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 nice enough. There was a large outside deck with a pretty cool view over the city. It wasn't too full either, so we had our own room. We pretty much just collapsed and went to sleep.

Wednesday we woke up and ate breakfast out on the deck with the monkeys. Afterwards we took a bus to see Christ the Redeemer. You take a 20 minute train ride through thick forest to get to the top. The statue is even bigger than we were expecting. The base alone is over 6m high and contains a small chapel. Of course the place was completely overrun with tourists - you need to jostle a bit for a good photo spot. The view of the city is amazing though. When we were done, we made our way back to our hostel to get our things (it was fully booked for carnival so we had to leave.) We had managed to book a few nights in another hostel (Vanazul) in an area called Sao Conrado.

Thursday we slept in and went and chilled on the beach in the afternoon - about 5 minutes down the road from where we were staying. It was about 33 degrees, but felt cooler than in Cape Town, so we both stayed in the sun too long and got sunburnt :-/ That evening a few of us from the hostel (the 2 of us, a Canadian and 2 Ausies) walked about 5 minutes up the road and had dinner in the favela. Its really cheap (about R$13.50) and you get a huge plate of food. The drinks are really cheap up there too!

Friday we went looking for a plug adapter for the laptop charger - turns out SA plugs are not very common. Ended up buying a Brazilian plug and just rewiring the charger. That afternoon we had a nap and later went out to one of the carnival parades.

Saturday we were up pretty early to do an official favela tour. We went to 2 favelas - Rocinha, which is the biggest in Rio and one of the biggest in all of Brazil. The second one was the one just up the road from us (3000 people.) It's quite interesting comparing the favelas to the townships back home. The standard of living seems to be higher in the favelas - the houses are all made of brick/concrete, they all seem to have electricity and most have running water. A big problem though is lack of access - Rocinha has only 1 road to serve 70 000 people! We had lunch at our local favela hangout. In the evening we went through to check out another carnival parade in Ipanema.

Sunday we were up early to get to Ilha Grande, an island about halfway between Rio and Sao Paulo. The traffic was terrible which meant we missed our connecting ferry and had to get a much later one (which cost R$30 each instead of the normal R$7!). We eventually arrived in the dark at about 21:00 - a whole day of travelling :-/