The train up the Urubamba and then the bus switchbacks deliver you to the gate, and Machu Picchu comes out of the morning cloud in pieces. A terrace, a temple, the whole city at once. We'd acclimatised in Cusco first; the altitude here is gentler, and the place earns every photograph ever taken of it.

Buenos Aires felt like a European city that drifted south. The wide avenues, the cafés, the faded grandeur of Recoleta. The tango show was the set-piece, the dancers close and precise, the bandoneón doing the heavy lifting. Dinner ran late, as everything does there.

We did both sides of Iguaçu. The Brazilian panorama one day, the Argentine catwalks the next, out over the Garganta del Diablo where the river simply disappears into spray and noise. You come off the walkway soaked and a little stunned. The falls are wider than Niagara and there are hundreds of them.

Rio closed the trip. The cog train up Corcovado to the Christ statue with the whole city and bay laid out below, then the cable car up Sugarloaf at dusk. The samba show that night, with dinner, was loud and joyful and exactly the right way to end a continent.