Even knowing that Australia had no chance of progressing to the next round, the chance to play Spain, the Number 1 ranked team in the world, was exciting. Spencer and I had a quick breakfast then took his brazuca ball to a local park near the hotel for a bit of pre-game practice. It wasn't long before we'd drawn the attention of some local boys and we have a pick up game.  We took turns having shots on goal and dreaming of scoring the winner against Spain. W...

.....they were the words our Rio tour guide Eliana left us with yesterday. So given it was the weekend and we had been going pretty hard since we left Sydney I told Spencer he could do whatever he wanted today. He said he wanted to go to the beach and play football – can't argue with that. After brekkie at the hotel, we put our cossies and flip flops on and headed to the beach. Our hotel in Copacabana is 100m from the beach so it was lovely to be able to ...

June 19th Up at 7am, quick breakfast and then a quick transfer via taxi to the airport for our flight to Rio. We are flying GOL airlines in Brazil which is a bit like Jetstar. Unfortunately their "hub" is in Sao Paolo and all of our destinations on this trip are either side of Sao Paolo so we have to transfer via SP each time – not Spencer's favourite plan of attack. In any case it was an easy flight from Porto Alegre to Sao Paolo and then onto Rio. We arri...

It was a very early start from the Pousada - a 2am drive to Cuiaba airport!. Thankfully our driver did a great job of dodging the cows, horses, caimans and capybaras on the road on the 3 hour drive back to Cuiaba airport in the early morning. An uneventful flight to Porto Alegre and we checked into the hotel and spent the afternoon watching the World Cup and writing in our journals. James flew in around 6pm and we went to a local Churasco restaurant (Braeiros) wh...

Monday June 16th A quick breakfast (great coffee – the Brazilians love their coffee!) and it was on to tour Horse riding tour. This was great – our horses took us around the jungle to the lake – on the way we saw some more birds, capuchin monkeys, hummingbirds and Jabiru storks. Spencer did very well on his horse and we walked back to the Pousada through the wetlands, with sleeping caimans either side of the horse trail. We both thought of Elea...