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Published: February 8th 2005
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Afternoon everyone - how is everything with you? We seem to spend so much time talking about ourselves, what´s going on in your lives?
Hmmm....sounds interesting. Anyway....
Photos will hopefully be making their way onto this site at some point, as prompted by Andy´s Dad. However, I´m afraid he and the rest of you will need to wait until we find an internet cafe that lets us do that and work out how we post the pics. Rest assured there are some good ones.
In fact, all of our cameras have taken a real hammering since you last heard from us.
Having ummed and ahhed on Sunday night about whether to go to the main Carnaval sight, the Sambodrome, the fact that most of the city seemed at a standstill convinced us to go for it.
For those of you unfamiliar with Brazil´s Carnaval, the centrepiece (in Rio anyway) is a series of parades from the city´s biggest samba schools. Kind of like Tring Carnival and the Victorian Fiesta rolled into one and laced with mind enhancing drugs. This all takes place at the Sambodromo which is a big stadium that is only used for this
purpose once a year.
Anyway, we got to the stadium at about 1:30am on Sunday (the parades run from about 8pm until 6am) and managed to negotiate some discounted tickets from a tout outside. We paid 35 reals (about 7 quid each) to get in, as opposed to those who´d bought tickets through the hostel and paid 150 reals (about 30 quid). We were quite pleased with ourselves, until we got into the stand and realised that it was a total scrum and took ages to move even a pace. We crammed ourselves in and caught the last 30 mins of one of the parades, which was pretty impressive. After that quite a few people left so we fought our way to the very top of the stand and grabbed some seats to see the next parade.
Over the course of the next hour we witnessed some pretty amazing (and some pretty random) sights, hundreds of people dancing about in brightly lit costumes, sandwiched between amazing floats full of dancers. One of the floats, shaped like a swan, had about a hundred people dressed in white, all moving together to create an impressive effect. All this whilst a
special samba song, written purely for the parade by each school, was being sung by a band at the back of the parade. Have you ever listened to one song for more than an hour? At first it´s pretty catchy, then it starts to grate a bit, then by the time the band appeared at the end of the procession you want to throw things at them.
It was well worth it anyway - I´m not sure there can be anything much like it anywhere.
So Monday morning was sunny again (2 days in a row!!!) and we decided to take a tour of Christ the Redeemer and Sugar Loaf Mountain.
Leaving the hostel at about 2pm we took a minibus (yes, we did it the very toursity way) up Corcovado, the mountain astride which sits the statue of Christ the Redeemer. Being a national holiday it was really busy and we left the bus in a traffic jam about 3km from the summit and walked the rest. When we finally reached the top we were pretty sweaty and in need of a rest, but the amazing views that greeted us meant this wasn´t a possibility. The
statue itself is actually smaller than you´d think (about the size of Ashridge monument) but the views across Rio are spectacular.
We spent a few hours up there and then got back on the bus to go to Pao d Acucar (Sugar Loaf). This sits on the opposite side of the bay to Christ the Redeemer and is only accessed by cable cars. You have to get one from the ground to another summit, from which you then get a further cable car to the peak of Sugar Loaf. The cable car was being blown about a bit in the wind, so it was something of a relief to get to the top.
When we did we were again amazed at the view. It felt like we were cheating a bit - within about 5 hours we´d experienced two of the most famed sights in the world. We got to the peak to see the sun set over Rio, and the lights get turned on at the foot of Christ the Redeemer across the bay. Fantastic...
So we´re pretty much done in Rio now to be honest, and are planning our next steps. We leave here on
Thursday, and we´re not sure where we´ll be for a few days. Then, on Saturday, we´re going to a tropical island called Ilha Grande where we´re staying until next Wednesday. It should be great to just chill out and let the stresses and strains of Rio wash away.
Thanks for reading, love to all.
AC
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anonymous
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ummmm
Nothing too much to report from the UK, just thought I'd say hi. It is alway nice to recieve a messages to be read first thing in the morning. The burning question is will you go and see the Garrincha museum? Also imagine this, one of you has a one night stand with some brazilian beauty (unlikely I know), and 20 years later he could be the next samba star for the Brazillian national team in the mould of Dunga. Dee - Dee