Quite a busy few days! On tuesday we did the favela tour in the morning which was totally amazing! We arrived at the bottom of the hill where the favela was and had to take a motorcycle taxi up to the top which was quite a white knuckle ride to say the least! Then to get into the favela's main street we had to walk past a drug dealer holding an assault rifle although we were assured that this was totally safe as the tour company has a deal with them. Once in the favela apparently there is pretty much zero crime as the drug lords come down very heavily on it. It was filled with very friendly positive people and I was amazed to find many people had TVs and there were DVD rental shops! Despite this it was still evidently very poor and cramped, 200,000 people living in 1 square km! We met some local kids and went to an art gallery where I bought a painting. After the favela tour we headed to the beach which was packed as it was a public holiday. The atmosphere was amazing and the football skills dazzling! In the evening we headed to this enormous concert on the beach with a Canadian girl we met the previous evening. There must have been at least 20,000 people there and we were the only gringos I saw! So we sang and danced to the music with the locals all evening which was great fun!

Wednesday was pretty much exclusively a beach day followed by all you can eat steak! We barely made it home we had eaten so much!

Today we headed to the centre for a bit of culture. We wandered the streets looking at all the colonial architecture and then spent most of the afternoon in the museum of brazilian history.