I’ve created a YouTube playlist of some of my favourite Bossa Nova songs on the site. Gal Costa – Wave This is a great rendition of Antonio Carlo Jobim’s Wave. Gal Costa’s voice is both polished and expressive yet sensitive. Ella Fitzgerald – Dindi Ella Fitzgerald is cute as molasses and this version is an [...]

Brazil was much more expensive than I ever imagined it’d be. I got a hint of what I was going to encounter by the prices of hotels in Rio, but I didn’t imagine that the prices would be nearly on par with Canadian ones. Brazil’s economy is the world’s sixth largest economy and growing at [...]

The New York Times has named Paraty as one of its places to go in 2012. They have a slideshow here.

Despite having a lot of experience travelling independently, I decided to do a group tour for part of my vacation to Argentina and Brazil, for many reasons. First, my travel partner had never been outside of North America (and had never backpacked either) so I thought a group tour would make him more comfortable. Second, [...]

Last stop on our vacation was Rio, a city which sounded both invigorating and frightening at the same time. We had allotted 6 days to Rio, mostly due to the scheduling of our tour, and we worried it was too much. (We were right.) We opted to exhaust pretty much every sight in Rio in [...]