Every trip to Antarctica requires a transverse of the roughest stretch of sea in the world - the Drake Passage. At this latitude in the world there are no significant pieces of land to break up the winds, which therefore build up very quickly and increase the likelihood of freak weather events. Entering the Passage the previous evening, we took an arched route across to avoid a building storm that was threatening to keep us in Ushuaia, and the following day...

Having made my way to the airport in Rio and transferred in Buenos Aires, where I would return in around 10 days time, I eventually made it to Ushuaia, at the bottom of Argentina for the real part of the holiday to begin. Getting from the airport to the hotel was pretty quick as the city was rather small, yet it became immediately clear that 'summer' here was much more like a Scandinavian summer than it had been in Brazil. After having met some new travel comp...

After a brief day and night in Brasilia, I boarded my flight onwards to one of the cities I was most excited about - Rio de Janeiro. Whilst Brasilia was a warm 25C, Rio added 10C to that. Just like January eh? Getting from the airport into the city was a nightmare. As with Brasilia, ************e spoke English, and the bus to the metro stop had nowhere to buy a travel card - just the ability to top one up. Trying to explain this to the guard, he just let me ont...

Well over 18 months ago I booked myself the trip of a lifetime to the Antarctic. However in order to get there I would need to get to the bottom of South America - the other continent I had yet to visit. And so after much planning I decided it would be a massive shame to literally fly in, past some cities I really wanted to visit, and thus I planned to go via Brazil en route. After taking an overnight flight from London, and transferring in São Paulo, I arr...

Having already holidayed together twice in the summer, Chris and I had another getaway - this time a short distance across the Channel to Paris. Once again taking off the Friday afternoon from work, we headed to the airport to catch a flight from Luton to CDG for a weekend in the French capital. Upon arrival in Paris we quickly noticed the effects the ongoing state of emergency was having. After buying our train tickets to get to the city centre, we found that ...