David and Caroline’s travel diary

We spent the first day walking up and down Copacabana beach front and the evening in the hostel’s roof-top bar (complete with hot tub).

Day 2: After a late start the beach beckoned and we hid from the sun under some hired parasols with an Australian couple we met before jumping around in the crashing waves. In the afternoon we took a small tour with some other people from the hostel up to the christ statue and on the way back dropped in by the never ending tiled stair case in Lapa area of the city. We spent the evening testing the Caipirinhas in the hostel bar.

Day 3: Another lazy day, we had lunch by beach, explored our surroundings a bit more as far as the local shopping mall for ice cream and had dinner in Ipanema at gula gula restaurant before walking back along beach until we got tired of being eyed up by thieves and took a taxi back to Copacabana sea front which was much safer at night despite being less classy by day.

Day 4: We took the cable car up sugar loaf mountain and had our last swim on copacabana and final caipirinha’s in the hostel bar.

Day 5: We had a sea food feast for lunch by the beach taking in a lobster thermadore for good measure before heading to the airport. We got our connecting flight at Paris the next morning (where they confiscated the cachaca we had in our hand luggage) and were back at beautiful Heathrow by midday for the cab back to our house. We even thought we’d brought the sun back with us for a couple of hours but it wasn’t to last.

Day 1: Up early for Abilio and Carlos to drive us all to Paraty where the 4 of us took a boat trip for the day around the surrounding islands stopping off at beautiful isolated beaches to dive off the boat, a lovely day! We also saw a bit of the cobbled streets and colonial buildings of Paraty later in the day before heading back to Ubatuba for an excellent Mexican meal and a good round of shooters at a local restaurant. Dave ended the day watching his sunburnt back get more and more red.

Day 2: Had a very relaxed day around the apartment and the beach just over the road. It was good preparation for what was to come; after starting late with a few drinks at a beach front bar it was back to Joao’s (a friend of Abilio’s) beach-front apartment with a carrier back full of limes, a couple of kilos of sugar and a bottle of cachaca to perfect making our own caiphrina’s, singing 80’s songs and watching Abilio dance until the sun came up over the horizon.

Day 3: We walked down the road back to Abilio’s apartment and managed to get a couple of hours sleep before catching the bus to Rio de Janeiro from Ubatuba’s bus station leaving Abilio and Carlos behind. All was going well until on the outskirts of Rio a car going in the opposite direction hit the central reservation, took off spinning through the air and careered into the side of the coach about a metre below Caroline’s window. Miraculously the bus driver kept the bus on the road and away from the slope beside the road and the driver of the car walked away from his upside-down vehicle. The side of the bus must be stronger than it looked as while perforated down the side of the bus it took the impact well and after the driver had been interviewed by the local TV station and the police had cleared the road we continued on in the same bus to Rio. We checked into our hostel 4 blocks back from Copacabana beach and took it very easy, counting ourselves very fortunate our Brazilian lottery ticket hadn’t won and the luck had instead been used elsewhere.

We arrived in São Paulo bus station shortly before 7am off our overnight bus and took the metro into the city (very cheap and easy as it´s the holidays) and spent most of the rest of the day catching up on sleep in a beautifully air conditioned room in our hotel. We wandered down the famous Av Paulista a little and in the evening met up with some Brazilian friends we met in Santa Catarina to be introduced to the delights of Cachaça (sugar cane rum) and Chope (extra cold and light beer) and we all had an excellent late night in a small bar with live Brazilian rock music.

Day 2: Very lazy day following the late night before. Raining cats and dogs in SP today so taking it easy, eating pizza and trying to plan our next steps. In the evening Abilio and Carlos took us to a bar with a band playing excellent traditional Chorinho samba until the small hours.

Day 3: An exceptional day today, starting out with Gilberto and Renato (two people we met at Santa Catarina) taking us on a tour of the city in Gilberto´s car, we visited the Luz station and Portuguese language museum and outside we drank the water from a coco nut bought from a street vendor. Gilberto took us to his house where we met all the very welcoming family and were fed a top class meal of lasagne and Baiao de dos (rice and black beans) and were introduced to the wonder of corn juice! After lots of conversation in Spanish, to finish off they took us to Ibirapuera park where most of the city relaxes on Sunday afternoons. In the evening Abilio and Carlos took us to a bar where a band plays Forró music and we had a go at learning the steps and dancing until late along with a few more Caipirinhas, Gilberto and Renato showed up too with some of the ladies from Santa Catarina .

Day 4: We checked out of the hotel in the morning and spent the afternoon taking the metro and walking around Sao Paulo; we took in Praca de Se and Republica and walked most of the way along Av Paulista. In the evening Abilio and Carlos picked us up in Abilio’s Alcohol-fuelled car and we drove out to Ubatuba on the coast to stay at Abilio’s family’s beachfront apartment.

15 hours later the night bus arrived, fairly undramatic apart from the power cut in the services we visited in the night that left the whole place in pitch black for a few minutes and no running water. After speaking to Tourist Information for help with accomodation, hoping to improve on our tent we viewed an apartment and rented it for 5 days, our joy soon turned to horror when it turned out to be infested with bed bugs and we had to leave, rapidly.

Back to plan A, we sat in a traffic jam in unbelievable temperatures behind the rest of Brazil (who were all heading to the beaches) to get to our tent. Once we arrived, hot and bothered it turned out the tent had not been bought yet and in fact didn´t get bought at all that day. Fortunately it later transpired there were some beds left in the single sex dorms which we eagerly checked into.

Late in the evening we went to the beach and watched a African influenced religious dance of some description with lots of candles, white clothes, spinning, jumping, smoking of pipes, clapping and drumming, with the Star of David set out in candles it was a very curious affair.

New Years Eve: Struggling with Florianopolis somewhat, after discovering that the main Brazilian airline won´t let non-Brazilians book tickets online, we arrived after an hour bus ride back to the centre only to find the airline office had closed until 2nd January ten minutes earlier. We´d been told that Brazilian ATMs in general don´t accept European cards so weren´t surprised when none worked, fortunately we´d already stumbled across the one bank in Florianopolis that does work (three cheers for HSBC!) and have booked a night bus from here to Sao Paulo for 3rd Jan. Back at our hostel on the South of the island we finally made it into the sea, and loved it!

In the evening we got a lift into Florianopolis centre with about 20 new Brazilian friends who wanted to show off their New Year driving skills (the Brazilian way) before we watched the fireworks and saw in the new year on the streets with the rest of the city, all very good.

New Year´s Day: Had an excellent lazy day around the hostel and the beach and it was a lot less busy in the area. In the evening we took a stroll along the beach to the next village with some friends from the hostel for a mountain of fresh fish. We were thoroughly impressed with the glow flies and the sand burrowing crustaceans we found on the way back in the dark and watched the fisherman wading in the surf catching fish in their nets. Santa Catarina is an excellent place to be when you do what it is meant for (beach) rather than the frustration of admin tasks of the previous days.

2nd Jan: The whole area has gone from full-to-capacity to near-empty in 24 hours and there´s hardly anyone on the beaches so that´s where we spent the day. The Costa de dentro beach that we´re on has to be one of the cleanest beaches we´ve ever seen, not only is the water clean but there´s literally no litter on the beach at all.  So we spent another day swimming in the waves, dodging the jelly fish and having another lovely night stroll on the beach followed by a tasty exotic version of fish and chips at a local fish restaurant.

3rd Jan: Another tough day at the beach jumping the waves before taking the hottest bus ride in history back to Florianopolis to catch the night bus to São Paulo. We had fun boarding the right bus in a busy station because we only know 3 words of Portuguese - they don´t seem to sell Portugese-English phrasebooks out here, so we are having fun guessing what people are trying to say to us. Being the body language experts that we are, we have found ways to get by.

We took an early flight from BA to Puerto Iguazu on the Argentinian side of the border where we were met met by our very own tour guide just for the 4 of us. There was wildlife everywhere with wild guinea pigs and raccoon-like creatures called Coati all around before we took the train to get closer to the falls.

After walking around above the falls on elevated walkways we finally got our first light soaking at the largest waterfall called the devil´s throat from the water vapour thrown up by the falls. More was to follow with a power boat ride under two of the water falls where we felt the thundering water landing on us before the boat hastily retreated and then powered down the river to drop us off for a truck ride back through the forest.

After leaving the falls we drove across the border into Brazil (where a local TV crew wanted to film us and worryingly got the border police extremely agitated) and to the very pleasant San Martin hotel in Foz do Iguaçu.

On our second day we toured the Brazilian side of Iguaçu for the amazing views of the falls on the Argentinian side that we had walked above the day before and then had lunch by the end of the falls.

On the 3rd day around Iguazu we parted company from Dave´s mum and sister when they headed off to Rio de Janeiro. We spent the morning panic booking accomodation for Florianopolis with little luck other than securing a one person tent, a kind lady on the phone informed us there were no rooms left on the island and that water shortages were being reported due to the enlarged population for new year. Despite this we had a leisurely day by the pool and headed off to the night bus from Foz do Iguaçu to Florianopolis that we´d booked the day before.

When we stepped off the plane we met Dave´s mum and sister at the hotel and went out to find a late night bar for a quick drink, came across the Jack the Ripper bar which served up belgian beer and wine in tall glasses until 2am.

The next morning we took a trip down to La Boca, we didn´t visit the football team but had photos taken with tango dancers in the street. We wandered the streets of San Telmo around the Sunday antiques market and Caroline created a minor-craze in the area by buying and (ab)using a chicken noise machine from a street vendor. We dropped by the Cathedral and saw San Martin´s tomb (general who led Argentina, Chile and Peru to independence) guarded by soldiers. We wandered past the Casa Rosada presidential palace where Evita and Juan Peron made their famous appearance and settled into Cafe Tortoni for dinner (but narrowly missed the tango show).

First thing on Christmas Eve morning we dashed out to the Air France office (online booking wasn´t working) and booked our flight home to avoid the BAA strikes scheduled for the week we need to return, we´ll be landing in Britain early on 16th January. After some leisurely strolling around the shopping malls and past the Malvinas war memorial (with the names of all the 650 dead) we had lunch at a Buller brewing company bar and enjoyed their sampler of beers. After lunch we visited the famous Recoletta cemetery where Argentina´s rich and famous are buried in grandiose tombs and most famously, Evita´s grave. After a swim in the hotel pool we had dinner on the excellent Palermo Viejo roof terrace dinner and watched Buenos Aires light up with fireworks over our champagne.

On Christmas day we took a walk in the blazin heat to the obelisk on 9 de Julio and had an early Christmas day beer at the cafe before heading back to the hotel via the Congress building, we then enjoyed a very lazy day and finished up with evening dinner at an excellent parillada which served a truly fine T-bone steak the size of two fists.

On Boxing day everything was open again so we took in the Japanese gardens and the Evita museum and Dave had a long overdue hair cut before we all went to a superb Tango show in the evening.

In the morning we took a trip in a sunflower-oil-diesel-mixture-powered landrover up into the hills above El Calafate into gaucho (cowboy) territory. We saw the wild foxes and amazing sedimentary rock formations some with blisters of iron ore within them and were thrown around on some amazingly steep slopes above the town. One particular highlight was when a JCB rebuilding the track was blocking the way and we all head to get out (including our driver) while the company owner took the land rover off-track and in some amazing driving managed to get around the blockage. We spent a lazy afternoon in El Calafate and in the evening took a flight back to Buenos Aires to meet Dave´s mum and sister and checked into a lovely hotel (a Christmas treat).

We took a bus out from El Calafate to the highlight of the Park Nacional de los Glaciers, the Perito Moreno glacier. We stood on balconies on the hill just opposite the main face of the glacier and listened for the loud cracks as we watched the chunks of ice dropping off the face into the lake. After lunch a boat dodged chunks of floating ice to take us to the other side of the lake for our hike out onto the glacier. We were fitted with crampons and followed our guide out onto the ice, it was pleasantly solid despite all the deep cracks that had melted into it. The guides often hacked out new paths for us as we went up the side of the steeper sections and most of the time we were walking on unspoilt ice rather than paths. After about an hour and a half trekking up and down the ice slopes looking at some amazing sink holes and ice valleys the hike finished with the guide taking his ice axe to an ice mound and serving up Scotch on the several-hundred-year-old-glacial-rocks on the side of the glacier. We finished off the day back in El Calafate at another parillada with an excellent steak and pork platter for two.

On our last morning in Ushuaia we took a tour out into the national park, fairly missable compared to many NPs but interesting to see the beaver dams, watched a fox catch a rabbit and took a look at the river in some of the wilderness down there. In the afternoon we took the flight up to El Calafate, a pleasant little town which is growing faster than the infrastructure can keep up on the side of lake Argentina, and checked into our hotel. The main road into town from the airport is an old runway and it still has the massive numbers and markings written it, joined by dirt track roads running off it!

Day 1: We took the 5:45am flight from BA to Ushuaia, the Southernmost city in the world down at the tip of South America which left us dizzy with exhaustion, not helped by the fact that it doesn´t get dark around here until 11pm at this time of year. We took the long walk down to the town from our hotel via the Falklands War memorial. With the islands only 300 miles off the coast and a naval base at one end of town where the General Belgrano last set sail from we´ve been seeing signs saying the Malvinas belong to Argentina everywhere; souvenir shops, car bumper stickers, even statutory taxi signs! We dropped by the Antarctic Tourist Information centre (cruises set sail for Antarctica from Ushuaia), the fin del mundo museum and had a top notch meal at a local Parradilla (Argentinian BBQ restaurant) before stopping by the Irish pub (yes, they get everywhere) for a locally brewed Beagle beer.

Day 2: We took a small boat trip out into the Beagle channel to visit the islands and see sea lions, cormorants, a few penguins, the lighthouse and the remnants of the indigenous people´s habitation.

More sorting out of plans today including booking a trip to Patagonia, a note to anyone who ever plans to book tickets with Aerolineas Argentinas; either delegate to a travel agent or visit them in person in their office, this company is HARD to deal with even when you´re trying to give them money! Inbetween chasing airlines we took some time to stroll up and down Av Florida where a lot of the main pedestrianised shopping district is located.

We took the 1 hour buquebus ferry across the Rio de la Plata basin to the town of Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay for the afternoon and spent some time walking around in the bright sun admiring the new stamps in our passports. The town´s fairly pretty and we spent the day enjoying the sun and a lazy Sunday afternoon in the park and around some of the historic sites. After realizing we were in a different timezone at the last possible moment, we successfully navigated the 3 hour ferry (in a bigger slower boat) home to BA again in the evening.

BA is a phenomenal breath of familar air after Peru and Ecuador, it feels very much like a European city, probably because it´s well developed and there are zero indigenous South Americans to be seen, in fact despite not being as fashionably dressed we are being mistaken for locals a lot.

After spending most of the day rushing around Buenos Aires trying to sort things out and making arrangements for the coming week we made it back to the hostel for our roof-top terrace tango lesson with a few other tourists, it was fun but probably the less said, the better. We went out in the evening and had a couple of fine Argentinian cuts of cow; i had a Bife Cordillera which is a T-Bone the size of your thigh and Caroline had a Bife Chorizo which surely translates as ´chunk of beef´. Fortunately we discovered Chimichurri, a supernatural Argentinian spicy sauce which allows you to carry on eating vast quantities of red meat long after your digestive system would usually mutiny.

After Machu Picchu we had a couple more days in Cuzco, taking it fairly easy, stayed at a nice hotel for our last night and took in the last few sights.

Having been warned off by too many people we´ve pretty much decided that Bolivia is off the menu for this trip due to all the political unrest at the moment, so today we spent the whole day in either an aeroplane or an airport and got in late this evening to Buenos Aires and checked into a hostel in the San Telmo district.

Caroline´s knees while much better than they were are still not up to the Inca Trail so we took the slowest train in the world (4 hours to cover about 35 miles) from Cuzco to Aguas Calientes a.k.a. Machu Picchu Pueblo, the train´s the only way of reaching the town as there´s no road. The town exists purely as a jumping off point for the famous ruins and is an amazing example of what happens in the absence of any planning regulations; rushed buildings thrown up everywhere and there was no road outside our hotel, just the trainline! We arrived around lunchtime and visited the museum which is halfway to the ruins, big waste of time, don´t bother! The town has no vehicles other than the buses to ferry you the 20min drive up and down the hill to the ruins, and while buses will drop you at the museum they won´t pick you up there so after attempting to walk up the hill ourselves we managed to flag one down and got to the ruins around 3pm just as all the day trippers were leaving. It´s a very impressive set of Inca ruins that the Spaniards never got their hands on so is largely uncorrupted but what makes it even more special is the location on the top of a mountain surrounded by steep valleys and other mountains.

The next day we resisted the temptation to get the 5.30am bus up to the ruins and instead arrived around 9am, still long before the swathes of day trippers arrived. Dave took the hike up to waynapicchu, the mountain overlooking the city that you see behind it on all the photos and the ruins and view there were well worth it (only 400 people a day are allowed up). The whole site´s very impressive and almost uniquely uncommercial in our experience, no shops or vendors anywhere within the grounds, no brands, no banners, no graffiti! We explored for the rest of the morning before surrendering to the heat and visited the super-expensive Machu Picchy Sanctuary Lodge restaurant which is immediately outside the ruins to cool off and eat probably the most expensive buffet in Peru (at 30 USD a head) for some excellent suckling pig. It was well worth staying the night nearby to be able to enjoy the site without all the big day-trip-zombie-tour groups clogging the place up. In the afternoon we took the slowest train in the world back to Cuzco and have to confess aren´t particularly upset to have missed the inca trail having seen the insect bites on the people who´d done it.

We joined another tour to get a look at the sacred valley Northwest of Cuzco. One highlight was the Sunday market at Pisaq where we wandered around looking at the local produce and then bartered a bit before ripping ourselves off! We visited Ollantaytambo to see the enormous hill fort and terraces covering the hillside, one of the few places the Incas ever had a victory over the Spanish. Ollantaytambo lies at the intersection of two valleys and the temple is built so that on each of the solstices at sunrise the temple is intersected by the first blade of light. We finished up at another market town of Chinchero to see some Alpaca-based clothes.

Day1: However it´s spelt or pronounced we flew into it from Lima first thing this morning and had to spend a few hours in our hostel catching up on sleep until mid-afternoon when we were awake enough to explore Plaza Almas and the heart of the town. We had a very relaxing afternoon, we had to because the altitude was making us dizzy for most of it (the town´s at 3360m) but this was wearing off by evening.

We treated ourselves to a top notch shepherds pie and a couple of pints of draft Old Speckled Hen (which at 2 quid a time were cheaper than they would be in London!) in an Irish pub in the corner of the main square; once in a while you need a break from the exotic food, never-before-seen vegetables and most of all, the local lager.

Day 2: Wandered round the city some more and visited the inca temple of Qorikancha which was central to the inca religion until the Spaniards built a monastery on top of it, much of the old temple walls remain inside the courtyard of the monastery, very odd. Quite interesting to see artificially elongated skulls in the museum too.

Day 3: Joined the rest of the tourists on a tour of the city, mainly so we could get out to the ruins north of Cuzco; Saqsaywaman an ancient fortress city with towering walls, Qénqo´s caves and temples, Tambomachay´s fountains and Pukapukara, some ruins by the side of the road. Before leaving the city we visited the cathedral in the main plaza, it was interesting to see the same set of procedures being applied by the Spanish here as in Limá; build the cathedral on top of the existing temple and use a painting of the last supper involving guinea pig to convince the locals to convert.

We’d heard only dreadful reviews of Lima before we got here; stories of locals being robbed and stripped naked, sprawling masses of polluted city and nothing worth seeing. When the airline delayed our flight by 12 hours so we couldn´t fly onto Cuzco the same day it forced us into spending a day there so we were pleased to find the critics had all been talking cobblers.

After getting a detailed introduction to the city from Francis (the owner of the hostel where we were staying in tourist zone Miraflores), we walked almost 2 blocks to the Huaca Juliana pre-Inca pyramids in the middle of built up Lima which were hidden under a heap of rubble until the early 80s and were amazed by the size of the structure in the very heart of the built up city. They also had a couple of hairless Peruvian dogs hanging around and of course a load of Cuy, both of which were excellent.

After the pyramids we headed into central Lima to the main plaza and the Cathedral of Lima where the archbishops graves are traced back to the 1600s and the grave of Francisco Pizarro who conquered the Inca empire and founded the city is on display. It took a little getting used to a seeing a very European cathedral with the art depicting Europeans in the middle of a city full of South Americans.

We had a typical Peruvian lunch just off the plaza, two courses, with beer, costing about a 2 quid each before heading to the Museum of the Inquisition in Peru which is the very same building the Catholics used for doing unpleasant things to blasphemers and heretics in South America.

Then it was round the corner to the Convent of San Francisco which was particularly impressive for the wall-sized painting of the last supper with Jesus and his disciples feasting on Guinea pig. The second highlight of the convent is the catacombs underneath containing wells 5m across and filled 10m deep with bones.

Back in Miraflores we took in the sights of the cliffs overlooking the beach before popping into a supermarket and picking up some fruit for dinner (including a Cherimoya which inside looks like the inside of a cod but tastes a lot better). Finally we settled down back at the hostel to watch The Motorcycle diaries on DVD which depicts Che Guevara and chum in Lima and Cuzco in the 1950s.

Lima just goes to show that it´s very rare that anything´s as bad as people will tell you it is (apart from AeonFlux which is abysmal).

Back in Quito and gently recovering from the mountain biking we ran a few errands and had another final afternoon of Spanish school. The week-long Quito Fiesta celebrating the Spanish founding of the city is in full flow with open top buses filled with bands playing traditional songs patrolling the streets day and night. Having seen a few clips on TV of the bullfights going on this week at the Plaza del Toros we´ve decided not to go to one, I´m curious about the atmosphere in there but fairly certain I don´t want to sponsor a bull being tortured to death.

This morning Quito had rare clear skies (very unpredictable weather at this altitude and so close to the equator) so we took the teleferico (cable car) up above the city to 4100m and could see all the surrounding snow capped volcanoes with Quito laid out beneath.

We´ve been here a little too long now and are starting to recognise people in the street so this evening we´re flying into Lima for a day or 2 and staying at this hostel. Ecuador´s been great fun but it´s time to move on, we´ve left behind several things to see next time; the market at Otavalu, the Amazon in the Oriente, ice climbing school on Cotopaxi, Lake Cuicocha and the colonial city of Cuenca down South.

Fresh from our return from sea level at the Galapagos we put our altitude sickness resistance to the test with a trip up to 4500m, just a few hundred metres below the snow line, on the active volcano Cotopaxi a couple of hours from Quito. There we got on mountain bikes and rode down the unmade road without peddling for a good few kilometres down to 3200m altitude, Caroline managed the full 15km descent for a couple of hours until lunchtime and demonstrated an impressive array of mountain biking skills but her legs didn´t want to carry on after lunch so she rode the rest of the way in the jeep which was fortunate in some ways as just after lunch it started to hail. A total of 40km of riding later we all joined Caroline back in the jeep and were returned safely to Quito.