26 hours on a bus to Rio

Saturday morning, said sleepy and therefore slightly less emotional goodbyes to Aida and Silvina than the night before, and Fernando took us to the Terminal de Omnibus at Garupa to catch a bus to Rio.

A 26 hour bus to Rio.

Yeah, I know what you´re thinking...FLY! But they are soooo cheap, and I don´t have a job right now, so we´re being a bit prudent.

The buses were ¨Cama¨ which means your seat opens out like a first class seat in most airlines and you get fed. So once the bus actually pulled in (about 1.5 hours late from Buenos Aires), I piled on and got the seat out to full extent and settled down for some much-needed shut-eye.

Yeah, comfy as anything for the first 8 hours. Then I got antsy and fidgety. Still, managed to watch 3 films along the way: In the name of the King (with Jason Statham and Burt Reynolds, two markers of a shit film if ever there were...C fell asleep, but I was riveted to watching this car-crash of a movie simply to see how bad it got), Dan in Real Life (with Steve Carrell, funny and sweet rom-com), and the next day (after a breakfast stop!) Eastern Promises (a hugely violent but brilliant film about the Russian Mafia in London - get it out on DVD).

It was a fantastic movie, but I couldn´t help feeling maybe they should have left the throat-slitting and eye-stabbing for the late night screening and showed the Carrell one in the morning!

There´s not much else to do on a bus for 26 hours except read (so I check our Lonely Planet notes on Rio, bugger it´s all Portuguese, so we´re back to understand nada, also it´s twice as expensive as Argentina, and now I´m here, it´s nearly London prices really) and sleeeeeeep, which fortunately I´m rather good at.

Eventually, we pulled into Rio a full 2.5 hours late, at about 1pm on Sunday afternoon, ravenous after a breakfast of dried fruit (freeze-dried mango that´s as brittle as glass with the texture of honeycomb...weird but so good! Dried Apple rings, and this amazing Banana Pulp bar - I might go into importing) and Cheetos crisps (those motorway service stations)...