Ola! and Good Evening to you all and thank you for paying a visit to my travel and photography blog. This time around I am heading off to the continent of South America for the very first time!
Despite having travelled to 49 nations thus far, I have never ventured over the equatorial divide into the Southern Hemisphere. The two nations I will visit here…. Brazil and Argentina.
The journey to South America would certainly be a long-haul one and for me it would begin in a car park of one of the world’s largest airports, London Heathrow (LHR). For cost efficient reasons I used ‘Purple Parking‘ for my airport parking and you can get some really good deals using this site.
Again for money saving reasons, I avoided booking direct flights, and used comparison sites such as skyscanner.net and momondo.com and the cheapest flights at this time were with Portuguese Airlines ‘TAP Portugal’ and would be flying to Rio de Janeiro Galeão via Lisbon.
On-Flight Safety Demonstration
Luckily for me, my departure from Heathrow would be from Terminal 2, the Queen’s Terminal. It’s a beautiful terminal with posh restaurants (although spending £900 on some caviar meal at one of them isn’t for me) shops, bars and the impressive “Streamline” sculpture on entry.
You really can see why Heathrow’s T2 has been voted as the world’s best airport terminal, and yes, customs and security was smooth running too.
Queen’s Terminal at London Heathrow
So, onto my flight to Lisbon which was a pretty short journey, taking less than two hours, and was a comfortable flight. Then at Lisbon Airport (aka Aeroporto de Humberto Delgado) I vacated the plane and entered the airport terminal and I approached what could only be described as some kind of ‘Willy Wonka’s Sardine Factory’ gift shop?! What is was, was a huge wonderfully colourful store selling all kinds of sardines and sardine gifts. A very unique store to have in an airport.
The Lisbon Airport Sardine Store
Next up was the main flight of this journey, Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro. It would take around nine hours to reach the runway at Galeao Airport.
To be honest I can’t write too much about the flight as I slept for seven hours of the nine hour flight, but what I can say is that the staff were brilliant, the aircraft was clean, the food was pretty decent and as you could tell, very comfortable, especially as I had two seats to myself!
