It is briefly Thursday. Soon after the plane takes off we will cross the International Date Line and it will be Friday. I will savour the delights of Thursday while they last.

LAN were unable to check our bags through to Sydney as the French wanted a chance to check our bag in Tahiti. Also flights to Tahiti from South America aren’t subject to the new ‘not allowed to hijack a plane with a bottle of shampoo’ rule. This does apply for flights in and out of Australia. The irony of the terrorism prevention measures in Tahiti, is that the French Government has a long history of supporting terrorism. It was somewhere in French Polynesia that the French Government terrorists responsible for bombing the Rainbow Warrior were sent to work on their tan for a few years in the guise of a ‘gaol sentence’.

Anyway, as a result of all this security palaver, we have had to line up, go through immigration and customs, collect our bags and do it all in reverse 50m down the concourse. We were in the country for less than 30 minutes. That is my shortest stay in any country. The airport hasn’t caught up with the trend in most of the civilised world and still allows smoking in its terminal, and not just in a tar stained glass booth with powerful air conditioning. It is permitted everywhere and those French cigarettes with the smell of slowly burning Parisian dog shit seem to be the order of the day. Or is that the ‘odour of the day’.

If the French disappeared off the face of the earth, would anyone really care or indeed notice? Certainly getting them out of the Pacific would be a start, although that might mean having to test nuclear devices a little closer to home.

Sue has gone to see if we can get into the ‘Club Lounge’ since she is in the Qantas Club and the flight is code shared with Qantas. Unfortunately on these code-shared flights only business class passengers are allowed in the lounge. Pricks!

This is our second last airport of the trip. The last of course being Sydney, where we look forward to being abused by the taxi driver for the crime of living too close to the airport. We shall see.

We are sitting in the hotel’s breakfast room finishing off a bottle of vino blanco while an interview is being filmed next to us. I have no idea what it is about or who is being interviewed, but we haven’t been asked to move and are sitting only just out of shot.

Today was very quiet. We slept in late again and then went for a walk around town. We stopped at the Internet café where I discovered both the caches I had missed had been found in the last six days.

Sort of hiring a car there was no way to get back to the volcano, so we went back to the cache near the cemetery. Armed with new knowledge that it was a micro cache, we found it easily, but I had forgotten the travel bug. Although there was no way to fit a 10cm long plastic bull inside a micro cache, I left it under the boulder in which the cache was hidden. Having brought it half way around the world, I wasn’t going to take it back.

The rest of the day was spent eating lunch, not too much as our Pesos were running out and the islands only ATM only took MasterCard. It is only 45 minutes until our transfer to the airport arrives. It is 1815 and we will be travelling until 1500 tomorrow (0700 Sydney time). That is a lot of time in the air and not a lot of fun.

As I write these words in my diary, it is dawning on me that my holiday is almost over.

Today is Day 4 of the 5 day tour and is a “day at leisure”. The sea is too rough to go diving, hiring a car would see us driving to places we have already been and we have visited at least ¾ of the shops in the village. There is not a lot to do but sit around in the sun/shade and read. This is very relaxing but has an underlying feeling of constriction.

Day 5 of the tour is ‘Depart Easter Island’, but since the flight is at 2130 (pickup at 1900), it is another free day. I still have 400 pages of a new book to finish but Sue is down to 200 or less on hers. Although there are a wide variety of stone statues for sale in the shops and the local supermarket has such obscure items as Bart Simpson masks and Spiderman costumes, books seem few and far between. The only available ones are about Easter Island. The next 36 hours could prove to be excruciatingly slow.

Today we have two half day tours with the two remaining Australians. There was a three hour break in the middle. We visited more huas and the ceremonial village of Orongo. It was just near here that I failed to find my second cache on Easter Island. Ground zero was an opening under a pile of rocks, but the cache was not to be found. The travel bug will now have to returned to Australia. Shame. So many near misses.During the 3 hour break we tried to change our flight to an earlier one, only to find that the flight we are on is the next west bound flight.

At sunset we went to the nearby hua to take photos of the sun setting behind the Maoi, but the cloud conspired to block most of the light.

We had a simple meal before going to bed.

Today we had a tour a tour with the six other Australians. Every site seeing spot involved stone statues in one form or another. We began at the sparse but interesting anthropology museum to learn all about the Rapa Nui people and the main periods in their history. (Before the Maoi, building the Maoi, smashing the Maoi).

We went to the quarry where the statues were shaped before they were moved into their final locations. (There are over 800 on the island). We saw the biggest Maoi yet formed (over 200 tonnes, but not completely cut out of the quarry).

We then went to several sites where the Maoi were erected. There have been restored as most were toppled during the “smash the Maoi” period of history. We have another full day tour tomorrow (with a pack lunch) and hopefully the opportunity to find the other Easter Island cache. It will be the last opportunity to dispose of the ‘travel bug’ before we go home. The duty free Absolut Citron is helping the assimilation process.

The flight to Easter Island was great because it was on a 767-300 refitted with a new entertainment system. It had both video and audio on demand with a choice of over 70 movies and TV shows and 300 CDs. There were also video games.

At Easter Island our bags were almost the last on the carousel and we feared that they may not have made it on to the plane. We shared our transfer with six other Australians, although they were staying at a different hotel.

We had a few hours sleep to catch up on that lost on the plane, before going for a short walk around Hanga Roa (the capital and only real town). We searched unsuccessfully for a cache and suspect it may have been discovered by a local.

Although our luggage was checked through to Easter Island, it still came off the carousel at Santiago. Luckily Sue spotted her bag as we walked past. I guess this is because we were going from international to domestic.

We had to check the bags in again, which was just as well as we had been allocated seats in different parts of the plane.

On the way through a LAN employee spruiking for business asked if we wanted to upgrade to business class for $US225. Since the seats on these planes are all the same (except for a little extra leg room), we would have been paying $US225 to have a slightly better meal. Not a good deal in my opinion.

The sun is rising over Santiago, a sun that we shall chase across the Pacific, stretching the length of the day as we follow.

Sue added up the flight hours of our trip and it came to over 50 hours. This is not counting the trips within our trips such as Quito to Baltra and Lima to Puerto Maldonado. This is a lot of time on planes and we have vowed not to do it again.

Today was an easy day. Sue went to have a pedicure and I had a rest. We had a look around the old town of Quito and went to the Cathedral Museum and the Convent Museum, but they weren’t very exciting. Each had lots of gory paintings of people in hell and hanging on crosses. We returned to the hotel to find our laundry still not back. Thus ends the shortest diary entry of the trip so far.

For the first time on the trip I rose early enough to see the sunrise and was rewarded with a brilliant orange grey sky. Soon after we went onshore to San Cristobel to finally see Blue Footed Boobies. Some were already settled on egg filled nests while others rocked from foot to foot, doing a dance that would find them a partner.

Also on the hunt for a partner were the frigate birds, who puff up a bright red pouch to impress the females. We were so busy looking at the birds on either side of the track that we would sometimes almost step on a sea lion or iguana that lay across the path.

Here we also saw the land iguanas for the first time, all of the others had been marine iguanas. The land iguanas are bigger, fatter and don’t have the line of spikes along their back. We had breakfast later than usual and then motored back to Baltra.

There was a bus shelter where we got off the boat, but both of the large bench seats were occupied by sea lions. And they weren’t even catching the bus.

After a short bus ride we were back at the airport. The airport terminal is like a large shed with half height walls on two sides, this allows a steady cooling air flow through the building, giving relief from the hot equatorial sun.

The sound of someone gargling in a bucket has just filled the air, meaning we will be boarding soon. We return to Quito via Guayaquil. Read the rest of this entry »

We motored during the night to complete a semi-circumnavigation of Isla Santiago. Just off the coast of it is Isla Bartoleme. It is a barren island, formed by a volcano about 800,000 years ago. It has a small variety of plants (mostly pioneer plants) and sandy black volcanic soil. We walked to the top of the island about 140m up and were afforded good views of Isla Santiago and a few of the other nearby islands.

This is day three on the boat and that is close to my limit for staying in such a confined space. The other factor is the lack of control over your movements. Unlike a hotel where you can walk out the door at any time, on a boat you can only leave when they want you to leave.

The cruise finishes tomorrow with the trip officially finishing after breakfast in Quito the day after. In the afternoon we cruised to Sombrero Chino and had a short walk after most of the others had been snorkelling. Stepping off the IRB we had to avoid stepping crabs and then dodge the sea lions as we moved further up the rocks. Everywhere you looked there was some sort of wildlife, it was amazing. On the way back we cruised past some penguins.

In the evening we were served a cocktail before dinner to mark the end of the cruise. Everyone (the 4 day and 8 day cruisers) would be getting off. It was also the birthday of one of the passengers (David) and a brightly iced cake was produced.