Ant Trails Ramblings

  If you’ve been following our posts on social media since we arrived at Galapagos you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the Amazon Rainforest’s reign as ‘the best thing ever’ didn’t last. As it turns out it rains longer than it reigns. Our experience in Galapagos was simply fabulous. ‘Wow, just wow’, as Pam Bewes put it when commenting on one of our posts, just about sums it up. If you have a bucket list, put this place on it. I'm sure it helped that we chose the best cabin on the best and newest boat operating in the islands. Come on, it was Tracy’s 60th, if we weren’t going to ‘push the boat out’ then, when would we? Through their evolutionary history, over tens of millions of years, the species here survived with no predators. Left to get on with it themselves they developed their own fear free ecosystem. So, when man turned up some 400 years ago, they were sitting ducks, or sitting tortoises to be more precise, and their trust in man proved to be unfounded. Fortunate...

Tracy has been preparing for this trip by learning Spanish on Duolingo. She’s better at it than she admits and a damn sight better than me. I can list the number of Spanish words I know on my fingers, although since arriving in Ecuador I will be engaging one more finger than previously. It’s only after I arrived in the country, and after having been on the planet for almost 59 years, that I realised Ecuador is the Spanish for Equator. It seems blindingly obvious now. If you pronounce the words using the same vowel sounds they are pretty much identical, try it. Because we don’t, it never occurred to me, and I suspect the same can be said for many other English speakers (go on, admit it). Somewhat bizarrely, the country has named itself after a line. An imaginary one at that! I’d have thought if any country were going to name itself after a line it would be Colombia. It’s easily arranged, just swap the lombia for caine, job done! Eric Clapton’s already written them a new national anthem....

I imagine I am not the only husband to experience this but sometimes I am expected to know what my wife Tracy is talking about based on relatively scant information. This morning, for example, shortly after we woke up, she said “I think this is the best thing I’ve ever done”. Now I hoped she was not talking about sleeping in separate beds, which we have been obliged to do in our rainforest accommodation. Maybe she was talking about becoming a successful racehorse owner. After all she had, one might say, ‘encouraged me to be awake’ at four o’clock in the morning to show me the video of Ready to Shine’s latest glorious victory, which had occurred whilst we were asleep. It is a wonder of modern technology that we were able to download and watch a horse race taking place in regional New South Wales whilst staying in a lodge in the Peruvian rainforest, three hours travel from the nearest civilisation. It’s down to Starlink, which is all about satellites, and something to do with Elon Musk. ...

It was not originally in our plans to visit Chile, our focus during this, our first visit to South America, being on Peru for the Amazon and Ecuador for The Galapagos Islands. In fact, the genesis of this trip was Tracy’s desire to be in The Galapagos on her 60th birthday, specifically to see the Blue-footed Booby. More on that when we get there. The only direct flight from Australia to South America is with Qantas to Santiago and when we discovered this we decided to stay in Chile for a couple of days, mainly to get over the jet lag before venturing onwards. We’ve gone a bit cool on Qantas in recent times, like most Australians. The flight was ok though, the staff were great and the food excellent. If my screen had worked without having to be rebooted and my seat functioned without me having to stand up the whole experience would have been perfect. I’m sure those minor problems would be Alan Joyce’s fault, everything else seemed to be. This was one of those flights where you are in th...