Rio to New York in 6 Months

Kelly and I will be arriving in Rio on 4th April. We will update this when we get there.

Well we finally arrived in Rio after a nightmare journey. We left Heathrow as planned but when we got to Madrid we found out that our flight was delayed due to French air traffic controllers being on strike so we had to wait for another 12 hours for a flight. Read the rest of this entry »

We arrived in Curitiba this morning at about 2am after a 17 hour bus journey that was only supposed to take 12 hours but the bus broke down in Sau Paulo. We are not having the best luck with transport but at least we have not crashed yet. The bus was very comfortable and they gave us a packet of food and a blanket and pillow when we got on which was cool.

Curitiba is supposed to be one of the cleanest cities in Brazi according to our book. It have some nice old buildings and churches and we found a really good arts and craft market where we bought a couple of things that we have to send home tomorrow.

We have recently discovered restaurants where you can get food from a buffet and pay for it by weight. They have lots of different fruits and veg and lovely meat and salad. We do not know what some of it is but it tastes nice. It costs about 4 pounds for a kilo of food but I have only been getting 500 gram worth as it is very filling. We have also been drinking lots of fruit shakes which the Brazilians seem to love. My favourite so far is Orange, Passion Fruit and Lime.

We booked a bus to Iguazu Falls today and we leave tomorrow night for a 10 hour bus ride. The falls are supposed to be beautiful so I will take lots of photos and put them on here once I find an internet cafe that lets me do it.

We are getting better at speaking Spanish / Portugese but they speak so fast it is often impossible to understand what they are saying.

I will update again once we have seen Iguazu falls.

James

We went to see the Brazilian side of the falls yesterday and they were amazing. They are massive. Here are a couple of photos from the Brazilian Side. Read the rest of this entry »

We arrived in Buenos Aires after a very comfortable bus trip from Puerto Iguazu. We payed a bit more for a “Cama” bus (we had previously got semi cama) and got much bigger leather seats and hot food and wine served to us which was cool.

Buenos Aires is a very nice city and it has a European feel to it. We spent a few days there chilling out and seeing the sights. The temparature in Buenos Aires was a bit cooler than previous cities in SA and I even thought about wearing jeans but decided to stay with shorts since I managed to survive the whole of the English winter in them. We went to quite a few markets and bought some cool stuff but just spend most of the time walking around. I wore a step counter for a few days and I clocked up over 20,000 steps each day so hopefully I am getting a bit healthier. My legs don´t know what has hit them.

We were in Buenos for the easter weekend and on Sunday night we saw thousands of people walking down the street chanting and singing while following someone carrying a cross. I think it may have been “Jesus” but I could not be sure as I was too far away to see clearly. 

James

Hello.

We took a bus (5 hours) from Buenos Aires to a little place called Tandil. We hoped to stay on a Ranch while we were there but the prices were out of our budget thanks to incorrect info in our guidebook (again). Tandil was a nice change from Buenos Aires. We arrived just after the easter holidays had finished so it was very quiet and we were the only people staying in our hostel at first but some spanish guys arrived later and one of them gave us quite an interesting talk on the history of South America (I think that was what he was talking about anyway) It was a big old house and it was the first place that we were able to use the kitchen since we had been away so we cooked steaks for ourselves in the evening. Steak is so cheap here it is ridiculous. I was going to send some home in the post but the guy in the post office said there was some sort of regulation that did not permit me to do it (sorry mum but I tried god damn it !).

Tandil is quite a religious place with quite a few statues and shrines to jesus and quite a few old buildings. We saw the sights in which were pretty cool but I did not take any photos photos for the blog again. The reason for the lack of photos is that I wonder if people will be interested in seeing pictures of statues and monuments but I suppose that a picture of something is better than a picture of nothing. Maybe I will start doing stupid poses in front of the momuments to make them more interesting.

Thats it for Tandil.

James

We arrived in Mendoza this morning at about 7.00am after a 16 hour bus journey and I was surprised that the sun did not rise until 8.00am. I don´t remember it rising that late at home even in the winter.

We called a couple of hostels but they did not have any rooms so we went with this guy who said he had a hostel but he took us to an apartment that we are sharing with 2 Israeli guys at the moment.  Read the rest of this entry »

While in Argentina we have been enjoying some of the best steaks ever so I thought I would share a couple of pictures. Vegetarians look away now. Read the rest of this entry »

Valparaiso is one of the main ports of Chile and we decided to spend a few days there. We rented a little cabin type place from this old lady who we met at the bus station. She was a really good artist and her paintings were spread around all over the place. She was a bit eccentric and pretty cool. Valparaiso is famous for its hills that have loads of multicoloured houses and mansions spread all over the place in no apparant order. There are about 15 funicular railways going up to the hills and Kellys fear of heights became apparant again when we took a ride in one of them. They are all pretty old (about 100 years) and I must admit I was a bit scared when loads of people piled into the small cabin / carriage despite a sign saying that it was only able to carry 7 people.

The views from the hills were pretty cool though. Here are a couple of pictures.. Read the rest of this entry »

The bus journey from Valparaiso to Santiago only took an hour which was cool and we spent an hour trying to call hostels with no success (I think there was supposed to be some sort of code before the number or something). Eventually this American guy recommended a place called “Hostel De Sammy” that was not in the guide book. I was happy that it was not in the book because I had become used to everything in the book concerning hostels being wrong. Read the rest of this entry »