Some pics and other items

This first picture is of me at Los Frailes, the beach preserve I visited in Puerto López. So lovely! And I´m working the hat, thanks ladies! :)

The two bird shots are on Isla del Plata, or what is also known as the poor man´s Galapagos. The blue footed ones are blue footed boobies, and the one with the eggs is a masked boobie. We were only feet away and they couldn´t have cared less. Very cool to see! One of these days when I´m gainfully employed perhaps I´ll make the trip to the true Galapagos to see the other creatures there, but not this time around. For now, boobies will more than suffice.





This last pic is of a whale that was so close to the boat I had a visceral reaction to how close it was -- it suddenly dawned on me that if it surfaced at the wrong spot our boat was toast. It was probably only twenty feet away. Wow. And at the same time as I was taking this picture, another three or four were within a hundred feet of us. So beautiful and so far beyond us. I felt guilty about the boat motor noises -- I am sure they sound like a complete cacaphony to creatures who communicate through sonar... But I am still glad to have been able to see them, guilt or no guilt!



Cuenca is lovely. The bus trip here went through two national parks and they were just beautiful. I am glad to be back in the mountains again -- I like the landscape and the climate is good too. The coast was lovely though, and I think that I´ll follow the advice of the Peruvian family I met regarding the best route through northern Peru from Ecuador. I´d be planning to take the Sierra route, but it seems that connecting between villages is hard (in the sense that the bus may only come once a week through some of these parts) and well. I don´t have that long to make it from Vilcabamba to Lima! I think that the coast will be good though. Until I get to Lima the weather should be quite good and it´s about my only opportunity to get a bit of summer before I head up into the colds of Bolivia. I met a lady in Puerto López who told me that in La Paz the temperature at night in a good hotel is about zero Celcius, and in a dodgier (read cheaper!) one the temps can get as low as -10C or more... Good thing I have my sleeping bag with me, methinks...