Brazil 2015

The trip started in a car park at half past seven in the morning, next to a hire car and a plan to drive into Minas Gerais.

São Paulo was the airport and the paperwork this time rather than the city. By the end of the same day I was watching the sun go down over a reservoir most of a day's drive north.

Arrived with just enough light left to go and look at the water.

Furnas is a reservoir rather than a lake, which sounds like a downgrade until you see how much of it there is - from the high ground above the town it runs off past several horizons, and the sun goes down straight along it. Found a green pool and a rock wall on the way in and left the canyon itself for later in the week.

Back for the canyon, which is the reason anyone comes to Capitólio.

Sheer pale walls dropping into dark green water, seen from the viewpoints along the top rather than from a boat. You can walk between four or five of them in a morning and each one hands you a different bend of it. Go before midday - once the sun is straight overhead the water flattens out and loses the colour completely. There is a waterfall on the way in that drops into a pool so green it looks lit from underneath.

A lunch on the way south, and the lunch was the whole point of stopping.

Rice, a platter of feijão tropeiro (beans, cassava flour and sausage) with fried eggs on top and couve (collard greens) round the edge, grilled pork sliced onto lettuce and tomato, chilli sauce on the table and cold beer beside it. Eaten at a friend's house, which is the best way to eat anywhere and particularly here. Minas food is on its own a good enough reason to drive through Minas.

Three days at the end of the trip, spent doing the obvious things and not regretting any of it.

Cristo Redentor in the morning, along with everyone else and their phones, and still worth it from directly underneath - the angle nobody puts on a postcard, where it stops being a silhouette and turns into an enormous plain concrete thing right above you. Then up Pão de Açúcar in the afternoon and, crucially, staying past sunset. Almost everybody rides the cable car down the moment the sun is gone and misses the twenty minutes afterwards, when the bay goes navy and Rio turns its lights on underneath you one district at a time.

The rest was the water. Botafogo, the beaches, and Sugarloaf sitting in the middle of the view from wherever you happen to be standing.