Advantages

• The £10 a month unlimited internet and texts for life is a great deal for anyone, like me, who doesn’t make many voice calls.
• Since its pay as you go when you travel abroad you are no longer faced with a horrendous bill on your return. You can get one of their £5 roaming bundles easily by text whilst you are away.
• Topping up is a delight, they send a message when you are running low you can send a free text back with the last 4 digits of your previously registered credit card  the amount and three security digits, and away you go.
• The itemised billing is excellent, totally itemised bills to the last K of data transferred and instantly available on the web.
• 3G Coverage so far is awesome!

Disadvantages

• If your phone breaks and Apple replace it then according to the local Apple store it will be locked. Will O2 unlock a phone if you have no contract? When I asked at Apple they just said speak to O2 and yes O2 say speak to Apple. Maybe this issue will clear up as more iPhones get legally unlocked and Orange etc come to the market.
• At the moment  if I put the iPhone in Airplane mode the iPhone asks to be unlocked again by iTunes (to do this you have to remove the SIM, take it out of flight mode, reinsert SIM and then iTunes will unlock it).
• You get the silly Content Lock screen (in picture) if you access blogs
• The iPhone seems to eat the battery in 3G mode. I guess with O2 it never found a 3G mast!

Conclusion
Its great to have an always on internet, even in the depths of cafes and lecture theatres, so I’m sticking with T-Mobile until either I buy a Nexus or the latest toy from Apple.

A quick bike ride to the airport,then about 12 steps from parking the bike to the AeroGal office followed by about 10 clicks on her computer and the job was done, no charge, no fuss. Airports and booking as it should be

I then decided to cycle up the extinct volcano to see the El Junco crater lake, after  a few hundred yards a local taxi driver in his Toyota pick up suggested a lift up the 1000ft ascent for $10, since it was in the thirties I thought it was a grand idea (sorry Andrew you are 19 and I’m 62!). A lovely walk around the lake watching the birds washing the salt of their wings then back to the bike and the mainly descent to the La Galapguera de Cello Colorado Tortoise breeding station and then onto the white sand and beach at Puerto Chino.

On the way back the taxi carrying my 2 new American friends, who I met on the beach, stopped to give me a quick lift up the worst incline, I learned from him that you can rent an apartment for $150 a MONTH here, interestingly his girlfriend hs just arrived after his 3 months away

The trip with pics is here.



San Cristobal, Galapagos cycle/walk/taxi

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Tomorrow I’m boating over to Isabela via Santa Cruz for $55 a 4 hour ride. co

What have I learnt? Mainly that I’m a slow learner like I was at school when I was a kid. An interesting life observation is that to succeed at school you need a good short term memory preferably with sufficient capacity to absorb several hours of stuff. In life memory is not rated that highly, thats why we have books & the internet, retrieval of information is most highly rated either by employing the right person to do it or been adept at doing it yourself.

I will maybe go to more classes in Ecuador or maybe in  Cusco with Sally for a couple of hours each day .

Tomorrow I’m heading off to Turrialba to try and get some more white water rafting experience or canyoning. Then its off to Ecuador to have some fun standing on the Equator, apparently there are loads of tricks and funny things you can do there.

I’ve enjoyed my stay here, especially Nuria’s cooking and her sister Ilsen who taught me at the school, Nelson my first teacher was great as well but the rest of the class was way to speedy for me….

Managed to get some DIY in by replacing Nuria’s kitchen sink taps and the loo seat.I really enjoy going to foreign builders merchants to see the real world in action

Well off for  final visit to Samara beach…

The walk was designed as a figure of eight with Ickworth Hall in the centre, acting as a rendezvous point for the start and lunch. In the morning we were blessed with sunshine and a cold wind the afternoon turned into a battle across a ploughed field in a squall!

Here is the walk and trail with (even though I say so myself) a fine shot of Ickworth Hall!

Ickworth figure of 8 walk

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The start was at Audley End, Vera led 13 of us, at a cracking pace, across the rolling Essex countryside to The Langleys were we stopped for our sandwiches outside the The Bull. Tea was taken alongside the stream in the very pretty village of Arkesdon.

The countryside was still very wintry & bleak looking with only an occasional burst of snowdrops to brighten the day a little.

Audley End to Langley walk

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We did just over 16miles in 5hr 11min of moving time with 1hr 35min of stops. Surprisingly for us flat landers we did 0ver 1900ft of ascent!

Graph of elevation and speed, from HoudahGeo

Walk elevation & speed

Mud, Mud glorious mud

Then today was up and away to be at Cambridge Rambling Clubs ‘A’ walk led by Carolyn with a 9am start from Hardwick across the total overkill of the blue footbridge over the A428  followed by many many muddy fields to Elsworth for a drink at the George & Dragon run by the aptly named Mr & Mrs Beer.

Here is the walk with some great shots of muddy boots:-

Cambridge Ramblers – Elsworth Walk

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Here are my twitter followers:

Currently I have bookings on the following dates:-
26 Dec 2008 to 4 Jan 2009 (KB party of 4)

4 Jan to 31st Jan (GJ various parties)

31st Jan to 7th Feb 2009 (AH party of 6)

16th Feb to 23rd Feb 2009 (CP party of 6)

1st Mar to 8th Mar 2009 (SR party of 4)

11 Mar to 15th Mar 2009 (IH party of 4)

18 Mar to 22 Mar 2009 (PC party of 5)

10th April to 15th April 2009 (KB party of 4)

To see the complete google calendar click here.

If you want to fill the gaps, send me an email at lesgets@geoffjones.com

Euan pointed me in the direction of Ascent for the iMac which can take in data from the Garmin and is Mac based software. Works beautifully and very fast! However, for some weird reason Everytrail wouldn’t display the track, even though it was visible in Google Earth.

Great news from Chris at Everytrail is that he has found and fixed the bug (VRM in action) so now Ascent will display the trail in Everytrail with the photos, geotagged by Houdah, and downloaded from Flickr.

Here is an example of a walk that  Sally, Ellee and I did with the Cambridge Ramblers C for codgers group last Wednesday a far cry from pounding the camino in Spain doing 25mile days in temperatures of 30 degrees. But an interesting day anyway

Stretham walk take2

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Santon Downham Walk

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To import the trail I tried using the Ascent software as suggested by Euan, However, I can’t get it to display the imported trail in Everytrail – The folks at Everytrail are working on it – maybe Todays pictures are all taken with the iPhone as the Olympus’s rechargeable batteries have gone all dodgy on me. NB: Chris from Everytrail reports the bug has been  squashed so it should work now

Ascent does produce activity charts like this though:-