Jardim Botänico

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After sleeping with every parts of our body crossed, hoping for fine weather today. We were both bitterly dissappointed to wake up to more rain and another day when we would not see a brake in the clouds. In protest of this English like weather we slept for another couple of hours, as quite frankly there wasnt too much to hurry up getting out of bed for.

We did however make it out of bed and up for breakfast where we were pleasantly surprised with the standard of food. We were served really nice orange juice and the best fresh bread we have had so far. So much so we both had three rolls of it. Our plan today involved seeing the botanical gardens which was on the opposite side of the lake to Copacabana. If we were being honest we would not have visited the botanical gardens if the weather would have been nice, but we wanted to try do as much as we could given the weather.

To get there we decided to take a taxi as the gardens were not on the metro line and we could not properly trust the buses. It was only a relatively short ride though so it did not cost too much getting there. We had no idea what to expect as we hadnt really read much or heard too much about the gardens. So when we arrived we were surprised with just how did the gardens were.

After paying our admission we straight away came across the Japenese Garden, it was beautiful, tranquil and very well prunned. It reminded me of mr meage's garden in the Karate Kid films. In these gardens we met a brazilian women who after asking her to take a photo of us, she went several steps further by even suggesting and taking other photo's in different locations around the garden. It was pretty cool having our own personal photographer.

We strolled through the gardens admiring the different areas like the Amazon region, waterfalls, mexican gardens, the monkey river, the palm tree area and the pretty looking waterfountain.

The gardens were very cool as it enabled us to have fun and joke around like kids however still appreciate the designs and variety of the scenary. In total they have over 5000 different types of plants - but dont worry i am not going to name them all. In summary the gardens were a lovely place quiet/peaceful place which was a pleasure to look around. My Grandma Tina (Margaret) would love it!! I could just imagine her walking Sally around and admiring the plants.

So after walking around for a couple of hours we decided to go to the RioSul shopping centre in Botafogo. This was really close to the gardens but we were advised to get a taxi as you have to pass through a rough area. So best not to take any chances.

Ok so i know your thinking that all we do is shop, but this was different. This time it was for me as I wanted to go and pick up an external hard drive for our pictures. When in the shopping centre we found it was huge, it had over 6 floors of nice shops, so we did a bit of browsing but nothing other than the hard drive appealled to us.

After a few hours shopping we found ourselves warn out. it was about 5ish so we decided to get ourselves back to the hostel at the Mellow Yellow. When we got back we didnt stay long as I wanted to go test my new gadget and upload all the photo's. So we set up base in an internet cafe for a while. This gave up a chance to communicate with home and browse through all our pictures so far.

Brfore we realised the guy who owned the shop was tapping us on the shoulder as it was 10pm and he was closing. On the way home we were looking for places to eat as we were still yet to eat dinner. We found a nice fruit bar that did tasty pastries, so we had a nice fresh mango juice accompanied with pastries.

Rio is simply the best for fresh fruit juices, they have juice bars everywhere and there are all so nice. One of my favourite things about Brazil, well as well as the beaches.

Anyway we got in from the juicebar and went straight to bed as we were tired. We both missed our free drinks tonight which was dissappointing, i guess we will just have to make up for it another night.

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