Since the screen of my old camera somehow got crushed in my suitcase when I last travelled, I bought a brand new one since it was cheaper than fixing the old Canon.

The new toy - a Kodak if you're interested - has this cool feature where you can take up to three shots and the camera magically 'stitches' them together to create a panoramic image.  I'm pretty impressed at how easy it is to use.   Anyway, I've decided to take various panoramas of places I find interesting, wherever that may be.  And here's the première!




This photo takes in the historic Tower Bridge to the left, and the futuristic globe to the far right is City Hall, which is where the current Mayor of London is based.  The current mayor is the bumbling Boris Johnson.   Lets hope he only lasts one term.

I like this panoramic shot because it contrasts the past with the future, and is a lot like the rest of London, where modern, glass skyscrapers jostle for space among ancient buildings that are centuries old.

I didn't mean for the above to sound like a paragraph in a tourist guide.  Oh well.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past week, you must have heard of the volcano in Iceland that's erupted and wreaked havoc, closing European airspace and grounding all flights because of dangerous ash in the air.

At first, I found it mildly amusing - in the sense of "oh wow look at that, we have all these wonderful technologies and have made huge advancements but nature trumps man every single time" - especially as I know a good number of people that are stranded worldwide and unable to complete their journeys.

Now that this vomcano business is dragging into the fifth day, that feeling of amusement is now partly mixed with a little anxiety. I've planned everything around the day I leave. My rental contract expires the morning of my flight, and I handed in my notice so my last day of work is the Friday before my Monday departure, leaving me with the weekend to do last minute frantic packing.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the temping that I am doing, especially as it is for Cancer Research, a charity that I support anyway. The charity I worked on before CR was the World Wildlife Fund, which is cool I guess but even I, as a marketing assistant, didn't really buy into some of their ideas. Yeah I know it's important to save wildlife etc etc, but when you hear about some of their campaigners throwing themselves in front of a bulldozer to save the habitat of an exotic Peruvian insect from being destroyed, you have to ask yourself... really? What about people? Is that beetle going to turn up at your house with a bunch of flowers in gratitude?

The work I'm doing for CR is rewarding but pretty physically draining and I couldn't bring myself to do it for even an extra week. So if my departure ends up being pushed back I'd probably just sit at home and wait it out for a new flight, rather than do more marketing work. Well, even that wouldn't happen because my rental contract would have expired by then and my parents live abroad. So 3rd May is when I HAVE to leave.

I was at Heathrow last Sunday and the world's busiest international airport was a complete ghost town. Rows and rows of planes parked, a handful of passengers floating around in the huge Terminal 5... It was eerie in a strange way, like there was some national state of emergency and all human activity had ceased to exist.

Look at the photo of the arrivals board.  Every single flight.  Cancelled. 



The check-in area was pretty much dead, apart from a few weary passengers looking dejected and some ground staff sitting around looking bored.


So in summary, the volcano is cool in a way, the skies are actually blue rather than being filled with jet contrails, but thanks Iceland.  Nice performance, but we want our flights back.

P.S. Just as finished this post, I saw some aircraft contrails jet over London.  I hope it's a good sign.

My big South American adventure begins with me taking off from London Heathrow, bound for Rio on the 3rd May.

I've already bought the travel guides, worked out a good idea of places I want to see, but wow, there is so much that needs to be done before I go! Things like finding a good deal on a backpack (and also deciding what size backpack is ideal), replacing my broken digital camera, buying travel insurance, figuring out where to leave all my stuff while I am away, the list goes on! Also Brazil particularly is such a MASSIVE country and I'm trying to work out how to fit in all I want to see there plus take in Argentina and possibly Uruguay (still undecided on the latter two).

Also, it doesn't help that I am temping for a charity here in London five (sometimes six) days a week, which only gives me about five Sundays to sort all of this out!

Some people said to me that I'll probably spend the first week of my trip lying on a beach somewhere exhausted, and trying to recoup my energy for the rest of the holiday....I can see that happening!