Sitting in transit at the International Airport in Los Angeles, we've just realised that the morning we told people we were landing has already passed in Australia! It seems that we forgot to add an extra 24 hours to account for passing back over the International Date Line... you'd think that we'd be pretty good at this by now! Not to worry though, a few phone calls and we have it sorted. We're still arriving home a week before we told both our parents, to surpr...

Four days was never going to be enough for the colourful, energetic metropolis that is Rio de Janeiro, but we managed to make the most of what little time we had. It took us three attempts to find a taxi driver to take us from the bus terminal to our hostel in Vidigal and we soon found out why... It turns out that the name Casa Alto means exactly that (elevated house), and we sympathised as our driver wound higher and higher through the heart of the favela Vidig...

At some point in the last few weeks we realised that our intended travel route would land us directly in Rio de Janeiro for Carnaval, arguably the biggest party in the modern world! It seemed a good idea to capitalise on this opportunity so we looked into booking a couple of beds. We were easily deterred. At a minimum of $120 each for a night in a twelve bed dormitory, we decided we aren't really big enough party animals to justify that sort of money. Instead we ...

We didn't have long in Argentina, so waiting for our Brazilian visas to process at the consulate in Puerto Iguazu was a good excuse to stretch our brief visit out for a little longer. We spent five very relaxing days in this sleepy tropical border town, which is the Argentine gateway to the world renowned Iguazu Falls! It seemed like way too much effort to track down a Brazilian consulate in Canada and wait two weeks for our visas to be processed, so we were...

It was a relief to cross into relatively developed Argentina from Bolivia. It wasn't that we didn't enjoy the raw beauty of the landscape and its people. Just the long, bumpy gravel highways, apparent lack of any form of policing and unpredictability of Bolivia left us craving security and stability. So far Argentina has proved a bit of a mixed bag... We had heard a little from other travellers about Argentina's political and economic problems. We had also ...