The world is a playground

ZOOLOGICO, SAMIPATA 29.12.2011 – 24.01.2012 So after a little visit a few days ago, we decided to stay in Samaipata and work at the Animal Refugee. The owner was a lovely Swiss Lady called Manuela, who lived there with her two sons Maiku and Wayra and also Dennis, a friend of the Family. When Matt and I started working there, there where 3 other volunteers, Guillermo, a 60 year old chef from Argentina who cooked all our meals (vegetarian, much to Matts excitement :o)), Sebastian, a French guy filled with loooove and happiness, and Martin, a guy from Argentina who didn’t speak a word of English, which turned out to be loads of fun once it was just me, matt and him in the end.. The conversations between him and Matt were hilarious to watch.. ... read more

12.08. KINGSTON AIRPORT Arrived at Jamaica airport in Kingston in the afternoon and we are planning to go to Port Antonio. Straight away we get swarmed by taxi drivers that want to charge us 150 dollars for the drive there. Apparently there are no buses from the airport, and our only other option is to get a taxi to Spanish town for 40 bucks and then a bus up to Ochos Rios for 5 bucks. Wow, the local buses, or route taxis how they call them here are an experience!!! They manage to squash 25 people into a 12 seater minibus, nice and cozy haha..also there seems to be no rules on speeding or overtaking, we nearly had a crash in our first hour in Jamaica..the drivers are a bit crazy here and everyone thinks they ... read more

Santiago We got to Santiago after a 24 hour trip from Buenos Aires trough the Andes, which was an unbelievable beautiful drive trough the snow covered mountains.. As soon as we got of the bus, we had to start organizing buying our car. We organized to couchsurf at Ines and Titos place, but they were not home until late afternoon and we arrived first thing in the morning.. So having a quick snack, jumped into the next taxi to go see a VW Kombi we were thinking about buying. It’s a Volkswagen minibus that was transferred into a Campervan buy a guy called Mister Kombi. He does a great job with the cars! So we arrived at Nils place, who was the guy selling the van. We previously talked to another girl (7 students bought the ... read more

22.10. Soooooo hungover today! The three of us (matt, savior and me) planned a trip to Florianopolis today, which is about 2 hours south of Blumenau. Savio was having a family meeting and Matt and I joined him to get to see another place in Brazil. On the way there we were all suffering terrible from last night lol I had to really concentrate at every turn to not be sick in savios nice car.. Savio invited us to join him on his family gathering, so we went to his uncles house.. there was soooo much food, about 8 cakes for dessert, it was amazing! Savios family was extremely welcoming and nice to us, loads of them actually spoke german fluently which really surprised me again.. We had a lovely afternoon eating and chatting and eating ... read more

28.09.2011 Juhuuu, flying to Rio today!!! Just chilled all day really, Matt cooked some beautiful chicken curry for us in the hostel, backpacker style ;o) The hostel we stayed at was called Porto Salvador and we would highly recommend it to anyone going to Salvador..its 2 mins from the beach, with kitchen, games room and very friendly staff. So we planned to catch a bus to the airport, but the bus never came (as they do in Brazil) so we jumped in a taxi. No problems checking inn, even dou we used someone elses CPF, so we probably will keep on doing that to book flights :o) In Rio, we jumped into a taxi to drive to Ivanas house, our Couchsurf host in Lapa, the nightlife district of Rio.. Ivana and her girlfriend Bia were great, ... read more