Oi! We´re back in Brazil now and relaxing in a beautiful, hippy style, beach town called Parity, which is on the Emerald Coast. It´s roughly equidistant between Rio and Sao Paulo. We´re having very mixed weather, we´ve had quite a bit of tropical rain but it´s also been very hot and humid. We only have a few days left now until we´re back in snowy England and to be honest, we can´t wait! Since our last email, we travelled from Coroico to Sucre. Sucre is seen as the actual capital of Bolivia, but it´s actually just the judicial capital, whereas La Paz is the financial and legislative capital. Sucre was very different to what we had experienced elsewhere in Bolivia; it´s much cleaner, more modern, very progressive and the city feels very cared for. The buildings are mainly from the colonial period but somehow feel more modern, maybe because they´re all sparklingly white and clean. Sucre is nicknamed ´Ciudad Blanco´or the white city, because all the buildings are crisp white and repainted yearly. The shops in Sucre are more expensive and the women almost all wore western style clothes, whereas in La Paz, almost all the women had worn traditional dress. We really loved Sucre and could have stayed longer. The food was really great and of course, still very cheap. One meal that we´ll always remember was in a French restaurant (we´ve realised that there is no Bolivian cuisine, that´s why we couldn´t find any Bolivian restaurants) which served the best filet mignon we´ve ever tasted, and it was only 4 pounds! We also had some scrummy chocolate desserts and a bottle of delicious Bolivian red wine. We left Sucre and travelled on a Thundercat bus (no, we´re not kidding, check the pictures) which had been sold to us as something far better than it turned out to be. We had 19 hrs on thsi bus and it wasn´t very comfy but this was only the start of things once the journey started and we realised that most of it was down dirt tracks, across rivers and anywhere really apart from on a road. It was almost as bad as our bus trip back from Uyuni which we wrote about last time. We were shattered when we arrived in Santa Cruz, but we were only staying there overnight as a stopover in our journey through to the Brazilian border. From Santa Cruz we travelled probably 2/3 of South America´s width across to the East coast of Brazil. Our journey started at 11am on Saturday with us arriving nice and early for our train which was due at 12pm. Unfortunately, the train driver had other ideas and didn´t show up until 3pm. When the death train finally left (so called because of the number of people who died building the tracks, not from deaths of passengers - so we were told, anyway...) we stayed on til about 10am the following morning, when we got off with some Brazilian guys who we´d got chatting to, to cross the border. The guys, Andreas and Marcus, (who Clare thought were super cute) are both Brazilian medical students, who study in Bolivia because it´s ten times cheaper. We crossed the border into Brazil with Marcus and Andreas, had some lunch and banter with them, then got on a bus to Sao Paulo at 4pm. This bus was bliss compared to some of our Bolivian experiences! The bus took about 23.5hrs and arrived into Sao Paulo at 4.30pm the next day. We had to quickly cross Sao Paulo on the metro at rush hour (this being the busiest metro in the world, ever) and managed to catch a bus to Parati at 6pm. We thought this bus only took 2-3hrs, but it actually took 6.5 hrs, so we arrived at our hostel very tired at 12.45am after about 61 hrs of travelling. Phew!! Unsurprisingly, we´ve since spent a lot of time chilling out since then! We fell in love with Bolivia, far more than we had expected. We never personally came across any of the horrror stories that we had heard and never felt in danger. That said, it´s not an easy country to travel in. Transport is hard work and it is afterall, the poorest and least developed country in South America. After Bolivia, being in Brazil again feels like a holiday in Europe! We leave Parati on Tuesday morning to go to Rio for our flight home for Christmas. We´re both really looking forward to spending some time at home as it´s hard to feel festive when you´re sweating in 30*C heat and have sunburn. We´ve uploaded more photos if you have time to look. If not, save it til the New Year when you´re grumpy to be back at work. Our next message will be from North Thailand. We wish you a very, very happy Christmas and hope you really enjoy the festivities. Much love, Clare & Nicky xxxxx