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We left Rio yesterday afteroon after meeting up with our Tucan group, our guide Rebecca is Australian and our six other group members are all Brits apart from one Irish girl. All of us are within about 10-12 years of each other in age so that's quite good and we all get along well so far. In the morning before we left Rio we went to a Favela which is basically a slum area. It was built on a hillside so we were taken up to the top on the back of motorbikes, no helmets of course and the drivers were a bit crazy but it was so much fun! We walked down with a guide through the favela streets which were dirty and littered with rubbish but the people looked surprisingly clean and were very friendly. The police don't tend to enter the area but there are people on look-out, and if they do enter, fireworks are set off to warn everyone. It's safe enough for tourists as they don't want a reason for the police to come in. You can only take photos in some areas and never of people with walkie talkies or machine guns! We didn't see any of the latter though!
In the afternoon we moved on to Paraty (pronounced Parachi), a 4 hour bus ride south along the coast. It's a nice friendly little town which is quieter and safer than Rio. The Old Town is a World Heritage site, and the cobbled streets at sea level get washed when the tide comes in. The town seems to have many food stalls and rather than sitting down for dinner last night we had various food from different stalls all of which were fabulous. Today we went out on a Schuner cruise around some of the nearby islands and we just chilled out, swam, snorkled and got wind-burnt a little too! Moving on to Sao Paulo tomorrow.
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