalo Markets, where much money was spent, and many bargains were negotiated (Tilly and Louise even took on the role of personal shoppers after allegedly memorising the layout of all the stalls), it was onward to another spectacular crater lake. This one actually has an island in the middle. We scorned the boat ride and opted instead to hike around the entire lake! Phew. Took us 4 hours however.

We are now on our way back to Quito in order to get our flight to the Galapagos tomorrow.

Crater lake

This is where we ended up at the end of our ride.... Beautiful.

Ride 'em cowboy!

Today we all did a pony trek! Everyone except Pip and Rosie decided they were horse people (many had never ridden before)

James was in a world of his own, gee-ing his stallion up the path, and proudly announcing that he had cracked the secret of getting his horse to trot. It was only slightly later that someone else pointed out that he took off at high speed on several occasions simply because one of the horse handlers was giving his horse a gentle tap on the behind 8-)

The big prize goes to Rosie, who is not a horse person at all, and could be heard to go 'noooo o o o o o o o' every time her horse got bored going slow and started to trot!

Nedd named his horse 'buck' as it refused to let any other one overtake, and was almost as slow as Kay on the hills

Becky displayed her confidence well, and was subsequently given a slightly balmy horse

Let's see however who needs a cushion to sit on tomorrow!

Going up in the world

From Quito to Cotopaxi refuge and glacier 4800 plus metres high and we all made it - hurrah
Then it was down to our hostel and bed for the night... Phew!

By the way - we are getting *all* your comments but we can only publish them when we can get to a computer so don't worry if they're not appearing straight away (it may take us several days).

A special well done to all this techno grandparents out there - we're very impressed.

On that note the hendersons are the only people left with no comments so come on parents what are you up to, hello nan, hope house is great Lisa and hi David. Someone better post something now!!! :-)

Revenge of the Readheads

Today we travelled by bus from Las Palmas after a very welcome night in a hotel and a nice meal. We travelled South to Santa Domingo and then on to Bua. Here we met the Tsa'Chila Tribe of people who live in a small village about an hour away from Bua.

After introductions and a nice fresh drink of raw sugar cane which was freshly squeezed using a wooden press expertly by Pip along with some assistance from Martyn (pip doesn't agree), we engaged in a game of football with two mixed teams. Our performance was variable, and the game determined at draw.

We ate some extremely tasty freshly caught river fish, cooked in palm leaves.

The men in the tribe die the hair on the top of their heads bright red using a locally found berry as it is said to ward off poor health. We expect Ross and Joe's hair to return to normal in a day or two 8-) (they are busy warding for our tribe now!)

Now, perhaps somewhat unwisely, I have handed the blogging machine over to Charlotte as today's guest author:

Dear sad and lonely friends and family,

First and formost, why on earth are you on this blog again? We're still in Ecuador.

Anyway, long story short, we've all joined a tribe, all got tattoos And we are not coming home.

Thank you and goodnight,
Charlotte and Rosie

P.S - fear not parents - the tattoos are actually paint - we expect all of them (including Pippa's Harry Potter lightning bolt on her forehead) to have washed off in a day or two.

Seeing as we are now on the bus back to Quito, we have actually left our new found tribal friends to get on with the next two weeks of our adventure in Ecuador.

We also said goodbye to Sabine, Yanapuma's volunteer group leader, as she joins her next group today. She has promised to follow the rest of our trip here on the blog - Thanks again Sabine for making the first part of our adventure in Ecuador such great fun. 8-) xxx

More blog in a day or two we hope 8-)

Sunshine!

Sooo just in time for our last day at the community project, the sun came out, and the kiddies from the school came to help us move ANOTHER 4 tons of gravel and rocks from the bottom of the school lane. Grr.

For 6-12 ish year olds they are amazingly strong, and got stuck in with our amazingly efficient human rock passing chain- so many hours passed passing rocks in a series of entertaining ways, we even had time to teach Millie to catch (rocks are good for this because if you drop them on your foot they hurt) - no
feet harmed btw.

Today we also visited what Rahul (one of the people who looks after us here) in his 'grande casa' on the hill to watch the wales breeching, and learn about what they are trying to protect in the marine park here.

Onward then, and it was an early start this morning as we had to catch the ranchera to Esmeraldas- we had to be out in the rain waiting for 6am yuck.

Ratty visited us one more time, but we got some sleep at least!

After about 3 hours in the ranchera sharing with the locals, planks of wood, sacks of food, and plantain (mm yummy)) we arrived in Esmeraldas to beautiful sunshine, sat on the beach and had a picnic. Our hotel (complete with showers and beds with mattresses - ooh such luxuries!) after a swim in the sea, we returned to the hotel to have a mammoth blog comment read after a week with no signals..

Some brief messages from some of us, I am sure these will make sense to those who know what they mean:

Becky looks like a lobster. Torse stop posting your daily routine. Louise didn't get burned (ner) Rhiannon and charlotte look like they have been a jolly good meal for some biting insects. Charlotte says just
Because you are in scissasy (her spelling) doesn't mean you cannot post loving comments to your only child. Millie feels loved,please don't stop.
Nat says nic please teach my parents to comment !!!!
Pab and Bethan we love you.
Hi to the tilly fan club (again)

People who feel unloved:

Becky
Rhiannon
Rosie but she is bored of comment from mum and Rachel because they are dry (?)

Finally, we have to ask that our growing fan club please avoid posting comments that may be regarded as offensive to staff or students as we are unable to publish these. (our site here is linked from the school remember) 8-)

Big creepies!

We interrupted our blog comment reading session the other night, as one of the local team here alerted us to a large tarantula spider. This big chappie was right outside our seating area, but was well behaved and stayed still for some photos then he disappeared.

I think we will be checking under our mattresses tonight extra carefully.

Shout outs:

The Tilly fan club - you have posted nearly 1/4 of the total comments!

Louise's boyfriend: dog house for you over that diet comment yesterday, she was not impressed!

Claire: k says the tortuga makes an excellent pillow!!!

Alun & Beth: thanks for your texts, we are back in civilisation soon!

Among the conversation topics today while DIGGING AGAIN were "what meal would you like when you get home" - personally we think this is a little early midway through our 2nd week, so we will keep the list to ourselves.

Big progress at little school

If you look carefully you can see that the steel grid supports are now showing from our expertly dug foundations -after much digging, and two mornings of bailing water from the holes, our local builder assistants have now cemented them into place.
And the green grass patch that we started with is now a mud bath with big holes in - seriously considering a last day mud wrestling competition but we don't think we would get any muddier than we already are.

You will also notice that it is not actually raining in the photo as well - today (Tuesday) we got some real sunshine! Wow.
After five mins of sun and no rain becky and Millie were heard to comment that they wanted the rain back as it cooled them down.

Siesta time this afternoon will mostly be spent by muddy people washing themselves and attempting to dry some clothes - the humidity here means that mostly things get more wet when they are hung out overnight
We are all quite excited by the possibility of clean and dry pants tomorrow - it's the little things in life that keep you going!
3 or 4 days to go and then we might manage a shower instead of a bucket wash - maybe , hopefully , we can dream !

Fingers a go go!

Today was blender finger stitches out day. Dr Lloyd was in attendance, and the patient was well behaved. All are now removed!

Finger still present and patient instructed to continue to care for finger.

Rain Rain and more Rain

Today was a wet one.

It was so wet that Joe actually washed his hair yesterday out the back of the open top bus as we travelled back from the posh beach hotel place.

Now for a blender-finger update:

We have a blender here, but we have banned Jess from being near it. Her finger is fine, it has been swimming, dug holes, wheelbarrowed, planted seedlings, played football, and (the dressing) has been changed regularly. Dr Lloyd says that tomorrow is stitches out Tuesday!

We think however that something in her brain also got blended - so far she has:

-Lost her toothbrush
-Accidentally changed her padlock code and forgotten it
-lost her padlock completely
-slipped over and dropped a bucket of wet cement

But - apart from that, she's fine. Really, everyone is very proud of Jess because she has smiled throughout, as well 8-)

More rain tomorrow then.

Nat meets a jellyfish

Don't panic, it was only a small one, it tried to make friends with her yesterday while we had a day at a posh beach resort, but only manage to sting her. After some hasty application of vinegar, all is well and she was free to participate in a football match that took place later that afternoon.

We then waited on the Ranchera to return us to our house about an hour away. This was when we discovered about the RAIN. It rained on us for the entire journey back and we all got extremely wet.

Later that evening it got wetter and wetter, and wetter. After we went to bed it also got wetter and wetter still - in fact it rained all night without stopping. We squelched our way to breakfast this morning half hoping that due to the fact that it was STILL raining we would get the day off - no such luck. It rained sooo much overnight that the 2m holes that we had dug had filled completely with water!

We spent the rest of the morning bailing with buckets to empty them.

We are all here!

Despite some comments to the opposite, we did all get here, and we have just had a really nice day at the beach relaxing instead of working. Well it is Sunday after all

Special hi to all those internet grans and grandads we are loving your comments. More blog in a week when we get back to town

Beach tidy

Today we took a break from digging and planting to help the villagers clear the nearby beach. Sadly we cleared most of the plastic you see here from the beach, but none of this is left by people here, it all drifts down from the californian coast, along with large amounts of wood.

It was Charlottes birthday today (she didn't remind us much), so we ignored her all day, and had a surprise party in the evening with pass the parcel, cake, and musical statues as well as toasted marshmallows by the fire.

James meets gecko

Part of our beach tidying efforts today involved meeting some of the local wildlife, this included two hermit crabs, a gecko, and a baby octopus.

Back at the ranch later in the evening we also met a 'bug with a torch in his butt' (as described by our new Dutch friend Sabine who is working here with yanapuma) - I much prefer this description to 'glow bug' - we saw several types - including one with two ' 'glowing headlamps' which are apparently different colours for the male and female.

Meet the neighbours

Today was a blur of digging, bag filling, sawing and square steel thing making

The local school has just one classroom building, this morning we helped out with the foundations to a new second building. The locals make new buildings from steel reinforced concrete frames, with timber or brick infill between the frames.

Due to the remote location of many schools out here, it is mandatory for new teachers to spend some time teaching in these remote places. Naturally everyone wants the teachers to be comfortable during their stay, so the volunteer groups out here built a teacher's house first! We are told today that it took 4 different groups of people to complete the teachers house, with this in mind we are the first group to work on the 2nd classroom, so we will mostly be doing the groundworks by hand (!) -

The team split into two today, one group starting on a series of 12 deep foundation holes needed for the steel and concrete supports, while the other half spent the day in a nearby tree nursery preparing pots for seedlings.

We also met a man who catches the giant snails you get round here to feed the pigs, and we got to meet a local animal - a bush baby (we think) he looked very sleepy.

Digging, spiders and a rat

This morning we were woken a little early in our lovely house by an unwelcome visitor - a rat! To be honest he had been to visit the night before as well but we didn't twig that he was a local resident in the building until today. He also tried to share Ross' bed last night which is not at all on. It turns out that he was living in a spare drain pipe in our rafters, which we have now removed along with all the food that was in our bags! We will see if we are rat free tonight.

Group 1 started in the holes yesterday, managing to complete nearly 5 of the 12 holes. It was the turn of team 2 today, and here they are below.

Work was briefly interrupted today by a large spider in one of the deepest holes - James appeared to be an expert in identifying it, he said it was big but not a tarantula so that was helpful ! but not bad though as he is not at all keen on creepies along with many others there have been many shriek moments so far cockroaches are a favourite but the large witchery grub in the compost heap only scored a muted round of ughs !

Underwear origami

So today we enjoyed Spanish lessons, and Salsa!

We are quite knackered now, but we did have a very nice Ecuadorian lunch (chicken, sauce, beans, and rice). During lunch we had a number of creative people constructing interesting items from the restaurant napkins, this included Charlottes creative underwear, though we understand that she will not be wearing it during the trip.

Olivia Rhiannon says thanks for remembering me! Xxx

Unloved people today are Catherine neddyn, Jo Tilly louise matt James - so families how about some comment love! ( some of you have been dishing up quite a lot of love already)

Ok, so tomorrow we head to Caimito on the north west coast. This is where our community project is. There is no cell phone signal there unfortunatley so we suspect that there will be no blogging either 8-(

If we do get a chance to update here we will, but don't panic if you don't hear from us for a couple of weeks due to this.

Rest assured there will likely be a torrent of updates as soon as we are back in coverage. This also applies to you commenting types - your comments won't appear until we can get to them .

Meanwhile enjoy the nice UK weather, it was quite cool here today and it thundered again.

Smells different

Here we are hard at work on our Spanish.

Happy birthdays to Tillys brother Oscar, and Millie's dad for tomorow

Becky says please give Puzzle the horse cuddles every time you go to the yard.

Louise is obsessed with the fact that it smells different (!)

Some students are feeling unloved as they haven't had any comments!

Bethan charlotte says no ppt for me yet (it's not PowerPoint) and Trish please post more text!

Panic at the equator

Whilst we were balancing eggs today and watching water run down drains in different directions today, the three wallies pictured realised that they had filled their water bottles before removing the instruction leaflets from their shiny clean bottles - oops

We thank you for your comprehensive big brother update today, perhaps we could have shorter ones, as we had to take a commercial break during reading them.

A quick visit to the supermarket today allowed everyone to stock up on highly nutritious snacks, we caught the world cup final in a nice bar in quito, then got drenched as the rain came on

We are currently relaxing in a nice Mexican restaurant waiting on our dinner

Spanish lessons, Salsa class await us tomorrow, with perhaps some more blogging depending on wifi 8-)

Egg balancing on the equator!

Today we visited the Equator, apparently it's possible to balance an egg on a nail more easily as the forces of gravity are less on the actual line of the equator

Only three of the group had the required steady hand to do this though - hah.

Waiting, and planes and waiting and planes

So we made it to Ecuador fine, just not to the right airport! Our flight was diverted last night due to a thunderstorm, but hey we had chips and queuing and everything

Twitter is down ... Yay

We're on the plane... Ola Madrid

About comments then.

So, if you are a blogging newbie you might find this helpful:

You can post a comment or message to any of our updates on the Ecuador blog by clicking the little 'comment' link

This will take you to the page where you can see if anyone else commented.

Type your comment in the box, select 'anonymous' if you don't want to sign up with an account, compete the 'captcha' if it is there (the wiggly letters you type in to protect against spam!)

Finally, click 'post comment'

The blog then privately sends us your comment in an email so it wont appear on the site until we have read it and approved it.

Bear in mind that it may be several days before we get connected to get your comment, we may also read it and choose not to publish it as well, so don't be upset if you don't see it! (we're looking at you big brother addicts)

We really do enjoy reading out your messages so keep em coming!

Kippers and a blender

What a tranquil place heathrow can be after the rabble of 15 teenagers finally subsides.

It's so warm tonight they are literally sleeping outside under the canopy most unbritish!

We are also finally joined by Jess who did her best to blend her fingers in a blender earlier today - I think there is definitely a new nickname there somewhere.... Whizzer?, Blender?, miss whizz?

Dont panic Mrs Harvey!

Yes, the comments page is a little confusing, but it is working - if you look below the last post, you'll see your comment.

We'll do a special post later tonight about how to post comments, while we enjoy our 5 hours in the Airport!!!

Pics up from the last training weekend!

Gosh, we've been a bit complacent, didnt even post the link to last training weekend. You can check them out on our main site here.

The sun shone (which is unusual for May) and we all had a great time. There was even time for some Fire spinning things...

We've just realised that actually, there arent any more training weekends, the next meet-up will be the parents evening and then, we're off! See you then!