Last day in Rio, went to Copacabana Beach for the morning. Coffee, people watching and souvenir shopping. Garbage trucks lined the streets, with police escorts, finally starting to clean up all the rubbish. By midday they had only done 1 side of the strip along the beach. Wandered down to Ipanema before heading back to Flamengo. Out on a boat around the harbour area to watch the sunset - too cloudy, so not a good sunset, actually non existent. Was nice to be out...

Spent the morning chilling at Flamengo Beach, people everywhere but quite relaxing. In the afternoon went to Sugar Loaf Mountain, had to take 2 cable cars to get to top. It sits at the mouth of Guanabara Bay and is 396 metres above sea level. Views were fantastic, photo is looking out over Copacabana Beach. Saw Marmosets, cute little monkeys. Afterwards we went to Praia Vermelha (means Red Beach) and enjoyed churros filled with caramel - yum!!

Last night went to sambadrome for 1st night of carnival parades, 6 samba schools paraded and each school can have up to 4000 members. Each school has a minimum of 65 minutes and maximum of 82 minutes to complete there parade. Started at 9pm and would take until 630am next morning to complete. First we had to get there though, there was a massive Bloco on in our neighbourhood and could not get to metro so walked to next station through absolute mayhem of people. ...

Out early to go to Christ the Redeemer statue, 38 metre high statue. Had views over the city but was overcast and quite hazy. Bit boring, get on a bus then a train then look around for 30 minutes then back on the train then the bus. Let's go to the lagoon, so we drive around the lagoon. Tour finished and done 2.5 hours later. Went into a favela (slum area) to see the Morrinho Project. Walked past a dealer issuing a group of kids bags of cocaine to sell, they did...

Did a familiarisation tour of Rio this morning, metro to Ipanema Beach then walked to Copacabana Beach. Extremely hectic, beaches as jammed packed - they are like sardines almost. Our tour guide kept telling us all to slow down, if I went any slower I would be walking backwards. Took a long time to do little. At Copacabana Beach there was a locals Bloco getting started, essentially a party in the street. These start up in areas daily during carnival, people dres...