When we got up in the morning, the sun was shining and there was barely a cloud in the sky so we decided not to waste the opportunity and today we headed out to climb the hill on top of which the enormous statue of Christ the Redeemer sits. For some unknown reason, the first day we were in Rio I had asked Andy which hill 'Matey' sat atop as there was too much cloud to see him and the name kind of stuck! So heading off to see Matey we took the metro to a station w...

We slept in rather later than we wanted to today so it was gone midday before we finally caught the metro into the centre of Rio. Once we arrived and got our bearings we started our tour by looking at park dedicated to Ghandi which contained a very impressive looking fountain, which was turned off. We then took a stroll up one of the main streets in Rio, Avenue Rio Branco, which must be about 50m wide and is lined with trees, making it quite a pretty place to wa...

We were up and checking our bags in at 6 to board our onward flight at 7 which was very short at only 50 minutes and before long we could see the city of Rio De Janeiro stretching out below us. We landed at just after 8 and after the usual drama of baggage collection and trying to find out how to get to the place we are staying we managed to get on a bus with our bags, only to find you have to go through a kind of turnstile thingy and our bags wouldnt fit through...

Nothing to say about today as we didn't do anything, after waking up and packing our stuff away we got a lift to the airport from the tour agency and caught out flight to Belo Horizonte which took 3 and a half hours. We then arrived collected our bags and proceeded to the desk where we were informed that we could not check in as our flight was the next morning. We thenserched around for a baggage storage place but they wanted $5 per bag so we elected to keep them...

Although we were up by 8 this morning our plans for the day were postponed by the annoying lack of information about anything on the internet and it wasn't until after midday that we eventually left the hostel. It was hot and muggy today, about 33 degrees, so the bus that we managed to catch, much to our surprise given the chaotic system of random flagging down, was a bit on the warm side. A helpful passenger told us when to get off as the bus assistant (whose j...