Out of season and extremely good value, we spend an afternoon of dozing and lounging by the heated pools, our half-naked bodies sealed away from the cold crisp day outside by large glass windows built around a tall oak roof.

The holiday blues arrive on our last night in El Calafate and my friend and I decide to smother it with two bottles of the best Malbec in hand and a luscious dinner of grilled beef, deer, chicken and sausages at the most upmarket steakhouse in town.

In the morning ,the long journey home begins at the spaceship-like airport, where we board our flight to Buenos Aires and, upon a sharp turn North, we perform a fly-by over Mount Fitzroy and Lago Argentino. A mental postcard now stuck in my mind forever.

We land in Buenos Aires three hours later and my friend and I part our ways. She immediately boards a flight to Montevideo and I meet a local friend at the arrivals hall.

Her shiny and warm smile soften the blow of both ending an epic holiday and saying goodbye to a dear friend. A mild sunny day for enjoyment in the Argentinian capital, I am driven to Palermo for a walk by the vivid Floralis Generica and a hearty lunch of top notch steak at Puerto Madero, my last one.

At Casa Rosada, I picture the president watching a telenovela as the Sunday vanishes into the end of yet another week and the nigh thought of a Monday in the horizon.

I am driven to the airport and leave Argentinian soil in the middle of the night, flying over the River Plate with the lights of Gran Buenos Aires behind and the Uruguayan coastal city of Colonia in front of us.

At two in the morning, the Guanabara Bay emerges from the steamy fog of the Brazilian night and we land at Rio Galeao Airport in a less-than-glorious fanfare.

A city dark, humid and dangerous at night, I decide to wait for a few hours and find a corner where many fellow passengers are fast asleep, laying my head against a pillar of white tiles and a electric plug.

Unable to sleep , I walk across the emptiness of the two terminals that late at night seem to just whisper about the bitter goodbyes of flights now heading for Europe, an all so-familiar memory of five years past in this exact same airport.

At five in the morning, I take the first bus out of Galeao and in and out of my sleep, I try to pay special attention to the route taken: across the Bay, up the Red Line to the derelict Port area, contouring iconic Botafogo as the sun rises over the Sugar Loaf and finally across the long tunnel bore underneath Cantagalo Peak to call for my stop.

I meet an old friend and take a quick shower at her apartment in Ipanema as she brews fresh Brazilian coffee in the steeled mocha pot.

A short walk from her place, I lay on the sand and dip in the warm sea. I devour Globo biscuits and drink coconut water while I look at a very familiar coastline of topless runners and distant favelas.

Rio was once my escaping place. It was the beautifully green antagonist of my life in Sao Paulo’s concrete jungle. It was a place to relax then, it is a place to relax now too.

With the Soccer World Cup to be held in a few months and the Olympic Games to take place here in exactly two years, the city has seen a dramatic transformation in infrastructure and most importantly safety, with the military taking over the problematic slums with heavy patrolling and a safety agreement with the residents not involved in drug cartels, ending confrontation within the cramped shanty towns and bringing some sort of still state-of-alert peace to the hills.

For the first time in all my visits to Rio, I am invited to have lunch in a favela. Not as ‘slum tourism’ or a ‘window to the poor’ , but rather as a local experience that brings a much necessary income to its residents and breaks the barrier of prejudice in a country known for its inequality.

My short Rio layover ends as I take the air-conditioned bus back to Galeao and I fall asleep only to be awoken as we reach the terminal.

Nobody to say good-bye to this time. I check in, face the long immigration queues at the sound of a frustrated Brazilian passenger complaining about their government lack of planning skills, and leave the South American continent on a full Air France flight late in the night.

Movie, sit-com, dinner, movie, sleep, breakfast. Once turning on my mobile at Charles de Gaulle Airport, reality hits me with four missed calls and three text messages from my boss.

I land in Dublin three hours later and I am greeted with a ‘welcome home’ by the immigration officer.

I call the office to say I feel ill and take a shower to sleep it off. Sigh. Holidays are over, I am back in Europe and in need of a career change.