Wednesday Jan 26th - I arrived safe and sound in Rio at 8pm - after leaving Chertsey under a blanket of snow wearing a winter coat and fleece, I felt a tad warm arriving in Rio. I got picked up as planned from the airport and the cabbie (who was the spitting image of Tim Proome - well they do say everyone has a double somewhere so I just found Tim´s!!) gave me a bit of a city tour on the way to the hostel which was great.

I managed to sleep most of the flight (thanks to Nik, Tands and Andy keeping me up all night before I left) so I dumped my bags in the room and headed straight to the bar for my free drink. It took around 5 minutes to make several new friends :o) Chris from Crystal Palace, Salvador from Mexico and Socrates from Salvador (maybe they should swap names!?). Chris is teaching me Portugese, Salvador is teaching me Spanish and I´m teaching Salvador English - so I guess a whole new language will be born by the time we part company!!

Thursday - I spent all day chilling on Copacobana beach, which is a five minute walk from the hostel - what more could I ask for? The weather is just perfect, blue sky and sunshine. So far nothing has disappointed - I´m definitely not gonna be on the next flight home!!
Anyway, the keyboard on this computer is really dodgey ~ half the keys are permanently pressed in and some of the puncuation marks are in the wrong place so I´m getting frustrated with it now!!
Will update this again in a couple of days - maybe when I find a posher internet cafe - should have more to tell then too.....

Sunday 28th January 
Right, well now I've finally got around to taking some photos, but I can't figure out where to stick the wotsit into this computer so I'm gonna have to find yet another internet cafe which has slightly more daylight. I'm on the hostel internet at the mo - the keyboard on this one is OK, but the mouse sucks (think this could be an ongoing theme). The hostel isn't too bad - very friendly and relatively clean, but they seem to have an issue with lights - I think they put 20 watt bulbs in everywhere!!
Anyway, I have now done something touristy - I went up the Sugarloaf mountain
 - it was fab, we walked up the first mountain because the guide suggested there might be monkeys on the way up, but we didn't see any (maybe we should have taken some bananas). We took the cable car up the second bit and the views over Rio are stunning from there as you can see....

Last night a big group of us went to a Samba School in the favellas for a pre-carnival party - blimey those Brazillian girls can really shake their backsides!! A couple of them were trying to teach us, but needless to say, most of us (including me) were rubbish!! 
These parties don't start til midnight so it was a late night so I just managed to make it to the beach today with Socrates and Patrick at 3pm!
I've decided to stay in Rio til Thursday or Friday as it's Amber's (one of my current room-mates) birthday on Wednesday night so we're gonna go out and celebrate with a few Caipirinivodkas. 
No clue where I'm off too after that - my brain seems to be on brazillian time now (or it could have just melted), so everything is a bit 'manana' ...which is nice

Jan 30th - Today Amber, Veronica and I went on a Favela tour. It´s a bit of a bizarre concept - basically it´s a tour of one of Rio´s poorest areas. The nearest equivilent in England would be to take a tour of one of the most run down council estates in London. Anyway, we went and it was quite interesting. We drove to the bottom with the guide and got on the back of bikes to the top. We then walked from the top to the bottom through the centre of the favela. You can see from the photos that it´s just narrow streets with kids hanging around all over the place - as you go from the top to the bottom the place deteriorates with more and more rubbish, open sewers and filth.

Near the bottom we visited a school where some of the deprived kids are looked after - it´s provided by charty and some of the money from the tours goes to this cause too. There were a few guys walking around with machine guns and the guide pointed out a few drug dealers too, but we weren´t allowed to photograph them (surprise surprise). Occasionally the police do a raid and the dealers at the entrance to the Favela let off fireworks to warn the others inside the favela. Luckerly, we picked a day when none of this happened. Everyone in there was really friendly and the kids loved having their pictures taken - every time you took a picture on a digital camera they wanted to see the picture and got really excited.

The pictures of the favela look really bleak because it was raining when we went! Rain in Rio? ...that isn´t supposed to happen is it? Actually it was lovely - a little break from the constant sunshine was nice!!

In the evening we went out to celebrate Amber´s birthday - we had a few drinks in the bar and then headed out to a bar called Evolution (I think that´s what it was called anyway), but as you can see from the pics, there was a good turn out and there was lots of dancing and silliness!!


I´m still learning how to do this blog thing properly and I can´t figure out how to separate the pictures - this thing just seems to jumble them all up.....hmmmm

February 3rd:
I really don´t know what I´ve been doing this week - I have no clue what day it is half the time!!
I´ve come to the conclusion that Rio is pretty expensive - the hostel costs R$36 per night (9 GBP - there´s no pound sign on this computer), dinner is usually around R$15 (4 GBP), plus drinks, snacks, buses, taxis etc around R$15 per day (4 GBP), plus evening entertainment R$15 (4 GBP) and tours cost around R$40 (10 GBP) - so averaging approx 25GBP per day! But from what othere travellers have been saying most other places are cheaper so that´s good.

The last photos in this bit are from Santa Teresa - Veronica and I took the metro up to the tram stop and took the tram into Santa Teresa. The metro here is really good - very clean, air conditioning and cheap R$2.40 for the ride (around 60p). The tram was groovy too - as you can see in the photo, I snuck into the drivers bit - couldn´t figure out how to make it move though!!   Santa Teresa is sooo quiet compared to the madness of Copacobana so it was quite a relaxing afternoon.

Last night we went to Lapa for the street party - it was really good fun - a large Brazillian woman took a fancy to me in one of the clubs and nearly crushed me to death dancing with me which was a bit scary, but I did manage to break free from her clutches relatively unscathed!! ha ha. The young Brazillian boys are really friendly too....but I managed to resist their advances too - I think 15yr olds are a little bit young for me!!

I´m off to Ilha Grande and tomorrow with a nice American girl called Jen until 14th when I come back to Rio for the carnival. There are no cars on the island and it´s just peaceful and there´s forest treks so it should be a nice bit of relaxation before carnival madness commences.