Rio De Janeiro 5th - 11th June

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It's rather scary going travelling. One minute you're in your local weatherspoons, drinking 79p cups of tea because you're desperately trying to save money and dreaming about the far-flung places of the world that you intend to go to - then in no time at all you're there! And half way through the trip! Time certainly does have a habit of creeping up on you - Rio had always felt so far into our travels that we had barely paid it attention, but suddenly we were off our bus and in Brazil, trying to speak spanish to people who spoke portuguese and naviagte a city that has quite a reputation for violent crime (especially against tourists).

Brazillians have a saying: God created the world in five days - the sixth he spent on Rio.
Somehow we made it across town by public transport and checked into a really nice hostel in the fashionable (but safer we hoped) district of Ipanema - about 100m from the beach! Although we were pretty shocked by the prices in Rio (in fact "shocked" doesn't really describe the "there goes our budget" feelings that we had) we resolved not to cut essentials like visiting the core attractions out of our trip and simply had to lump the costs ($30 for a dorm bed - apparently it goes up to $100 for a dorm during Carnival!).

Tourist...
Christ the Redeemer, the iconic statue that looks so big in the movies, is more 'Christ the Midget' in reality. A wonder of the world he is not, although it certainly is still fun getteing your photo taken with him and the views from the top of the mountain is spectacular. Possibly even more incredible is watching the sun set on a clear day from Mount Sugarloaf and seeing the night lights turn on, with old Christy in the background. Pretty magical all-in-all.

Looking out over Rio from the top of Sugar Loaf at dusk ....

... and at night.
Rio is, of course, famous for being a real party-city so we checked out a street-party on the far side of town one friday night (which we later discovered was right next to a Favela slum). I have never seen anything like it - a huge street party where the drinks are cheap and striong whilst the music seems to come from unseen speakers. Huge crowds of Samba dancers in the streets and live bands stand alongside food stalls selling god-knows-what-but-it-smells-delicious. A really magical place, although it did turn a bit rough later on. Still, it was an incredibile night out.

The locals in Ipanema and Copacabana treat the beach like the Brits treat the pub - it is the hub of just about everything (hence why everyone is up early in the morning working on those beach bodies). In fact it seems like some people do nothing else but sit on the beach all day! It has to be seen to be believed how people treat the beach in Rio...

Beachlife is pretty easy-going.
The flip side of Rio to the people on the beaches and the expensive cocktails (and in fact all of the wealth in Brazil for that matter) is the large number of people who live in flavelas or slums that dot the cities (on maps they are just shown as large green spaces). What is extremely odd is the way that the slums come all the way up to expensive apparment blocks on the beachfront. These favelas are ruled over entirely by drug barons (no exaggeration) and non-gang crime is punished severely. As a result, a charity running a day-care centre for children ran (gang approved) tours within the flavelas themselves - something which we ummed and erred about going on (since we didn't want to treat someone elses missfortunes as a tourist attraction), but eventually felt that we wouldn't have seen the full Rio if we didn't go - so we decided to check it out. The only way that we can describe the flavela that we visited was that it was nothing like we were expecting - the housing was haphazardly built, but some of the housing interiors were completely undeserving of the word "slum". The levels of infrastructure were so much higher than you would expect, but also completely unregulated, so cables and pipes ran freely around. In some ways it was uplifting , I guess becuase it wasn't as horrendous as we were anticipating, but in other ways it was equally downlifting becuase there was even less of an escape from the favelas than we had though. An illuminating trip.

A Rio Favela.
Six days in Rio flew past - not helped by the fact that there was a sushi place around the corner from our hostel that was out of this world (particullarly the salmon roll!). After picking up the statuary pair of Haviana sandals that are a must for all travellers to Brazil, we were off again...

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