Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

Howdy crew :)

Well after our European adventures came to an end, a whole new adventure has started, South America!

We flew into Rio De Janeiro from Athens, with a quick stop over in Madrid, Spain. We were a little worried about the hurricane situation over Cuba and America but it was all good. We had some pretty crazy turbulence towards the end of our 14 hour flight, but over all it was reletively smooth and a good flight.

We arrived in Rio and jumped in a cab to our hostel. It was a very enlightening cab ride, thats for sure.. It wasn´t the fact that the cabby drove like Schumacher cos we are used to that from Greece now, (I never new a 1.6Lt Nissan Pulsar could do 150km/h but apparrently it can!) but it was more the fact that there are no road rules at all, except that you must change lanes at least 3 times every 10 seconds! There were guys in the middle of the freeway trying to open your cab door and sell you just about anything while you were crawling through traffic.. Def a crazy place.. The boys looked at me and were thinking ´what have we got ourselves into!..

So we drove through a very dodgy area where our hostel was and went to bed, sort of dreading the next week in Rio.

We woke up the next day, went to the beach and realised that our first impressions of Rio couldn´t be more wrong. The beaches here are great, the people are friendly and the weather is great.

We went up to a mountain called sugarloaf via a cable car and from the top we could see just how nice Rio was. There are a pic here showing the view of the copacobana from the top of sugarloaf.

From here, we headed down to the copacobana and the next beach along which is called Ipanema. We got some advice from the locals that this was the place to go and they were spot on. There´s guys on the beach trying to sell you just about anything you can think of but its a lot nicer and less touristy than Copacobana and the water is so warm :)

Although the surf has been a little small, we´ve had some great body surfs and got some crazy pics with the waterproof camera, which I´ll load when I can.

Another great thing that you can get here is coconuts. The guys at the little stores on the beach climb up the trees in the streets and throw them down so they can sell them. They cut them open with a massive cleaver and you dring the juice straight from the coconut. Nicko gets about 20 of them per day and they taste great :)

The hostel we´re staying at is a little bit too far from the beach but they love their music so much here that we can´t leave. Every night the whole place has a massive jam with guitars, african drums and even coconuts! There´s just about every musical instrument here that you can think of and everyone seems to know how to play them so there´s been some massive jams..

We´re also going to check out Corvocardo mountain today, where the massive jesus statue is (Christ the Redeemer). I´m really looking forward to this as it was a photo of this with the rest of the city in the background that I saw at work on Timmy´s computer that made me first want to come to Rio.

All in all, Rio is easily one of my favourite place that we´ve been so far. The beaches are beautiful and the people are extremely friendly. Some locals are taking us to some good surfspots down south tomorrow and we´re also going to check out some rainforests and waterfalls down there too. It´ll be great to get out of Rio city and get a taste for the rest of Brazil, even though we only have a week here.

Well the beach is calling my name so thats all folks from me today. Adios!