Two days before our second visitor arrived we landed in Amman. Luck would have it that we actually knew someone who lives there. Janelle, who graciously provided four college kids a free place to stay in Manhattan for New Years Eve ten years ago, invited us to stay in her upstairs studio apartment for as long as we could make use of it in Amman too! Janelle and Mark and their two cute kids, Alexandra and Paul were very helpful giving us the ins and outs of the city and …

Bali wasn’t on our original list of stops on the tour, this is one the travel agent talked us into. We did a little more research than usual and bought a Lonely Planet Encounter guide. We’d never seen these little guys and figured we give it a try to see if we liked the abbreviated version. From the book, we picked out the little island of Nusa Lembongan and the mountainous region next to the dormant volcano as our main destinations.
Nusa Lembongan is a short ferry ride away, but still …

Heat, sun, sand, and fish all welcomed us to Queensland. Apparently we haven’t spent enough time at the beach, so here we go again. We’ll head north again in three weeks.
The first stop was Cairns. There certainly was a bigger celebration in Sydney, but we experienced ANZAC Day up north instead. It is the Aussie version of Memorial Day, and celebrated in much the same way. We got a head start on the occasion by eating a whole bag of ANZAC biscuits (a delicious oatmeal and coconut cookie) a few …

We were excited to finally get off the plane after a 10.5 hour flight, but just ended up in the airport with no idea what to do next. This is the first place on our trip that we didn’t really plan on visiting, it was just a layover on the flight to New Zealand that we extended from two hours to six days, so we didn’t really bother to figure out what there was to do here. A quick check at the airport ticket counter revealed that flights to other …

After our two day delay, we hit the ground running once we arrived. The first stop was the Charles Darwin Research Station. The main attraction here is Lonesome George. He is the end of the line for the Pinta Island Tortoises. They have tried to get him to breed with other Galapagos tortoises, but no babies yet. The station also houses young turtles from multiple islands in an effort to keep them safe while they mature and then return them to the wild. They also have a large collection of …