Our first Argentinian experience was a truly authentic one - horse riding on a ranch! The ranch was set in beautiful countryside a little way out of a small town called El Dorado. We were fed empanadas (small pastries with different fillings) before we sat down to a wonderful lunch of Argentinian beef cooked on an indoor barbecue with salad followed by desert and coffee. We were all feeling sorry for the horses at that point as we ate quite a lot! We spent the af...

We spent two days in the Iguazu Falls National Park. The first day we were on the Brazillian side and the second day the Argentinian side. The falls are just spectacular, easily the most impressive sight we have ever seen, and no photo seems to do them justice. The first day we took a helicopter ride over the falls which was brilliant even if it didn't last very long. The second day we took a boat ride up to the falls and got absolutely drenched from head to foot...

We are now in Curitiba (pronounced Curichiba) a pleasant university city, 6 hours by bus from Sao Paulo. It's a lot cooler here as it is the highest city in southern Brazil and the temperature was 13 degrees centigrade when we arrived last night (compared with 37 degrees in Rio a few days ago!). There are many colourful buildings and the streets seem clean and safe. Tonight we take an overnight night bus to Foz do Iguazu, which takes 10 hours.

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 ...

We left Rio yesterday afteroon after meeting up with our Tucan group, our guide Rebecca is Australian and our six other group members are all Brits apart from one Irish girl. All of us are within about 10-12 years of each other in age so that's quite good and we all get along well so far. In the morning before we left Rio we went to a Favela which is basically a slum area. It was built on a hillside so we were taken up to the top on the back of motorbikes, no hel...