Blogs from Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, South America

Brazil is known to be a Catholic country and this is evident on the streets of Rio de Janeiro where you can find an enormous number of churches. Each one however, is very different to the one before. There are churches of all sizes and styles. I visited a few of these and was struck by the huge differences in appearance and feeling. On Easter Sunday we celebrated Mass in a relatively modern church on the beach in Florianopolis. This was a rather lively catholic mass with an established and popular band who led the singing of the hymns. The words were projected onto the walls and the sound system was new and very effective. Inside the church, there was little in terms of decoration and the walls were very clean and pure. The feeling inside ... read more

I am not sure when I first saw the Christ the Redeemer statue on television or why it had such an impact on me, I suspect it is a side effect of watching too many Bond films and others in that genre. But whatever the cause, it has been a wish of mine ever since I was a child to visit this special venue, a wish that with my fear of heights and my fear of flying I never expected to come true. However today, I was lucky enough to see the statue and the spectacular views that surround it. The landmark sits on the top of Corcovado Mountain, a mountain named after its curved shape, from the Portuguese for camel-back or hump. The mountain is found in Tijuca Forest National Park, a wonderful rainforest in ... read more

And hello beaches of Rio indeed! They really are something else, almost as if they could inspire a song or two! So I arrived in Rio this afternoon after a 2 hour flight from Foz do Iguaçu. It was a smooth enough flight and for someone who continues to suffer from a fear of flying, I have to say that two hours does seem a very short flight nowadays. As we neared our destination, I was even brave enough to look out of the window of the plane and was amazed to see the sprawl that is Rio de Janeiro. It is incredibly crowded but then in between all these pockets of development, there are mountains that appear to have grown up through the city, rather than the opposite that is the natural progression of development. ... read more

Descending out of the gathering cold and cloud, we caught our first breathtaking glimpse of Rio de Janeiro. Its famous coastline of countless beaches, oddly formed peaks and one particularly famous statue appeared from nowhere as we excitedly squashed our faces against the window of the aeroplane, our eyes straining to catch sight of one of Rio’s more famous landmarks – at that height impossible of course but our anticipation had suddenly armed us with irrational, child like wonder. Our tiredness following our arduous twenty-seven hour journey from Mumbai disappeared as quickly as the cloud covering. Here against the cool blue of the Atlantic Ocean, Rio de Janeiro and indeed the rest of South America lay before us... At that moment, it seemed like years ago that we had ended our time in India, a country ... read more