Our flight lands in Foz de Iguazu late afternoon and by the time we get to the hotel we go out immediately to meet up with John and Kate. It seems everyone does a similar circuit in this neck of the woods. Suzanne has a few Caipirinha's and the strength of them is soon realised! John and Kate have been to Iguazu Falls today so we are pleased to get some tips from them in terms of getting there. The place is like a ghost town at night. The following day we ...

We take a six hour bus journey through to Rio. We have seats at the very back of the bus (the last two together). We feel every bump in the road as we are sitting above the back wheels so reading, typing the blog or sleeping is all a challenge. As we come into Rio we enter in the industrial zone, that is a real eye-sore. The houses dotted around are in total disrepair and don't look fit to live in, although you can see that people are. Closer to the centre ...

Two hours bus journey out of Belo Horizonte is a pretty colonial town called Ouro Preto, a small mining town that is Brazil's first Unesco World Heritage site. Here, in the 16th century, gold was found in the river. Within a few years mines were springing up everywhere in the region and this small town grew in status to then be made capital of the Minas Gerais region. The finest goods from England and India were made available to this now affluent town and b...

We travel to Belo Horizonte by bus, a six hour bus journey made longer by the the drama of a drugs bust on the way. The bus was stopped and police and sniffer dogs were going through the baggage hold for some time. They identified a bag and then the driver came through the bus looking for the bag owner (we are all given a baggage tags to identify them when our bags go on). A sheepish-looking bloke stood waiting while all the passengers stared out the window ...

We arrive at the airport and get through customs quickly. However, we then sit in traffic for two hours just to get off the ring road some 100 metres from the airport. The metro workers are on strike, holding out for more pay just two days before the World Cup. It's late when we arrive at our IBIS hotel, which we are pleasantly surprised with. Basic, but new, clean and with everything working. We are staying in the Jardins area, which is the swanky part of t...