I finally made it into Brazil properly, after escaping from the grotty border town of Chuy on the 23:00 overnight bus to Porto Alegre. It wasn’t a very comfortable 8 hour ride; yet again I was sitting next to a larger than average guy, and the uneven road surface on the approach to the bus station in Porto Alegre caused me to wake up from a dream that I was in an earthquake in Sheffield, which was very disconcerting. I think I might be done with buses for a while.

After grabbing a coffee in the bus station, I got a taxi to the Lancaster Hotel (another Rough Guide recommendation) and went straight to bed, covering myself with every blanket and duvet in the room, because I was starting to feel like I was coming down with a cold and cough. Hopefully this pre-emptive rest, and the fruit-heavy breakfast I had afterwards, will have averted any illness.

My first daylight experiences of Brazil were a little bewildering, to be honest — I was just starting to get the hang of basic communication in Spanish, and now I’m in at the Portuguese deep end!

Now I have to decide what to do tomorrow, and there are quite a few choices! I can either get the bus to Florianopolis on the coast, fly to either São Paulo, Rio or Recife/Olinda, or figure out some way of getting to Foz do Iguaçu (The Iguaçu Falls, the biggest waterfalls in the World).