Well, it's the end if one era and the beginning of another! On Thursday morning I said goodbye to my Dragoman friends (I'll see them in Buenos Aires again so not really goodbye!) and went to meet the GAP lot. There are 15 of us on this tour and guess what? All, except me, are under 30. The next tour I book I might have to find out if there is an OAP special! The saving grace is that Lucio, our Venezuelan leader, is 35. Anyway, we are all Brits and Ozzies; 11 girl...

Just spent the last week in Rio which was a bit mad! When we finally got there and fought our way through the traffic jams and stifling heat, we discovered that it was experiencing the hottest heatwave ever and temperatures last week reached 50 degrees with about 5 million % humidity (Well, ok. That may be a slight exaggeration but the temperatures are real). It hit the mid-40s while we were there and in a city that normally has 7 million people added to which th...

We dropped Daniel off in Belo Horizonte as his mum lives there and continued onto Ouro Preto which was a lovely little place. It's an old gold and diamond mining town set amid the mountains and has a really nice feel to it. The name actually means "rich valley of black gold". It looks fairly European with Baroque style churches and cobbled streets. The only negative thing was the steep hills everywhere. You'd be as fit as a fiddle if you lived there. I ...

The boys managed to fit some perspex onto the truck as a temporary windscreen (doesn't look like we're getting the real thing until Buenos Aires!!) so on Thursday we set off for the Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park where we were due to camp for 4 nights. We had the opportunity to upgrade to little cabins (with private bathrooms) so at GBP10 a night, we did! Thank goodness as it pissed it down and was apparently freezing all night while we were tucked up in our...

The drive to Brasilia was fairly uneventful. We bush camped for the night which wasn't too bad although it took us so long to find somewhere appropriate to stop the truck that it was almost dark by the time we got there! The tent demo (our 1st time camping) was therefore very rushed and myself and Jade manage to get ourselves in a bit of a pickle but finally got the thing up, only for Daniel to come an tell us that if it rained we would get drenched so he fixed i...