Hi Everyone!!! So the journey has begun...finally! We arrived in Rio on Wednesday morning and it was already hot you'll all be glad to know back in Britain, you lucky things! Our hostel is pretty basic but it is only two blocks from Copacabana beach and the centre of Copacabana itself you we cant really complain! The people we are sharing with are great so its been a good laugh so far! Since we've been here we've been on Copacabana and Ipanema beaches which are both really nice! On the first night we decided to go to a football match at the Maracana Stadium - holds something like 130,000 so its really quite big! That was really good as the atmosphere was brilliant! Yesterday we went on a trip to Christ the Redeemer. Our taxi driver was excellent as he stopped all the way up so we could take pictures and feed monkeys (!). It is a fair distance to the top and some stupid people seem to have decided to walk up the mountain to it! Crazy! The views were absolutely amazing from the top - you could see all over Rio! I'll add some of the photos next time so you can see for yourselves. We spent quite a bit of this afternoon just chilling on the beach - well it was 33 degrees today so I feel it was justified! we are heading off to Parati tomorrow - its meant to be really pretty and is surrounded by 64 islands so I feel a boat trip coming on!