Party nights in Rio, relaxing days on Ilha Grande..

I'll start this piece with an apology brought on simply by my mispreparation and stupidity: I didn't charge my camera when I left Rio and left the charger in storage at the hostel. Nice one Joe, now there's no pictures of the beautiful Ilha Grande and its amazing Lopes Mendes beach. Hopefully you good Samaritans who did manage a few shots will be good enough to send some over.

Since popping up to see Christ, we've done a couple of things worthy of mention over in Rio de Janeiro. The first being a street party in Lapa, a district of RJ. Wow, what an atmosphere; it is here on Fridays where youths congregate, drink caipirinhas, play bongos and chill out in their hundreds at least. Any of you familiar with the Snoop Dogg video with the huge staircase of Rio steps? Well we chilled out on those very ones, as it was filmed in Lapa. Great night out with minimal dramas, one comic one involving Anna insisting she felt fine about thirty short seconds before throwing up onto a wall - great stuff.

Between visiting the amazing Post Nine on Ipanema beach, feasting at all you can eat restaurants for about four pounds, and chilling out in the Mellow Yellow spa, not much else was really done. Sunday however took us to a favela. I'm sure some of you have watched 'The City of God' - the club at the end of the film is where we got to visit and boogie on down to raw hip hop and Brazilian tunes. That, coupled with Opera Bay in Argentina, have easily been the best nights out in South America and are up there with the best since I left England last September.

Deciding to take it easy for a few days, I teamed up with California Aaron and Manhattan Laura to pop down to Ilha Grande, an island South-West of Rio. After the rain subsided for our second day there, we trekked to Lopes Mendes, which is perhaps the most breathtaking beach I have seen, certainly ranking high with the Thai beaches in the Gulf, if not better. You would have to ask someone who has been to the Andaman coast of Thailand to see if they had a preference to those beaches or its Brazilian counterpart. Lopes Mendes was the definite highlight of a relaxing few days.

One funny story from there involves (to nobody's real suprise) young Shane S. Campbell from Bath strolling into our room like he owned the place to nip to the loo. After I had sternly told the intruder to bugger off (before I recognised him..) he took a walk in the pouring rain, ended up in a bush to the best of my knowledge before being taken in by a local family for food and some restbite. You never fail to impress, Shane.

Spending my last few hours in Santiago is my current occupation, and I will be heading to my last country in South America, Peru, where I will hopefully end up doing some sort of hiking, get to Cuzco and then head over to Honduras for the final leg of my journey. And as Porky Pig would say, if he were real and could speak, after Central America and a couple days in New York: "Th-th-tha-th-tha-tha-tha-th-th-th.... That's all, Folks!"