After New Year's Eve in Rio we spent another week or so really getting to know the City. We did lots of sightseeing… We sat on many different beaches. We hired bikes and spent a day cycling along the coast and around the beautiful city lake. We visited the very pretty and relaxing botanical gardens. We saw the great views from Christ the Redeemer (although it was so busy we had to get there first thing and queue for more than 2 hours, then had to fight past/ t...

Welcome to our (slightly delayed) festive blog!! Happy (belated) Christmas and best wishes for the New Year to you all.We left the last blog dirty hungover (as we will leave this one…) and flying out of Salvador to Brazil's capital. Brasilia is very different from Salvador, but equally fascinating, and it was the place where we spent Christmas, having got a good deal on a suite in a nice hotel (courtesy of Michelle's lovely parents!). It's a "New City"...

After we finally got out of the Maceio bus station we went to Aracaju, a city in the state of Sergipe, but this was only a fleeting visit as we had our eyes set on a beach called Praia do Forte in Bahia and we would not be deterred by little things like bus schedules. So (having started our journey in Maceio at 9am) we spent between 5pm and midnight same day abusing the generosity of an all you can eat sushi restaurant in Aracaju before getting two more buses, fi...

After the jungle, we feel we have really started to explore, begin to understand and really appreciate Brazil… But as we are writing this we are stuck in a bus station in Maceio, beach town in the North, with seemingly no good options for the day. We have had several difficult and confusing conversations in sort-of-but-not-really-Portuguese with bus operators and the upshot is we have at least 3 hours to kill before we get underway, and we are not going where w...

We arrived in Manaus on 22 November and signed straight up for an Amazon tour. We nearly made our first significant travelers error by going for a tour run by a guy we met on the bus from the airport. A guy called Antonio Batista (aka Thomas, Tom), he helped us out a lot and was genuinely nice to us, but we googled him and found a history of being a general conman, and using people's credit cards whilst they were on the trip. Anyway, we stuck with a recommended b...