We rolled into Recife and headed straight to the lovely neighbouring city of Olinda. Olinda has a small but superb historic centre (at times small is just what you need). It’s one of South Americas most charming and well restored gems. We enjoyed the beautiful centre full of churches, cobble stone colonial architectured streets and plazas, all magnificently restored. Olinda also boasts a vibrant artesian culture, is chilled out and full of nice little cafes and posadas. It’s a great place to come and relax for a couple of days and isn’t overrun with tourists either. We left Olinda for Recife to catch an overnight bus to a city that we had heard so much about, for good and for bad. We arrived in Salvador da Bahia, found our hostel and had another great breakfast. Salvador ... read more

We had left the Venezuelan flat sabanas and travelled south through to the Brazilian state of Roraima to return to the city of Boa Vista. We didn’t want to hang around so we got the first bus out and travelled to the city of Manaus, deep in the heart of the Amazon. As we travelled overnight we travelled under the cover of darkness, so as we arrived it didn’t feel like we were back in the Amazon. Manaus is a big metropolis of nearly two million people, our first taste of things here was the city’s bus terminal and our taxi ride into the centre. Manaus is officially a concrete jungle and about as far away from how anybody could imagine the Amazon. After checking into a hostel we set about organising our transport from Manaus ... read more

We travelled from Nieuw Nickerie (Suriname) to the capital of Guyana - Georgetown. The villages we passed through as we followed the coastline were full of wooden houses on stilts with water trenches running around the base, connected to a network of ‘open drains’ running down the street. As we got to Georgetown we found the capital with similar infrastructure and got the chance of a ‘whiff’ of these ‘trenches’. We had a look around but quickly realised Georgetown didn’t have a lot to offer. The older, colonial buildings were in disrepair and not really that interesting. The piles of rubbish and the lingering smell of trench didn’t do anything to help Georgetown as a ‘destination’ for me. The people weren’t really that friendly either. In fact the most enjoyable part of my day was talking ... read more

Due to our late arrival we would need to catch up on some sleep before seeing Paramaribo. As time for us is beginning to run out we only really had one week to spend in the Guyanas. We were already up against it because we could only fly into Suriname - flying into French Guiana would have been the logical route. However the only international flights to Cayenne are from Paris and classed as a domestic flight. This logistical problem means that we would have to move quickly if we were to visit French Guiana, due to the fact that we would be doubling back on ourselves. More time issues have also come to light for the last segment of our trip here - getting from Guyana back to Venezuela is near impossible. The two countries ... read more

We arrived in Port of Spain (Trinidad) in the late evening. By the time we had gotten into the town centre and found a hotel we knew that our planned week-long trip here could be expensive compared with what we had been used to. We had pencilled in a few days here and the rest in Tobago, where Cecilia’s father was born. We left the hotel to get something to eat and have a first look at Trinidad. We had our first KFC (really quite bad) and ended up getting a cab to the lively quarter of St James. Being no stranger to Caribbean English in the UK, I was quite surprised on how different Caribbean English is in the Caribbean. ‘Ya wa'n gwa limin'?’ After Cecilia translated I realised the driver was asking if we ... read more