Sao Paulo is a massive city of 20 million people, one of the biggest in the world, and from the top of the tallest tower, the city streaches as far as the eye can see in every direction. Our hotel is situated in the gay area of town where obvious transvestites strut around in all sorts of outfits! We walked out of the hotel the first night for food and Martin had one bloke blow a kiss at him, he was not impressed at all!!

The main thing that hits you about this city is the number of homeless people. They lie about the streets in huge numbers sometimes alone, sometimes in groups or families, there are apparently 14000 homeless children! The problem is so huge that although social workers provide food and blankets for these people little difference seems to be made. Some are in really terrible conditions and it makes you realise how lucky you are not to have to live like that. We saw one man just walking around wearing black bin bags but smoking a cigarette - didn´t seem the best thing to be doing when wearing plastic! There is also a big alcohol problem among some of these people and we saw a group taking it in turns to take a swig from a large bottle of spirits. So it would seem that any money they get from begging is just wasted. There are very affluent areas in this city also and the gap between rich and poor is huge. This is seen by the number of people that commute to work by helicopter - you can't really blame them for doing that though as the number of carjackings and red light robberies are high. This is the city where they change the traffic laws, so at night you can go through a red light if nothing is coming, to try to combat this. We managed to leave the city without being robbed so count ourselves very lucky!