Getting out of Cartagena by plane took a whille as the airline and police required a few hours to check us 4 gringos in. As we were going with a Dash 8, there were only a few other passengers with us and we nearly left on time! Arriving in Panama City was a bit of a suprise as the skyline looks more like New York than Central America. Pnama is full of retired US Americans and you can enjoy a lot of fast food and real chocolate! We spent 2 days in Panama City having breakfast in Dunkin Donuts, dinner [View Full Entry]

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Travelling to Colombia was not in our plan at all, but hey here we are! The initial plan to fly from Caracas to Panama was quickly changed as soon as we heard the price of the ticket as it would have cost us around $1000.00. Sitting on the beach in Santa Fe, we decided to head to Columbia and try to go by boat to Panama. It sounded lovely to sail on a 40 feet boat via the San blas Island - not that any of us has ever been on a sailing boat before. Full of excitement, we took [View Full Entry]

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Our trip to Venezuela was long and a bit of an adventure! as we didn´t make it on the direct bus and we really wanted to leave Manaus, we just got on the nightbus to Boavista. From there we took a local bus to Santa Elena, which is the border town. The bus broke down in the middle of nowhere, but luckily we had a mechanic on board! You then have to do the border crossing by foot or by cab as there are no public buses... The Venezuelans didn´t charge us money for the stamp (we heard some stories [View Full Entry]

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Finally, we made it to computer and it takes about 10 minutes to open a website, but better than nothing! We are actually in Venezuela at the moment but we didn´t manage to blog in the last 2 weeks and here we go with short update. From Rio we took a bus to Ilheus in Bahia to spend a week or so on the beach. To avoid the crowds we headed to a very small village called Olivenca 13 km south of Ilheus. There we rented a very small and basic ´house´directly on the beach. Olivenca has a big indigenous community [View Full Entry]

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In the last week we have been in Sao Paulo and Rio, so a real city marathon! We arrived in Sao Paulo on the 19th February and because of Carneval everything was closed and the streets deserted! Luckily, we were staying in a nice and comfortable hotel as there was really nothing to see or do in Sao Paulo. It is not beautiful, but then all big cities here feature ugly 70´ies sky srapers and some areas as the Jardims seem really nice. Everybody warned us about Sao Paulo being so dangerous and you cannot use public transport etc. However, we [View Full Entry]

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Another bus ride and more bumpy roads, we arrived in Campo Grande at 6:00 am in the morning. Being the only gringos on the bus, we were greeted by a lot of young men trying to sell us a trip into the Pantanal! However, having booked in advance meant that Israel from our chosen outlet did his best to shake off the competition. On the same day we started our 3 day camping tour deep into to the swamp. The pantanal is the biggest wet land of the world and covers 230 000 km² and over half is flooded annualy. It [View Full Entry]

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We are a bit behind with the travel blog - how has this happened? After we had to leave our little paradise Guarda do Embau, we headed to Florianopolis to spend some more time on the beach. It was nice and we did a bit of trekking to the beach, chilled out in the hammock and enjoyed the waves. Francesco had a bit of a hard time as he managed to run into wasps and they stung him 4 times within a second. Hence, we didn´t make it to the nudist beach. Then, he managed to fall off the hammock and [View Full Entry]

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Guarda de Embau is located around 40 km south of Florianopolis on the main land and it is an amazing place. We arrived rather tired after 20 hours in the bus, this time snacks and soft drinks were served in the bus. We felt like in a plane a few years ago, when food was still served on planes...Then, if you ever arrive in Florianopolis and you do not have reais, it is good to know that there is no Cash machine for international cards in the bus terminal!! There are cash machines, but they only accept Brazilian cards. Nothing really [View Full Entry]

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Our first border crossing and everything went ok! However, we didn´t have to fill in any immigration paper and hopefully, they will let us out again. We had to stop for 4 hours at the border and the Argentines travelling on the bus with us explained that the relationship between Argentina and Uruquay is strained. This is as Uruquay is polluting the ´brown´ Rio Parana with industrial paper production. It seems like we need to correct our last entry as the Argentines clearly mind that the water is so brown.... What can we say about Montevideo? The first impression is that [View Full Entry]

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Tuesday morning around 4:00 am we arrived in Rosario safe and sound. The bus trip with Tac bus from Cordoba was a a bumpy ride and the bus seemed to fall apart any minute. If you can use a different compnay, please do so! Then we settled into a nice and old hotel - yes, we finally lost the ´s´ and upgraded from hostel to hotel. Rosario itself, is dominated by the River Parana, which carries very brown water and the unspoilt delta islands. We visited the beaches on the island and on the mainland, but the water was too brown [View Full Entry]

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