Rio De Janeiro…..WOW! This is definitely one of the most spectacular settings of any city we have seen in the world…..busy white sandy beaches surrounded by mountains, with old Cristo Redentor himself overlooking the city. We stayed in Rio for 7 days and could have easily spent a lot longer here. We stayed the first 3 nights in Ipanema beach….of course we did, this is the gathering spot for the beauty crowd after all! Ha ha. Weather wasn't that great when we first arrived, so we thought we would save the beach until later and instead go and check out the local Favela, 'Rocinha'. A Favela is Portuguese for slum, basically the setting of fast and furious 5 (although they couldn't actually film here as It was too dangerous!). This favela is the least dangerous in Rio as police have now taken control of the area…cough cough, by taking control they mean there are now only 2 drug lords running lose. From sitting on Ipanema beach, you couldn't imagine that up in the hills either side of the beach, there are people living in such poverty. We felt dirty from just walking around for a few hours, rubbish, rats, etc etc actually gross! We saw first hand at how dangerous it was….casually walking past and taking a glance to my left, I see 4 policemen with machine guns about to enter someone's house….they didn't have time to stop and pose for a photo properly. This is apparently nothing…our tour guide said that 2 years ago doing this tours, the kids would be walking past you with guns on their shoulders. The tour was really insightful and one of the best trips we have done so far….good to know that things were being implemented to benefit the favela community, and money we spent on the tour went back to helping the kids growing up there.

Next tourist stop (I say next, it was actually the first stop, but we - by we I mean Jodie - forgot to put the memory card in the camera, woops. SO, take two, we went to the Lapa steps. A famous Chilean artist, Selaron created the steps out of various tiles from around the world, and he is still completing the steps now. Snoop dog and Pharrell made a music video here! We also managed to go and watch another football match, Flamengo v Corinthians.

Friday, and the first proper day of clear sunshine…….so what do we do, spend the whole day in a queue. I think every man and his dog had the same idea as we did, to go and see Christ the Redeemer on this clear sunny day. The queues were worse than Thorpe park on a school trip! After an hour queue to get a minibus up the mountain, another hour queue to get a ticket, another queue for another smaller mini bus to the top, and 200 steps later, we were up the top….and the clouds had joined us, Typical! Major, major tourist attraction, which kind of took away the ambience of the setting. But nevertheless, once the clouds cleared, great view of this beautiful city! A better view was from our next tourist stop (which involved yet again more queues), Pao de Acucar aka sugarloaf mountain. Two cable carts took us up to the top of the mountain for sunset….without sounding cheesy, the view was amazing…..as you can see from the pictures.

Friday night, and in Rio there is only one place to party….on the Lapa streets with the locals. Literally it is a street party not for the fainthearted. Locals set up little stalls selling very very very strong Caipirinha cocktails. Eventful night with a few other people we met at the hostel…..in particular, 2 English boys deciding to play "lick the elbow"….which involved going up to someone and licking their elbow behind their back…..luckily for them, for some reason people tend not to notice their elbow being licked. However after chatting to some locals it was advised that Rio, especially Lapa, is not the place to play this game. After licking the big black Brazilian man's elbow 5 times without him noticing, the boys decided to quit while they were ahead! Great street party….however you do have to watch out for the ladyboys….we witnessed one of them gyrate against a very drunk boy, and not even tactically, the he/she fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a 50 note and just strolled off!

After a very expensive few days in Rio, we decided to spend the weekend lapping up the sun and chilling out. Pasty white tourists, we headed to Copacabana beach! Rio hadn't been that great hostel wise, we moved to Copacabana hostel and were put in a small basement room. The window opened out to the smokers area, so our room felt a bit like an ash tray. This added with snorers in the room did not make a great combination…..you can imagine my (Jodie) reaction. So Saturday night, no one else was in the room, for some reason no smokers were about so at last we were hopeful in getting a good night sleep. Dun dun dun………around 4am we were abruptly woken by the sound of a crash…..as I look to my left I see a body lying beside me. Thinking this was just one of our roomies who had decided to sleep on the floor, I started to shake his leg and tell him to get back to bed. I get up to turn on the light, to find out this drunken idiot had fallen off the top bunk onto the concrete floor and smack his head, causing a mini swimming pool of blood all on the floor! His face started to resemble that of the elephant man so I ran to reception to get them to call an ambulance. The Brazilian yet again confirmed our found opinion of the south American race, when the man on reception asked me, the English traveller, what the phone number was???!!!!! To which he then called the fire brigade…clever bunch these people are! After all that, the paramedics clearly couldn't be bothered to try and move the drunk man…..and in their professional medical opinion the best thing to do was to put a mattress on the floor to make sure he doesn't fall off again, while he sleeps of his head injury/concussion! Another good nights sleep then!

That is Rio in a nutshell……overall a great city!

Next stop…..the chase for the sun continues up the north coast to Salvador!

xxxxxxxx