Rio Baby..................

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Our 2 buses to get to Rio were pretty uneventful apart from a second bus where a team of muay thai fighters (obviously very good judging by the size of there trophy!) got on. Greg almost broke their trophy by reclining his seat, luckily for us they must have been tired and moved their trophy to a safer spot. Bus broke down got into Rio pretty late, we went straight for a taxi, who yet again wanted to impress us with his rally driving skills. Possibly the Brazillians version of the Stig as he had some classical jazz busting out.... Rio at night was very impressive the favelas and Christ redmitor (or whatever its called!) were all lit up and it was very pretty, uinfortunately due to McRae we didn't have time for a pic!
Got to our hostel both of us looking around with a "you having a laugh" look on our faces. It looked nothing like the website and was teeny. Not getting the twin room we asked for we were shoe horned into a teeny room that had 4 beds in it. However after all this travel we were glad to have a bed. The website obviously lied again as it boasted an exceptional Brazillian breakfast, probably why Greg chose it in the 1st place! In our book a couple of crusty rolls does not count as exceptional. Add to this the crap weather our 1st imopressions of Rio were not too favourable. Not complete haters, our hostel did have an awesome location, right intje middle of it all and 2 blocks from the beach. A quick mosy around the shops and katy was son the proud owner of a very pretty albeit kind of teeny bikini!...hey when in rome! And unbelevably Greg couldn't find a pair of speedos that he liked!....
Next day the hostel redeemed itself with a pretty good breakfast. However the weather was still rubbish. Took a stroll along the promenade sipping on a coconut and watched people in there teeny weenies doing all forms of exercise including volleyball and another footballers variation.
Third day....Finally saw some sun!!! And almost ran to the beach in excitement. Soaking up the much awaited rays and repeating Nao Obrigado/a to every vendor there was until of course it hit "beer o'clock" Spent a lot of the day peole watching (shocker) many a brilliant body wearing not a lot. One thing we definitely wanted to do was go see a game at the maracana stadium! Saw a pretty good game Flamengo Vs Nautico. Flares, flags and a very ;lively crowd. The majority celebrating a Flamengo 3-0 win. Driving back the driver pointed out the various favelas around Rio, seeing the massive monetary divide was quite shocking!
Thankfully the rest of the week we were on the beach everyday which worked out well as rio was well expensive! People will think we are crazy for not going to sugar loaf mountain or the christ monument but we saw it from different vantage point and were happy enough with that!
As nice as Copacabana was and i'm sure had we had more time and money we would have done/seen a lot more, our general impression of Rio was not quite as we had hoped. Both wanting to see lots of colour, dancing hearing music feeling anoverall buzz we were both left feeling very buzz-less and unfortunately bland!....

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