23/05/04- 28/05/04 Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

Arrived in the early afternoon alter a gruelling journey to a beautiful sunny day and booked into the worst hostel ever. Spent the rest of the day finding another place to stay and ended up splashing out on a fancy place in Ipanema. The following day having moved into our nice place we set about exploring the city and carried on doing so for the rest of the week. Did all the touristy things you would expect, went up sugarloaf and visited Christ the Redeemer, we also went to the botantical gardens and took a little walk in the national park next to it where we managed to see monkeys playing in the trees. We spent a little bit of time on the beach and a lot of time in the bars and even managed to pop across the water to Niterói. All in all had a great time and we are both really sorry to be leaving.

Rio is great and we have bought a place there- it's in one of the favelas but we have selected blue tarpaulin held down by breeze blocks for our roof so people flying over will think we have a swimming pool.

This is a picture of the city from Sugarloaf mountain:


And this is me outside the art gallery in Niterói- the building was designed by Oscar Niemeyer and is quite something to look at (e.g. a building) but it doesn't make for much of a gallery as there's hardly any wall space.