Blogs from Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, South America - page 9

Stop 1 - Rio de Janeiro Well my journey has just begun. After an interesting jounrey to South America with a slightly delayed flight and the sort of turbulance that you could pay for at a fun fair ride I arrived at the Alpha hostel in Botofogo in Rio. The hostel was nice. There were 9 people in each dorm and 3 sets of 3 tiered bunk beds which apparently is quite unusual. In the evening I met Lisa and Dave from the UK who were actually on the same flight as me. The following day I decided to go with Dave and Lisa to visit Sugar Loaf. Sugar loaf could be accessed via 2 cable cars which we decided to walk to as it looked quite close on the map. The walk ended up being ... read more

Day starts of with the usual - breakfast (the best so far - so many fruits to choose from), shower, pack. Say goodbye to the falls and catch a plane for Rio de Janeiro (TAM airline). Our plane departs at 10:40am and arrives at 12:40 in Rio (roughly 2hr). We find a cab that is so much cheaper than the ones at the arrivals door. The cab take us to Tupiniquim Hostel in Botafogo. We leave after dropping of our bags in search of lunch. Find a lovely little place where we have some soup of the day. Tempers start going out of control as we are lost for ages and nothing on the map matches the streets we are walking along. We walk for ages trying to find a shopping mall and end up tired ... read more

...A kitten with a sore leg! Anyways...Campo Grande, the capital of the area from which you can enter the Pantanal - an area of forest so varied in wildlife and ecosystems, over such a small area that exciting times are promised to lie ahead. We booked on a tour and still with Jimmy and Kev, headed off, eventually after we got the bus got going by us pushing it down a ramp, then re-fuelling it the engine still going so it wouldn't stall again. Hmmmmm. This is a break down of what happened over those few days... Night one of camp; Watched the sun go down over the jungle. It was like one of those African safari docos, where the sun races down over the horizon and you assume they´ve speeded it up. No. Tis ... read more

View from my house.... read more

We left London Heathrow at 10pm and finally arrived in Rio at 8am local time after an unexpected stop-over at Sao Paulo. On attempting to board the bus we discovered they would only accept Brazilian Reals and not the US Dollars that we had exchanged. A kind man directed us to cash machines on the top floor, only to find out they were in portuguese only and didn't accept our cards. Our second thought was to find a bank to exchange our money but these did not open till later in the day. We ended up exchanging 20 pounds with a porter at the airport who actually gave us a better rate than exchanging in England! After about 3 hours of walking around the airport with our backpacks we boarded the bus to our hostel. The ... read more

Hi all, Hope you enjoyed the photos from Argentina, apparently the website has stopped letting you know when we have updated the blog but we are still updating it - so keep checking! Had a fantastic 6 days in Rio, stayed in a great hostel in Botafogo, five minutes from Copacabana and close to Santa Teresa and Lapa (our favourite place to go at night!) We arrived in Rio on the first day of the Carnival so we jumped in head first and arrived right in the middle of all the madness! We were greeted by ´Bloco´s´(the street parties) going on everywhere every day but we managed to get tickets to the Sambadrome which is the epitomy of the carnival. We were in section 6 which was the cheapest section and absolutely packed but the floats, ... read more