Well, we're back from Brasilia now and thinking about preparing for our trip back to the UK at the weekend.
Rio while we were away was wet and windy so we were lucky to escape the bad weather. Patrick was off work on thursday & friday because of the Corpus Christi public holiday so we spent half a day exploring photogenic Santa Teresa and ended up having a late lunch in a nice seafood restaurant there.

The bus trip from Rio to Brasilia was meant to take 17 hours but in fact took longer. Brazilian and ex-pat friends thought we were mad not to fly but we wanted to experience long-distance bus travel and see a bit of countryside on the way. We had very luxurious reclining seats on the way out and the buses were huge and high off the ground but they needed to be as the road surace was pretty ropey and the roads were hardly motorways. They stop every few hours at the Brazilian equivalent of service stations so the journey is very broken up but the bus drivers were friendly guys and, much to my relief, drove very sensibly.

We arrived in Brazilia 1.5 hrs late and were met by the wife of an academic colleague of Leo's who seemed unfazed by having had to wait for us. She kindly drove us round some of the landmark sites before dropping us at our hotel.

We had been warned that Brazilia was not easy to explore without a car so it was great to be taken out to the further reaches such as Dilma's official residence, the Palacio da Alvorada, stunningly situated at the end of a long drive, on a lake, the first of many Niemeyer buildings we were to see over the next couple of days.
Brazilia is a strange place, very different to Rio. It might have been because it was the weekend and a public holiday at that but it was very empty and lacking in the vibrancy we've come to associate with Brasil.

It became the capital of Brasil in the 60's with the idea of shifting the concentration of power away from the south east more towards the centre of the country and was the brainchild of the then Predident JK Kubitschek who brought in the urban planner Lucio Costa and the architect Oscar Niemeyer (still going strong & working at 104 apparently) to work with him.
What they achieved, given such a huge blank sheet of paper, is fascinating. The city plan is in the shape of a bird or aeroplane with outstretched wings with a central body or fuselage where all the government buildings are located and the residential areas in the wings. Everything is zoned & on a grid and the apartment complexes follow an identical pattern with each series of blocks having its own set of shops, school etc. Addresses make sense to those with a logical mind as they reflect locations in terms of their relation to the central axis. Maybe I'd have got the hang of it if we'd been there longer!

General impressions of the city are that it's a bit 1984/space age and soul-less although some of the Niemeyer buildings are wonderful. There's a huge number of empty green areas, even in the central area and great distances between places. We'll put some photos up (more to come at a later date from Hugo) so that you can see some of the buildings we visited, several of which, disappointingly, were closed, due to a strike but we did get a tour of the Parliament and also the Kubitschek memorial. In my opinion, many of the Niemeyer buildings were in fact better outside than in as frequently they were oddly subterranean.

The Kubitschek memorial was particularly weird as we had to walk what felt like miles to get to what was effectively a mausoleum, staffed by people dressed in white suits, with piped music like you'd get in a posh hotel lobby. Juscelino & Sarah Kubitschek were Brasil's answer to JF & Jackie Kennedy and he died in a car crash in the 70's...

The Abreu family, who'd collected us in the morning, had us round to their place for pizza in the evening so we got a chance to see inside an apartment and Jorges kindly drove us round the main sites again at dusk so Hugo could get some more photos before we went back to the bus station. We hope you'll agree that he Niemeyer buildings certainly lend themselves to photographers, particularly at night.

The bus journey in reverse was largely uneventful though our view as we descended the hills beyond Rio was disappointingly shrouded in cloud and heavy rain. The Minas countryside was big and empty with very red soil, and not much sign of productive agriculture beyond the odd grove of orange trees. We passed through several large'ish towns and could see from the bus small rural communities but given that we were presumably following the main road there didn't seem to be a massive amount of note between Brasilia & the hill area north of Rio which may be true of quite large areas of interior Brasil.

We'd thought the bus was meant to get in at 1pm (we left Brasilia at 8.30 pm the previous evening) but we didn't in fact reach Rio until about 4pm which meant P & H had missed the first of England's european cup games. The bus journey from the bus station back to Ipanema was, as usual, marked by heavy traffic and scary driving, neither of which we'd had to put up with while we were away from Rio.