1-Feb-2009: Rio de Janeiro and Saquarema, Brazil

With it's mountains and long wide beaches, Rio De Janiero really is a spectacular city. We walked up to the Christ the Redeemer statue at the summit of one of Rio's overlooking moutains, which took us just over 3 hours from the hostel we were staying at in Mt Teresa. It was a scenic walk with beautiful views over Rio the whole way. We met some local kids playing in a water hole along the way, who were more than happy to pose for some photos for us!



Through one of the local community projects, we arranged to visit one of the shanty towns in Rio called "favelas". Favelas in Rio are found crowded onto hillsides and are made up of poor-quality, randomly built residences with networks of narrow stairways and sidewalks, inaccessible by vehicles. We were surprised to be met at our hostel by 3 young boys carrying skateboards for our tour - the eldest, Carlos, who was actually 18 years old, was our guide - the other two boys were mates from the youth community group they were all involved in. They were great kids, all lived in the favela we visited. Carlos had just finished high school and won a scholarship to study tourism at university.


At the favela, we watched kids play capoeira which was a lot of fun to watch. Community projects run these capoeira classes for the kids, and they also run craft classes and provide computers at the community centre for the kids to be able to access the Internet.




We visited the beaches at Copacabana and Ipanema, which are packed with sun worshipers during the day and lined with high rise apartments and hotels.


We couldn't time our trip to make it to Carnaval, although we were in town 2 weeks before and were able to watch final rehearsals of 3 different samba schools at the Sambodromo. The final rehearsals are pretty much the real thing, minus the costumes. The sound of the music was just amazing - it really got the heart thumping!

After Rio, Jesse and I escaped the city to a sleepy surf town called Saquarema not far from Rio. Jesse hired a board and we chilled out at our hostel, which was right on the beach for a few days - very relaxing.