If you’re doing the classic South America loop, you’ll likely tick off some combination of Lima, Santiago, Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro. On paper, they’re all “big Latin American cities”. In reality, they couldn’t feel more different. First Impressions When we landed at each of these cities - I went through a familiar set of emotions. Concern - moving through immigration, customs, finding transport to the hotel The journey from airport to hotel - together with the sights an

Day 1 - Arrival in Rio de Janeiro We flew up to Rio de Janeiro with British Airways. By this point we’d grown used to LATAM Airlines, where announcements came in Spanish first, then English, and sometimes a third language if needed. Good old BA mostly stuck to English. When the crew had to deal one-on-one with “Johnny Foreigner”, they either hunted down the one Spanish-speaking colleague, reached for a translation app, or—failing both—resorted to pointing and raising their vo