OK this will be a chirpy blog - honest - but the darkness has to be explained before the dawn has any significance. A few of you may have noticed a hint of negativity in the previous blogs from South America, more from me than Rachelle. To be frank I did not enjoy the first week in the continent, it was a struggle to even go out for a drink. Even in the bright sunlight Brazil seemed grey and uninteresting clouded by my discomfort and irritation. Jetlag was the in...

We really over estimated how much we could do in Brazil with limited time.Once we left Rio, we had two weeks before we had to be back and in that time we wanted to see three places: the Pantanal, Salvador da Bahia, and Ouro Preto (which is fairly close to Rio).Three places in two weeks seemed reasonable until the distances were put into the equation and it was clear that traveling from Rio to the Bolivian border and then going all the way to the Atlantic coast an...