Carnival is not what we were expecting at all - it was actually a bit random. We went to two parades, on the Friday afternoon/evening in Lapa, and on the Saturday afternoon/evening in Ipanema. We thought the parades were going to be these huge, mile long processions with hundreds of dancers and musicians etc. Instead, it is mostly just people walking/standing around drinking beers. On Friday we were trying to get to a parade in Santa Theresa, but because of th...

Ok, so we`re a few days into our time in Brazil and I have started to notice a couple of things - there are a lot of dogs here, a lot of tattoos and and A LOT of bums on show. But, I have figured it out: I rate that the Brazilian government issues each person with a dog and ONE swiming costume as a child and they are instructed to wear it for their whole lives. As a child the bum coverage is not a problem but, as you grow this does result in a little more on sho...

It turns out the bus network in Rio is pretty good - about a quarter of all vehicles on the roads are busses. There is a regular shuttle leaving from the airport that does a loop through all the main neighbourhoods, which we caught to our hostel in Botafogo (we had quickly booked a nights accomodation from an internet kiosk at the airport.) We ended up missing our stop and had to backtrack about 45 minutes on foot :-/ The hostel (Rio Nature) was simple, but nic...