Hello again Sao Paulo! This time we weren't staying at Leticia's flat as her sister was in the middle of uni exams, so we spent the first few days in a hostel. First day in the hostel it started to rain, as it does in Sao Paulo, a lot. The thing was that the dorm we were in was below street level, down a slope, with a drain that was on the slope rather than at the bottom so didn't stop the pooling of water at the bottom, and a toilet next door. We sort of joked for a minute that the room was probably gonna flood, but then 2 seconds later a wall of water approaches the room at astonishing speed.. pandamondium ensues! We all run back into the room trying to move all our stuff off the floor faster than the water is flooding in, and within about 20 seconds the whole room is flooded up to about 5 inches in brown water (we presume the brown colour came from the fact that a lot of it came out of the toilet...) We then had the wade around in this brown poo water up to our shins whilst we tried to cart all our stuff up to a different room. Not impressed. Thankfully I left that hostel a few days later to stay at my friend Nadia's flat. Thank you Nadia for saving me from the floods!

The next almost two weeks were pretty much just spent catching up with the Sao Paulo guys, walking around a lot, and not understanding tv in portuguese! (they have a relatively entertaining but very wierd and confusing show that was a brazilian version of blind date!) I also went to see a couple of bands play, the vaccines and carl barat, the other half of the libertines. Went on a few good nights out, the most interesting of which was a wierd kinda game night at beco, where they had all kinda stuff like beer pong, photo cabins, just dance, etc. as well as a dance floor with music and a lot of alcohol! We got some pretty good photos outta the photo cabin!

I also spent a long time looking for a netbook of my own with the help of Adam, but we managed to find one so now I am even con computador! Even if some of the stuff on it stubbornly refuses to be changed into any language other than Portuguese!

As Ben's passport had neither arrived nor shown any signs or being close, I decided that it was time to leave Brazil alone. I opted for flying rather than bus as it was only marginally more expensive and the bus would involve probably around 40 hours of bus to campo grande, wait in campo grande, bus to curumba, wait in curumba, bus across the border, wait again, train to santa cruz. Pain in the arse.

The flight was still pretty crap though as it involved 3 flights and two waits in airports, so ended up taking about 9 hours, and arriving in Santa Cruz at 2am! The stupid airport people also didn't tell me about the international flight hand baggage restrictions when I checked in, even though they knew I was headed for Bolivia, so when I was getting my third flight, when my backpage was well and truely checked in and I couldn't put things in it, they decided to tell me what I wasn't allowed to have and make me chuck away pretty much all my liquids. Idiots. I also almost lost my one day old netbook whilst arguing with the check in staff about this and putting my netbook down. I didn't actually realise until I'd gone all the way through x-ray and immigration and got to the gate, when I panicked and ran all the way back shouting randomly to people about 'my netbook being perdido'! Luckily it hadn't been stolen and had been handed into the information desk, as losing the thing the day after I'd bought it would have been one of my life's stupidist moments!

So I arrived in Bolivia with all of my stuff still in possession, and discovering along the way that Bolivian driving is even worse than Brazilian, if that's possible, arrived safely at my first Bolivian hostel, the solo traveller.