We spent one night in Buenos Aires, at Giramondo, the hostel that gas begun to feel very much like home. With a whirl of new friends and packing for the next day, the afternoon passed quickly, and we only grabbed a few hours of sleep before a 3am start (actually Casey didn't sleep at all). We set off from the hostel with lightened bags and hopped into a taxi with a driver who shored steadily all the way to the airport, although he didn't seem to he asleep. Traveling is, of course, extremely exhausting at 4 in the morning, but it is the sort of thing we have gotten fairly used to, and before we knew it we found ourselves disembarking in the sticky humid air of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

We spent three days in Sao Paulo, based at a comfortable hostel in a very nice part of town. The hostel was packed with friendly (but very bizarre) people, and several musicians, so we spent much of the three days jamming with an incredible argentine guitar player who also played a bizarre combination of a base and a guitar with no body or plucking. Our audience included a guy from Iran who claimed to be part of the most violent dangerous gang in Europe, an absurdly racist Chinese girl with a strong British accent who hated new York but proudly wore an I Heart NY tshirt, a flamboyantly gay guy who insisted on taking a dozen photos of anyone who took their shirt off for an instant in the heat, and a music-obsessed Frenchman not unlike a more worldly Jean-louise. There was also a massive Brazilian filmmaker who stumbled into me drunkenly demanding a rendition of Beethovens 9th which I was supposed to recognize from a slurred dumdumdumddum daaadaaadummdum. 
It was a very entertaining scene and the music was as always, beloved. Though we spent much of our time just hanging around the hostel, we also dud a few expeditions into Sao Paulo, which is a Massive, and not very touristy city. But we enjoyed wandering around the lovely parque ibirapuera (where we watched a spectacular water show in the fountains set in the parks main lake), and meandered up agenda Oscar friere, a street lined with the most elegant opulent row of designer shops we had every seen (outdoing London, new York, and any other competition). Shopping was not on the agenda, but we did find a good bookshop with an English section where we were able to stock up on reading material. While in the city, we ate vast, cheap meals of meat, rice, and beans at little street side eateries. We also discovered a totally incredible restaurant called casa jaya, a music bar and vegan restaurant. Where we listened to fantastic musicians serenading us as we feasted of mountains of salad, rice beans, and stew. The greenery was an incredible treat after such a long time of cheap food. And the setting was so beautiful, a shady little corner down the stairs from street level, the walls all painted lovely oranges and tropical plants and flowers thick in every direction. We stayed at this paradise for hours. We were loving the novelty of a new country, though it shares a border with Argentina they are utterly different in every way. The language barrier was frustrating after speaking Spanish for a month but not impossible. All in all we enjoyed our few days there and when they ended we had another dawn start, leaping onto a subway and cutting across the city to the domestic airport, where we boarded a flight north to Bahia (whenever we told people in Sao Paulo that we were going to Bahia they were extremely jealous). We landed at a tiny airport in the middle of nowhere, a fishing town called Ilheus, where we met Analida Graham, who I had stayed with in London and who would now be our host again. She is originally Brazilian and so the family (her, Charlie, and kids Alex, Will, Patrick, and Lilly) spends a lot of time in Brazil and had invited us (and several other friends, making for quite a full house) to their beach house for Easter. We rode with Analida north to the port of Camamu, where we were met by several other grahams in their speedboat, the Lillibelle, and shot out across leaping waves to a tiny town on the other side of the bay. Then we rode in a landrover down the narrow spit of land till we arrived at the isolated and luxurious beach house. We arrived as darkness settled, in time for a vast meal, with all 20 or so people gathered around the enormous dining table. We fell asleep early that night, after a very long day of traveling, but we were immensely excited about the two weeks of utter luxury that would begin the next morning.