Tuesday 1st March 2016

Woke up with a nauseous feeling, no headache yet but definitely hungover, cheers Angela/Andrew. Angela dropped us off at the train station and we caught a train back to Sydney to meet Lisa at her hospital. It's so weird to think that this is our last day in Australia, South America next and only 1 month to go till we fly home.

We made it to the hospital and Isla went and had a look around the maternity unit, I think she is still playing it out in her head what it would be like to move to OZ and work in the hospitals.

After Lisa finished work we headed back to her apartment to spend our last night ion OZ and to have a BBQ with her family. We picked little Isla up from school and we were all happy to see each other again. Back at the apartment we talked about our travels and thanked Ian for the recommendations he made for on route to Surfers Paradise. We enjoyed a lovely BBQ and once again little Isla sacrificed her room for us. We are finally heading to South America and weirdly it feels that moving from country to country is just our life now and we can't imagine going back to work. Although I guess it means we can save more money and do it again lol.

Wednesday 2nd March 2016

We left Lisa, Ian and Isla for the last time and headed into the city to catch a train to the airport. We had a little look around the departure lounge and got a McDonald's for breakfast. The lounge wasn't as good as the one in Bangkok so we just went and waited at the gate. We found out that our flight was going to be delayed by about 1 hour which at the time didn't really cause that much concern but retrospectively it made us nearly miss our connecting flight.

So we boarded about an hour late and settled in for our 12 hour flight. I didn't sleep much at all which was probably the wrong decision since we were going 12 hours back in time. We took off at around 1300 and landed at 1230 on the same day. Some kind of time travel I guess.

Still on the same day at 1230 we landed in Santiago, Chile and got told that we needed to hurry to make our connecting flight. A member of staff got us to the front of the queue and told us to run. We ran for about 500 meters and got to the gate just in time. We got on the plane and started our 3 hour journey to Rio De Jenerio, suddenly realising that our bags probably weren't as fast as us. We landed in Rio and waited to collect our bags but unfortunately they didn't turn up. A member of staff told us that the bags would be on a 2300 flight to Rio and that they would deliver them to us at our hostel. We left our details and headed out of the airport empty handed.

So it was night time, we didn't have our bags and we are in Brazil, so we were feeling quite nervous after all of the things we had heard. We caught a taxi and headed to the hostel. After about 15 minutes we were sat in a traffic jam when a young man, topless came running up through the traffic, immediately chased by a police man on a motorbike. Welcome to Brazil!!!!

This did not help with our state of mind and when we arrived at our hostel in a suburb called Lapa and we had to walk up a load of steep steps with loads of homeless people hanging around. I know people get mugged in Brazil but surely we were going to last more than an hour??? The steps are actually famous and named after an artist, Escadeira Selaron who has treated them as his canvas and transformed them into a piece of art. I guess a Brazilian version of Banksy.

We found our hostel and had to buzz to get let in. The staff look through the gate and ask who you are before letting you in, clearly a security measure to prevent them being robbed. We got into the hostel and thankfully the staff spoke a very little bit of English, we got shown to our room which was small.

We decided to go into the communal lounge to try and meet people to feel safer and more secure during our stay but unfortunately everyone was South American and only spoke Spanish or Portuguese. Apparently a lot of hostels are used by local students whilst trying to find accommodation. Hopefully we could find hostels in South America with other travellers that speak English. We went to bed in a very hot room with only a ceiling fan, not feeling in the best of moods after the day we had. Not a great start South America.