brasilians

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After our wild experience in the pantanal i was really stoked to be clean again. we had half a day to kill in campo grande before our bus to Rio... so we sat at the breakfast table with this kiwi couple we{d met and looked at my tourist map from the airport. it looked like there were a lot of cool things to see until we looked closer and saw that they had marked down the sculpture in front of the airport as an attraction, etc. we did go for a walk to view some more of these amazing attractions but it was just a joke! we bussed to sao paulo planning to transfer to rio, ended up at some random terminal that was off the lonely planet map, and being portuguese speakers in brasil it took a while to figure out how to get thru the metro to the correct terminal, but had a little bonus sao paulo experience as a result. finally around a day after we begun we arrived in legendary Rio!
just walking around checking out the beach i felt like almost the ugliest, whitest most overdressed person there. we were staying just on Ipanema beach where all the rich beautiful kids hang out who have lots of leisure time to become awesome at volleyball, get great bodies and perfect tans and buy designer clothes.
rio was really beautiful just like the photos, we got to see it from up high on sugar loaf hill on a clear day, but the next day our trip to christ the redeemer wasnt so successful - for quite a while all we could see were his feet, but for a few minutes the cloud cleared and we saw his whole body, which was cool, no luck with the city below though.
we did quite a few other things in rio including a great visit to the famous steps where snoop dogg and pharrell filmed the music video to "beautiful"!! and walked down the copa, copacabana, with that song stuck in my head like the whole time! tried some nice things like coconut water and guarana and acai smoothies, the juices here are great.
it was absolutely bleeding us dry though, oh the pain everytime we had to pay for something!
the last day i was determined to go for a swim cos we hadnt actually been yet, just went to the beach. that was the day after it had been raining all night, it was still raining, the surf was big and no one was on the beach. result was that i got wasted by the waves and lost my last hairtie, which is a big problem, you would know if you saw my hair over here (gets washed every week or so).
so then it was our longest bus journey yet, a full 24hrs!! fantastic! this was to foz do iguacu and was reasonably uneventful apart from that they played a night at the musuem AGAIN! is it really that great a movie that all the bus companies play it? it had portuguese subtitles this time though.
straight after arrival we made our way to iguacu falls which were even bigger than i thought! we walked around 15 mins seeing waterfalls the whole time and it really was amazing, photos will be up later, i wont bother to describe it. then we crossed back to blessedly cheap argentina and tomorrow we{re headed for the argentine side of the falls which is closer up rather than the overview we had in brasil.
someone is waiting for this computer so chau for now!

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