Being in Rio the main thing we wanted to do was throw ourselves off a mountain! Hangliding over Rio has to be one of the best places in the world to do it, flying over the city, the beach and rainforests and landing right beside the sea. We both signed up to do it and headed up to the ramp, 500 metres above Rio, where the nerves seriously set in! The hardest thing about hangliding was the fact that you have to run as fast as you can off this ramp into nothing. Everything in your body is trying to stop you but you just have to look straight ahead (not down) and run. If not it makes it harder for the instructor to control and as Gareth's instructor kept telling him you'll CRASH!

It was an absolutely amazing experience, we were just flying like birds over the national park and it all seems so effortless and natural especially when you see the birds just gliding around underneath you. All in all we were in the air for about 15 minutes and both loved every second of it. We had a really clear day so the views were amazing. We kind of look super imposed on the photos though which is really funny.

Arriving into Rio from Ilha Grande was a major shock to the system, going from a tiny town with no cars to a massive sprawling city with traffic everywhere. Rio has huge mountains some of which are now national parks and are totally undeveloped and covered in forest right in the middle of the city. It really does make it a most stunning place but God they must have been crazy to pick a place with so many mountains to build a city! All those tunnels look like hard work.

We stayed in Ipanema, just beside the famous Ipanema beach and around the corner from Copacabana beach. During the weekend it was amazing to see so many people crammed onto the beach, there really wasn't room to lay down your towel at all. We walked the length of the prom in Ipanema along the iconic black and white waved mosaic path and took in the views. Not only the views of the city and the beach, but also the famous Brazilian dental floss bikinis! You can classify most of the people wearing them into 3 groups, those who should, those who shouldn't and those who have had lots of work done! And no boys I do not have photos to illustrate this.

Christ the Redeemer has always been the main site for me in Rio, but I had always pictured him as being really huge over the city and in reality he's pretty small when you're looking at him from the centre but when you get up close he is collosal. We also visited the Sugar Loaf with Siobhan and Joseph, but not the easy way, we trekked up to the second cable car station through the national forest (and saw more monkeys). The view from the top of the Sugar Loaf was amazing all over Rio and Guanabara Bay, just gorgeous.

We also went to see the step of Lapa which are amazing, basically an artist decided in 1990 to do up these steps and sell his paintings there so he started to tile them with really brightly coloured tiles from all over the world. It's really fabulous and he's a real character, his trademark in his paintings is to draw himself as a pregnant black woman and he spends all of his days painting at the steps in red shorts and flip flops (jandels for the kiwi contingent). We had a chat with him and he showed us all of the tiles he has from Ireland and New Zealand and we even bought one of his crazy paintings.

One of the evenings we headed to a football match in Macarana stadium. The stadium is one of the biggest in the world, seating 100,000 but for Pele's testimonial they managed to squeeze almost 200,000 in. Unfortunately there weren't nearly as many at the match we went to but the supporters who were there more than made up for the numbers. We went to see Flamengo vs. Americanos and sat in the Flamengo supporters area. The atmosphere was magic, the supporters never stopped singing, the drums were going the entire time and huge flags were kept waving throughout the game. A great experience!