All the way south

There are a few different ways you can "do" the Galapagos, but from what I read the best way, where you make the best use of your precious/expensive time there, is to go on a multi-day boat cruise, where you sleep on the boat as it travels to the next destination overnight. So that's what I decided to do. When I was booking the tour in the Quito hostel-attached travel agency, a friendly Finn named Marko overheard that I needed to go to the airport at the same time as him the next day, so we agreed to share a taxi. As it turned out, we'd be sharing more than that - we were booked on the same tour boat, and sharing the same cabin. The complications that arose from making a last minute booking meant that Marko and I needed to fly there a day before our tour started, as the daily early flight on the day of the tour was booked out. This meant we had a night to chill out on Santa Cruz, the main Galapagos island, which has a well developed though touristy town named Puerto...

I moved from Sydney to the Netherlands a couple of years ago. In my six years of living in Sydney, I fell into the trap of not doing the "tourist" things - I lived there, I wasn't a bloody tourist. In the end, I moved back to Europe in a bit of a rush, and missed out on most of the Australian highlights. Luckily, I've been back in Sydney for the last couple of months with work, so I decided it was now or never to make up for this. Uluru A common debate amongst folks living in Sydney is whether it's worth going to visit Uluru (Ayer's Rock) or not. "It's just a big rock." "It's too hard to get to." "It's too expensive." I was undecided myself, until I read Bill Bryson's account of his visit in the brilliant Down Under : ".... And then you see it, and you are instantly transfixed. (...) It's not that Uluru is bigger than you had supposed or more perfectly formed or in any way different from the impressi...