We are just on the bus to São Paulo after having spent two nights in Angra Dos Reis. Everything in Rio went smoothly. We had a fab Uber driver who looked at us in disbelief as we told him about our plans: ‘you’re travelling round South America?’; ‘on your own?’; ‘for five months?’; ‘you’ll be working in a chicken farm?!’. Not a very reassuring response but he was excited for us too.

We arrived in Angra about 4pm and it was chucking it down. The whole town looked deserted and the very unhelpful woman in the bus station told us to just get in taxi when we asked for directions to our hostel, which turned out to be about 300m away from the bus station. The taxi driver then told us that he’d never heard of our hostel but drove us up and down the road until we could figure…