Buenos Dias Amigos!

So after the chilled statues of Easter Island and some romantic Valentines tapas in Chile, we were totally unprepared for the mentalist, mad packed two weeks in Rio De Janeiro going large with a million other tourists celebrating the crazy Carnaval!!

Stayed in a six person bunk bed dorm for the first time in months forcing us to speak to other people but luckily we had a pretty fly gang of dorm buddies: German Matthias who seemed to be in Rio with the sole intention of securing himself a subserviant Brazilian wife happy to submit to his kinky Kraut ways, Irish John, the oldest but most hardcore partygoer of us all who gave us all calenders from Ireland when he left, gay Aussie Liam who is a real life Carnie and grew up on the biggest travelling fair in Oz and took us to the best street party in Rio and fellow Londoner Katy who won our respect by downing seven shots in a row including three Brazilian Bombs, Pernod, Whiskey, Malibu and tequila after a spectacular losing streak in bar cards. So this was our too-cool-for-skool Carnival Crew......

And realising we were already on the backfoot and at a severe disadvantage thanks to our rubbish licencing hours, we were all soon in strict training to prepare us for the parties that didn't even start until 1am and finished when the last person fell down!

Went to some amazing Bloccos - street parties - with drums and giant speakers and the streets absolutely rammed with people all dancing and singing and snogging. And of course after the odd one or two 75 pence Caiprahinias, we were trying to Samba with the best of them, which is a little bit of a shame because despite my own beliefs after drinking my own body weight in cachacas sugar cane rum, I am not the UK's answer to Shakira. Ended up with Tim fighting off much male attention and me dancing oblivious behind him somehow sporting a yellow Lisa Simpson hair hat!

The Carnival Parade in the Sambadrome was incredible....we arrived around 1am and after a highly amusing stand-off between the ticket touts took our seats around 2.30am......the atmosphere was fab, everyone waving flags and chanting. The floats and the dancers were super impressive.....and even the street sweepers between each Samba school danced while they worked just like the advert!!

Fav floats included a car engine with people dressed as oil cans, giant scarecrows, a huge lizard with rolling buggy eyes and a massive robot with hundreds of matching robots marching in line. Sadly it was obviously all a bit too much excitement for one of the robots.....when we spotted an little silver man out cold being rushed away on a stretcher. Robot down, robot down!

We finally staggered home around 7am just as the sun came up over Ipanema beach...aaawwwww!

Looking forward to some proper sightseeing, we hear tell of some statue on a mountain thats worth a gander? xx