What a packed two months it's been! When I last updated this page, the trip to South America was still ahead of us, and suddenly now it's all over, and we're back to normal life at home. Well, in so far as life here is ever normal ...

It was indeed a magnificent four and a half weeks away. Real 'much have I travelled in the realms of gold' stuff, and it's hard to pick out highlights. Chile - and at last eating (and loving) Fish Cevice, which I'm now planning to add to my cuisine, and the colourful heritage city of Valparaiso; in Argentina learning to dance the tango, in spite of my two left feet, and wandering in the famous La Recoleta cemetery, that city of the dead in which Eva Peron is now a resident, or browsing in what has been called the most beautiful bookshop in the world 'El Atineo'. Peru and watching fascinated the expert horsemen, as gauchos put on a spectacular Peruvian Paso at the Hacienda Mamacona, and learning to drink Pisco Sours. The wonders of Machu Picchu and watching herds of alpacas and llamas in the high grasslands of the Andes (worth suffering altitude sickness for this - and I did!)  Rio de Janeiro, and the tour of the infamous favelas, with their tiers on tiers of slum housing and tangles of stolen electricity wires. Can this city really be ready for the Olympic games within the next few months? But worth the almost embarrassing luxury of the Hotel Copacabana to also find in nearly Ipamema the cafe, the Garota de Ipanema, where Jobin wrote the famous song about the girl who turned all heads on the beach front there.  The spectacular Iguassu Falls, seen from both the Brazilian and the Argentinian sides - which better? Impossible to decide.

So many highlights. Four days on the Amazon, with jungle walks, visits to small villages, piranha fishing at dusk (yes, caught two and ate them at dinner that night - a neat reversal of the status quo, I felt.) Lake Titicata, highest freshwater lake with its famous reed islands and a whole population living, often in family groups, on these man-made islands. And, of course, the Galapagos Islands, where we battled our way up dried creek river beds to heights that meant leaping from boulder to boulder to reach the top with magnificent views over this Darwinian wonderland. Coming face to face on a pathway with an enormous turtle, built like an armoured tank, and learning swiftly that I didn't have right of way.

So much to remember. I'm glad that I kept not only the daily journal, but also stuck to my resolve to write a poem a day - I've brought back the 34 poems in the set, and now have to decide what to do with them ... But writing these was, as always, one of the real joys of travelling, even on nights when I was dead tired and just craved sleep.

However, it was good to get home and discover some publishing pleasures on return: poems in the new book from Poetica Christi Press, Imagine, and in Polestar and The Mozzie, as well as the special pleasure of a lovely review of Bystanders in the May Polestar Writers' Journal, and finding that I had made it to the short list for the Stringybark Stories competition, where i received a 'highly commended' and publication in their coming book Standing By. Enough encouragement to keep me at my computer and still writing ...