We have arrived!   Let the Brazil/South America adventure begin!

Our tentative plan for the trip is to start in Sao Paulo, learn Portugese, travel south to Iguazu Falls/Argentina/Uruguay area, then northwest to the Pantanal (South America ´s largest concentration of wildlife), then through Bolivia, to Peru to see Machu Picchu, the north to the Amazon and jungle, then float the Amazon, to the mouth, then travel south alternating between the forests and sights of the interior and the beautiful coastal beaches.   Finally arrive back in Sao Paulo, fly back to the U.S., and move to Arcata, California.   I feel like I am in the process of knocking out half a year of my life in one fell swoop, but I ´m excited!!!

Click here to read entries from Brazil in 2006.

As is the nature of blogs, the newest entry (last entry from the trip) appears first.   If you want to read from the beginning, you’ll have to navigate your way to the bottom of the stack and work back up.   Maybe someday I’ll get savvy and make archives appear a bit more logically. 🙂

RETROSPECTIVE:

Hindsight found us woefully underfunded for our Brazilian escape.   Thanks to Brazil’s rapidly growing contributions to the world economy, my mistake of counting on the exchange rate in the three-year-old guide book pressed us into a life of voluntary poverty.   We took the news in stride, however, and built lots of character while eating nothing but bread with hot sauce, raw peanuts, and packaged cookies for days on end.   We learned what it’s like to miss out on sleeping in a bed night after night and put our new relationship through the ringer.   These entries are full of tales of how we survived on a shoestring.