Day 87 - Bogota, Colombia to São Paulo, Brazil

With three months down and two months left to go of our trip it's time to samba and hit Brazil which is where we will be until March now. First stop São Paulo. Our flight is at 10:30am which means an early start due to the traffic in Bogota. We also have a long flight today - 6.5 hours in total. Luckily we are flying LAN who have been amazing so far. So comfortable. 

Nat amusing herself with Facebook commenting at the airport. I have even bought and downloaded Atlas Shrugged for her to read so she needs to get stuck into that!

Goodbye to Bogota - it's been a great and surpring visit. We will definitely come back to Colombia on particular to visit Medellin and Cartagena that both sound amazing. It's a shame it's just a fleeting visit bit Brazil calls! We have been very surprised by what we have found in Bogota and found a place that is very cosmopolitan and modern and has a real confidence about the place. Definitely a place that is on the up. 

After hours flying over the Amazon jungle we arrive in São Paulo for a gorgeous sunset. 

São Paulo is an absolute monster of a city. The largest one in Brazil with a city population of about 11 million and almost 20 million in its metropolitan area. 

We get a bus transfer into republica as the taxi fare from the airport is so expensive. Everyone has warned us how expensive Brazil is and it is certainly starting off that way.  The bus transfer was great though and we are soon at the hotel. 

We are staying at the Novotel downtown (republica) which apparently used to be a top hotel in São Paulo. They have pictures all over the walls of famous people who have stayed here - even our good old Queen stayed here back in the 70s. 

One thing we have really noticed is the language barrier again. We know absolutely no Portugese and realise that we have actually managed to pick up a lot of Spanish along the way, or enough to comfortable get by. Back to square one again for a few weeks. 

That evening we just eat at the hotel as it is 9:30 by the time we get to the hotel and we are pretty knackered. It was a fairly choppy flight for large parts again (must be something to do with flying over the Amazon) so we didn't get any sleep. We did watch the film Rush though which was absolutely fantastic. One of the best films I have seen in a long time. Go watch it!!!

Some random things about the hotel... They have stupid lift signs...

And they have given us a disabled room which has the thickest toilet seat I have ever seen. Not sure why disabled people need such thick toilet seats, this makes it way higher than a wheel chair would be!