Note: I've had an opportunity to punch out a few of these blogs and now we have some okay satellite internet so I'll upload a few in quick succession. Photos will come later. In our 2008 trip of South America we missed out on seeing the Amazon jungle and so we decided that we'd make the effort this time around. That said, our expectations were tempered somewhat given how difficult we assumed it would be to get a fulfilling taste of the Amazon given its scale. ...

The bus ride from Rio de Janeiro to The Pantanal was no small undertaking, 22 hours if the bus ran on time. But despite the lack of sleep Em and I waded into the scrum of spruikers at the bus stop at Campo Grande to negotiate a 'Pantanal Safari' for the most reasonable price that we could muster. After an hour of shopping around and negotiation we organised a 4 night, 3 day tour with a group called The Pantanal Discovery, for which we paid $R330 each. We jumped...

Our last week in Rio de Janeiro was as spectacular and luxurious as the first and, as I have become particularly attached to the place and the Wards, I thought I (Em) would steal Alex´s job for a little bit and write about our last week in the beautiful coastal mountainous Rio. Alex was going to punctuate it with his interesting facts so to make it less flowery, but wasn't up to it. So flowery it may be. We returned from Paraty on Sunday night knowing that we h...

We returned from a lovely weekend in Paraty with the Wards today, Sunday 1st June. Yesterday morning we jumped in the family car with the Wards and headed south west along the coast to Paraty. The drive was beautiful, with picturesque beaches and the winding road ribboning its way around the coastline sandwiched between the ocean and the mountains. The drive was dotted with shanty towns, a floating oil platform and even a nuclear reactor that reminds you this is...

Just arrived in Rio de Janeiro, but in bus station and can't really write. I will update more in the next few days about our warm reception by our hosts, the Wards who live in Rio. Sorry. UPDATE: Em and I quickly got an appreciation of just how comfortable a stay in Rio we were going to have, as Roz had a complex matrix of plans ready on our arrival to make our arrival as stress and hassle free as we could possibly hope for. We were taxi-ed to their front do...