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Near-death experience

Rano Kau Crater We headed out in our Daihatsu Terios after breakfast, heading south behind the airport runway, going uphill towards Rano Kau crater.  The crater is located in the south-western tip of the island.  It was also where the park admission fee was collected. Rano Kau crater was a beautiful sight, not just with […]

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Rapa Nui

Flying to Easter Island The flight from Papeete to Easter Island took about 5h.  The LAN Chile 767 Business Class seats were like the old Air New Zealand First Class ones.  It had good pitch and seemed very wide.  I had a good but short sleep.  Two snack/breakfast services were offered for the flight.  Neither were […]

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Killing the day

Today, we have a day to kill, about half of it without a hotel room.  We have our flight to Easter Island departing after midnight. We started with a simple breakfast of cereal, stale baguettes, pate and cheese.  We relaxed till our checkout time of 1100 and transferred our luggage into the Crew Lounge for […]

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And then there were three!

After breakfast, we topped up on supplies from the supermarket.  It was a relaxing day followed by dinner at the trucks.  Today, it was roast chicken with a tamarind sauce plus chicken stir-fry with salted mustard greens.  Yummy again! This evening Rodger joins us.  After dinner, we set up his bed in preparation for his […]

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Moorea day-trip

We woke around 0900 which meant it was too late for the early boat to Moorea.  We took things easy and walked to town for the 1200 ferry, operated by the Aremiti 5.  It was a very big and smooth ferry and it took only about half hour to make the journey across to Moorea. […]

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Relaxing

With the time difference from Auckland, we woke around 0930 today.  We walked to the Carrefour supermarket promptly to get some food supplies.  It’s expensive here so we didn’t want to eat at the hotel.  While inside Carrefour, we had a delicious thin pizza and followed up with a toasted panini outside once the shopping […]

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Arriving yesterday

As we had crossed the International Dateline getting to Rarotonga and then Papeete, we landed on Saturday 15 October, a day before we had departed.  But just barely, as our arrival was at around 2340. Kim organised for us to get on the crew transport to the crew hotel, the Intercontinental Hotel, where we had […]

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End of an adventure

I slept in till 0930 today. With a 1730 departure, I pottered around with packing before going downstairs for breakfast. They had doughnuts filled either with cream, or savoury with chicken ham or beef ham. I chose the chicken one and it was quite nice. The Turkish coffee was awfully bitter as it was meant […]

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My extra day

Above:  Price of petrol is IRR800 (USD0.09) per litre, up 25% from our visit two and a half years ago. Lazy wanderings Today is my extra day in Tehran having arrived here a day earlier than planned. I took it easy with a breakfast of muffin and fresh honeydew shake in my room. I took […]

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Jewels and local insight

Above:  View of Tehran from Park-e Jamshidiye. Bazaar I had to conserve water when I woke, since I couldn’t get any last night. I walked out of the hotel to get a fruit shake for breakfast but it wasn’t open despite being 0850 already. The bakeries had queues. I settled for a super-cheap Caprisonne-style pomegranate […]

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