Two nuts in Brazil

South America » Brazil » Rio de Janeiro » Rio de Janeiro » Botafogo
August 20th 2010

Published: August 23rd 2010

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Sheryl and Steve

The Big Man

We’ve had our longest journey so far; a thirty one and a half hour bus ride from La Paz in Bolivia to Lima in Peru. With a quick over night stay in an excellent hostel we flew over to Sao Paulo in Brazil the next day. From there we took two buses and a cab and ended up in Rio de Janeiro. Three days, only one night in a bed AND we’re still friends.

Rio has captivated us, we are totally in love. If there is one place that will be visited again, Rio will have to be it.

It’s the first place we’ve been able to walk around without paying too much attention to the pavements, or holes in the pavements more to the point. The cars, although speedy, are much the same as home and tend to stay in their own lanes. The buildings have rendering on the outside, paint, mirrors and all manner of decorations. The restaurants have windows, doors and ceilings and not a chicken, rice and beans in sight for the whole time we were there. A little pinch of modern city living within a world trip of developing countries.

We only had

Cool hostel in Lima

Shez in the balcony where we drank a bottle of red whilst people watching.

two full days to enjoy, so we were determined to make the most of them. We visited the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer. He took ten years to make and stands over 700m high with his hands open, blessing the city below. It’s quite an impressive sight whether you are just below him or when you’re looking up at night and see him lit up.

We took the underground over to Ipenema beach to watch the sun go down, ate a sandwich and had a paddle on Copacabana, took a cable car up Sugar Loaf Mountain to watch the sunset and visited a staircase that a guy has been tiling for years with tiles from over 120 countries. We’ve tried out the local buses and figured out the underground system, drank wine in the Botafogo area and supped a few caipirinhas (well it’d be rude not to!).

Rio is known for it’s beautiful population and it lived up to it’s name, although not everyone is the sculpted, blemish free body one presumes to see. Wonderfully they have a wider remit for what is termed ‘beautiful‘. Everybody is out and about in the leafy suburbs or skating/running/walking along

I was spots.

one of the many beaches. Shops have open fronts and you can buy fruit smoothes from places that make you feel like you’re in the stock exchange.

Rio speaks Portuguese - although to us it sounded like some kind of reversed Klingon. Our Spanish seemed to help them understand us a little, but it certainly didn’t the other way around. We even had to ask what ‘frango’ was in the supermarket. Chicken.. not seafood, as we had guessed from the picture on the packet.

All in all one of the best ‘city breaks’ we have been on. We didn’t even scratch the surface and would love to go back for an extended stay to really get to know it.

We’re currently on a bus to Sao Paulo where we’ll be going straight to the airport. We don’t have to be there until 4am, but that would mean leaving a hostel at 3.30am - no point in paying for a bed if you’re only going to use it for a couple of hours :O).

Bye Rio, we miss you already.

S&S

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P.S. We’ve now completed that over night stay in the airport.. hostels