We are up early in Paraty at 6am to pack our bags and nip quietly out of the hostel to the bus station up the street. A bus for Angra pulls in at 6.40am and we struggle through the turnstiles on the bus with our packs. The ride costs just 8 reals each and we're off. Back up the same twisty, turning coastal road. Two hours later in Angra we jump off and find the catamaran pier not far from where the bus drops us. The next sailing to Ilha Grande is at 11am, 25 rea...

We're up at 6am on our final morning in Rio, after a restless sleep with a loud snorer in the dorm. We're packed and downstairs for some breakfast before we taxi to the bus station. The bus station is fairly manic with the coming Tuesday a public holiday, so people are taking a long weekend and heading away. We find our platform and settle in to wait for our departure at 8.30am. At 8.25am a bus pulls in but to our dismay it's the 8am bus! At 8.35am another bu...

Across the Brazilian border we settle into our bus seats and get comfy for the long ride ahead. For hours there is no movie, no snack and no drinks. We become glad we had lunch before we got on. After 6pm we begin our wait for dinner, knowing that we may have to wait until 9 or 10pm as is the custom for dinner in Argentina. 10pm arrives and we pull into a gas/cafe stop. Most of the bus piles off. We don't as we don't have any Brazilian reals for food anyway. Bu...

We wake up, maybe sometime around 7 or 8am. Breakfast is two croissants, tostadas and bread. We watch the countryside pass by, becoming more and more tropical as we go. The landscape is so vastly different to Patagonian and north western Argentina, we feel like we have crossed into another country entirely overnight. The soil has changed to a deep red colour. Houses are often little more than wooden shacks in the long grass and trees. We arrive into Iguaçu aro...

From El Calafate our Aerolineas Argentina flight leaves on time but our return flight jips us on the snacks - this time just a ham and cheese sandwich and another of those chewy damn dulce de leche biscuits. If have eaten enough ham and cheese sandwiches to last a lifetime. And the drinks are only a cup, rather than the whole bottle we were given on the way south to Patagonia. The flight gets a bit turbulent as we descend and our landing is a bit hairy, it seems ...