left isla grande after an impressive 24 hour downfall of torrential rain. too many gringoes and nothing like it was in 2002 when i first went there. it pains me that cruise ships now stop at the island. beautiful beaches out of the main town though and well worth the 12km trek to the isolated beaches. (we studiously ignored the fact you can get a boat there and maintained a sense of self-satisifed smugness for having walked there) 7 hours bus ride to Sao Paulo. ...

Hello We´re now on the small island of Ilha Grande. Spent 5 days in Rio which was pretty hectic so we´ve hit the beach for a few days although, in what has become a habit on our holidays we set off on a 2 hour hike (each way) today to a beach at the other end of the island. Lovely beach (see picture) but pretty hard terrain through jungle and up and down very steep climbs (for those who were at Joe Rosser´s leaving do my sweating reached epic proportions). H...

hello, another update already, haven~t they got anything else better to do you must be thinking, well, we´re moving hostels as steve who has become self-appointed budget controller has realised we-re spending 3x our budget already so we´re moving out of our lovely terraced, gardened, free internet mansion and into something that we can actually afford. it´s very hard to get out of holiday mode and steve is the only one of us thinking about spending wisely so ...

We´re off! Arrived safe and sound last night and checked into our hostel in the Santa Tereza district, it´s pretty plush (compared to what we´ll be expecting) and we´ll have to make sure we don´t get too spoiled. Have already blown exactly half a weeks budget but we´re allowing ourselves this one treat to go to the finals night of Carneval where we get to see the winning Samba schools perform, from 11pm to 5am!!! We´ve already met lots of really helpful pe...

2 days to go, not packed yet.