Ilha Grande

We have spent the last three days on an island in Brazil called Ilha Grande.  It is such an amazing place.  We have hiked, gone swimming and seen a turtle, been on a jet boat around the island, visited the local festival and tried lots of cocktails and done lots of swimming and sunbathing!!

We were pretty excited to find out their annual festival was happening while we were here and we got amongst the different food and drinks, one of the favourites was an espanola which consists of red wine, condensed milk and pineapple! It is delicious. 

Tomorrow we head to Rio for our last night with our tour group.  This time next week we will be arriving in London! 

2 weeks, 4 countries!

It's been a while between posts - we have been up to all sorts.  We arrived in Buenos Aires early morning to discover it's freezing!! During our time there we enjoyed lots of meat, red wine, empanadas and churros.  B.A is a very big city to explore, the highlights were the markets, the cemetery and the tango show (where we got a tango lesson - hillarious!)

From B.A we met up with our tour group and took a ferry to Colonia in Uruguay, where we were excited to have some warm weather.  We hired a golf cart and explored this quaint town - we survived driving on the wrong side of the road and it provided many laughs.  We almost killed our new friends when the brakes failed!!

Next we went to Montevideo (the capital of Uruguay) and then onto Salto.  Our time in Salto was short but we went to the thermal springs where we had a massage which was very nice!! That night we had a 12 hour bus trip to Puerto Iguassu, it was a long night and when we arrived in Argentina we went to visit the Brazillian side of the falls which had some amazing views and we were able to walk on a bridge right under the falls.  The next day we went across to the Argentinian side where we got a closer look,  we went for a jet boat ride underneath which was hillarious!! That night our tour leader introduced us to a BBQ - brazillian style.  We drunk a lot of Caprihannas and ate some delicious meat.  The next day was Sian's birthday - yay! We spent the WHOLE day travelling, we left Iguassu at 5.30pm and arrived in Paraty the next day at 6pm.  We were very tired but still managed to celebrate Sian's birthday in style - which ended at a party on the beach and a long trip home after getting lost! The boat trip in Paraty was amazing, we spent the day drinking cocktails and swimming in the beautiful ocean - definitely a highlight!  Wish we could have spent longer there! 


Sophie, Catherine, Sian and Olivia xx

Cuzco and the Inca Trail

On Thursday we arrived in Cuzco, we were pleased to find that we could still breathe even in the high altitude (3300m)!  We got to our hotel and met the rest of our tour group and then went and explored the amazing city!

That night we had a briefing about the Inca trail and were alarmed to find out we were only allowed to take 3kg with us up with mountain.  The rest of our night was spent deciding as a group what we would take with us to get us through the hike and after many weighing attempts we all managed to get under the 3kg limit. This did mean though that none of us could fit our puffer jackets which we were pretty gutted about...

Day 1 of the Inca trail we visited the Sacred Valley and Ollantaytambo where we started to learn about the ancient Inca culture. We went and visited a village and were amazed to see how they live. There were only mainly women and children at this village as all the men are employed as porters for the inca trail.

We started walking the Inca Trail on Saturday and over the 4 days we walked a lot! The maximum altitude we reached was 4,200m which made it a little bit hard to breathe! Our nights were filled with hot chocolate, playing cards and lots of laughing.  The porters were amazing, we had 22 and they each carried about 25kg on their backs and were running past us on the track to get to the camp sites before us to set up our beds and prepare food for us.  We found out on the last night that one of our porters was 69 years old! Mind blowing...

After the walk we went down to a place called Aquas Calientes and went to the hot springs, our muscles were thankful for that! We got the train back to Cuzco from there and were stoked to return to the hotel and have our first shower in a while!!  That night we went out for dinner with the rest of our tour group.  Our tour guide had been talking about guinea pig most of the hike so we had a try of that, was different!! Then we went to a local night club which was pretty interesting, we didn't end up staying long!! 

The last two days have been spent doing laundry and catching up on sleep before we head to Buenos Aires tonight! 

Sophie, Catherine, Olivia and Sian. Xxxx

Ride along Lima

Hola! 

We made it safe and sound to Lima after a long trip which left us at the airport without getting collected by the hostel as promised.  

After arriving in the taxi (which exposed us to Peru's interesting driving skills) we checked in and wandered out for dinner.  

On Monday we checked out the city, we saw the mall Lacomar which is in the cliff face and then got our bearings around Miraflores.  There are cats everywhere! We finished our day with some tequila shots which made for a difficult Tuesday morning.

After a slow start we managed to make it to our coastal bike tour where the first piece of advice we got was 'if you get hit by a car it's because your time is up!' But we survived the four hour tour and loved it, despite a few near misses.  All in all there was some great scenery and good laughs.  

Now we are preparing our bodies for the Inca Trail tour which starts tomorrow.  

We are learning some Spanish phrases but thank goodness their English is better than our Spanish!

Buenas noches Sophie, Olivia, Sian and Catherine xox