Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home ...

..... after around 24 hours of travelling from Rio De Janeiro to Santiago via Sao Paolo, then Santiago to Sydney via Auckland and a final quick hop from Sydney to Melbourne, we arrived home safe and sound this morning Thurs 15/1 at 10:30 am.

The welcoming committee (Ellen's friends) were equipped with party hats and those blower things that make rasberry sounds .... thanks guys, a nice welcome back to home turf .... I (Chris) sit here at 9 pm in the evening, every one else having succombed, desperately trying to hold off the desire to sleep to complete this one last blog entry ....

What can you say - six weeks of just stunning experiences in another continent of this amazingly diverse planet .... the key highlights of our trip would be something like ....

 1. Galapogas - stunning natural beauty and wildlife - you can see why Charles Darwin was captivated and amazed

 2. Cusco & surrounds - a lovely small city with beautiful architecture and lots of picturesque surrounding countryside

3. Machu Picchu - breathtaking in itself for what a civilisation could achieve hundreds of years ago

4. The Amazon basin - what can you say, the lungs of the planet and alive from dawn to dusk

5. The Bolivian high plains - possibly the highlight of the trip (or a close second to Galapogas) - the salt flats, the canyons, the geysers, the landscape - stunning natural beauty

6. San Pedro at Atatcama - sort of an extension of the high plans, but in Chile and deserving of mention in its own right - the El Tatio geysers and Moon Valley were individual highlights

7. Iguazu Falls - much more touristy but also leave you speechless - especially when you get dunked under the second biggest waterfall at Iguazu

Well, that about winds up the blog ... words cannot really add further to what we have alread talked about.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, we are not even sure how many photos we have .... Somewhere in the order of ten thousand we think ... 54 Gb on the storage module !!!

If you are interested, feel free to catch up with us for a look at some more pics .... or in due course the multimedia slide show will be available, although this will probably take many weeks to complete .... Thanks again to everyone who took interest in our travel blog and posted comments ... the trip is complete, but feel free to keep posting messages for another few days ....

Ciao !

Chris, Julie, Ellen, Tessa

15/1/2009