Rio de Janeiro and Carnaval!

---

---

Rio de Janeiro & Carnaval!! We had super high expectations for this part of our trip. Some things exceeded our expectations, but sadly, some things were not as we had expected..

Before throwing ourselves into the craziness of Carnaval, we decided to do a little side trip to Paraty to get a couple of days of relaxing beach time, sunbathing and swimming. We were lucky enough to get half a day of shining sun and beautiful blue skies, but then unlucky that the other two days were wasted grey and gloomy non beach days.

We returned to Rio and had beautiful weather throughout most of our stay. We tried to cram in all the touristy sight seeing before the big parties started. We went on a favela tour which was really interesting to see. We even saw a possible gangster casually sitting with his machine gun. We crammed the other sights- Sugar Loaf Mt, Selaron Steps and Christ the Redeemer. Again, with our great luck, when we got to the top of the mountain to see giant Jesus, a cloud decided to cling to the mountain!! We literally saw nothing of the (what was supposed to be) great view of Rio. It was so cloudy we only saw Jesus feet.

And then party time!! Carnaval is celebrated with "blocos" which is pretty much big street parties all over the city. We stayed in a really social hostel so we had a really good group to party with. But these blocos were definitely not what we expected and not what they are hyped up to be. The best way to describe them is it's a bunch of people standing on the street getting drunk to little or no music. We kept on thinking we were on the outskirts of the party until we realised that this was the party. And we thought everyone was meant to dress up in costumes for the blocos!? Well all the foreigners missed the memo that "costume" actually means wear a tutu and put glitter on your body. Seriously level zero out of 100 for creativity. Ok not ALL of the blocos were crap but you had to dig deep to find the good ones (finally found ONE on the last night!! Yay)

And then the Samba Parade - if everything leading up to this was not meeting our expectations, the Samba Parade definitely made up for it all. It was incredible!! The sheer scale of it - thousands and thousands of people in amazing amazing costumes, huge parade floats all different themes, the sexy Samba queens and feathers galore everywhere!! I could not stop taking photos and videos and attempting to Samba all night. We would go back just for the Samba Parade alone!!

I wish I could share more photos of our daily Rio outings but we didn't take the camera or phones out with us because of all the baddies out to get us. Seriously.. we heard of many people getting mugged - even our room mates 😞

---

Photos

Paraty
Streets get flooded with seawater during full moons high tide.

#iwokeuplikethis
I woke up like this. Must have gotten bitten in my sleep.