Day 9 (18th January 2011)

The ship is now rapidly approaching Recife in Brazil and we will be spending tomorrow there. We have booked on a boat tour of the city since it has many canals and rivers to see the city from. We have also been organising other trips for later stops including going to see rock hopper penguins on the Falklands. This involves an hour in a 4x4 across open country so I am sure we will get thrown around. Anyway that trip is over a week away.

We have been followed all afternoon by two different types of bird. They are apparently frigate birds and Gannets. Although, no one is entirely sure which-is-which. The surprise is that we are still more than 100 miles from land. There are apparently a few islands but they are over 20 miles away. The birds glide alongside the ship and occasional plunge into the water after fish. After a variety of attempts to photograph them I have given up since all I got was sky.

I had to change the virus protection software on the laptop and since the connection from the ship is quite slow I did it at midnight when I do not have to share the bandwidth with anyone else but it still took over an hour to download the AVG system.