Blogs from Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, South America - page 4

Arrived in Rio on Tuesday 17th June, where Jo and Marcela Tada welcomed us to Brazil in style. Luiz organised our accommodation and we all "rehydrated" at a local bar, with Brazilian beer, tapas style food and guava juice, yum! Today, we explored Rio by metro, and found the FIFA fan zone on Copacabana beach, ahead of the England game tomorrow, come on England! Off training tonight with Jo′s club! Excursion tomorrow with Ricardo. More to come later!... read more

Loaded up on the free breakfast from the hostel and rolls made for lunch. (An excellent habit of Brazilian hostels so far). With beautiful blue skies and high temperatures, even at 8.30am, we set off to Sugarloaf mountain. The bus stop was 2 blocks away and the staff at Che Lagarto really helpful with bus numbers. On our short walk to the bus station we passed through a fresh food market selling amazingly fresh fruit, many of which the market sellers offered us to try - the strawberries were delicious. We later found out that another unusual fruit we were given to try was called Cherymoya, or custard apple. Really nice. There were also live crabs on a string, which we dismissed as dead until they started nipping at each other. I would question their storage ... read more

Wednesday 8th January (Odyssey Day 61) We were collected from the hotel by an air-conditioned coach this morning and everyone was thrilled with the alternative transport that we had for the trip to Rio. The scenery was absolutely beautiful on the drive, with stunning views of the mountains out one window and the sea on the other side. It was a really winding drive along the coast. We arrived in to Rio de Janeiro at lunch time, about 1300 and checked in to our 4 star hotel just down the road from Copacabana beach. What more could we possibly want? A walk down the street to the beach was definitely in order. We did hear about Simon’s interesting drive to get here though. Apparently he got caught in a bit of a riot after a peaceful ... read more

After an hour´s delay we finally landed in Rio around 11pm. We jumped in a taxi straight to the hostel and went straight to sleep, it had been a long day and we´d had quite a few vodkas´s on the plane... After a poor nights sleep due to people coming in the room at all hours of the night and turning the lights on we got up early and went down for breakfast. Turns out the standard breakfast in Brazil consists of cake, fruit and some form of bread, and if your lucky a little bit of meat. After breakfast we walked down to Copacabana beach which was only 5 minutes away from our hostel. The beach was fairly quiet as it was so early so we walked to one end, the sun was already shining ... read more

Decide to try and see if we could navigate our way around the city. Caught the bus and metro into the centre of town. We were very lucky to meet several different people who were very helpful. One girl who spoke very good english chatted to us for ages. Said there was to be a protest tonight and that they were expecting 1 million people to attend. Its is over an increase in the transport costs. We caught a bus up to santa teresa looking for the ¨Steps. We walked quite a long way before we found them. We were looking to far up the hill. We then walked down onto the harbouralong to Flemengo.... read more