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So... we were sat in Terminal 4 at Heathrow having just said goodbye to everyone and we were feeling a bit sorry for ourselves when who should walk past?! None other than Jason Donovan looking like he'd just stepped off the set of Echo Beach! Don't be fooled though, he has not been the main attraction!
We arrived in Rio at 8am, found our hostel "transfer" and followed him out to his vehicle. Loaded our bags into the boot and attempted to get into the back seat only to find out that we were unable to open the doors from the outside and had to wait for the driver to get in and open them individually by the handles from the inside! At least no one could mug us at traffic lights! Then came the starting of the car....Ha.
So we were eventually up and running/juddering out of the airport when we established that Brazilian roads and taxi drivers were not a good combination. It was like the scariest theme park ride you have ever been on!
We arrived at the hostel, got our keys and were shown to our dorm room. Imagine this, we're told to be quiet because it's 9am and the other 12 smelly people in our dorm are still asleep. We're shown where we will be sleeping only to find ourselves face to face with an English girl's bottom scarcely covered by pink pants. We were under the impression that in all of these places we'd have somewhere to store our bags. We were mistaken!
Anyway, after we got over the shock of our arrival we became a bit more comfortable with our surroundings, met some nice people and saw a few sights. Christ the Redeemer was stop number 1, however getting on the wrong bus took us to some remote part of Rio where they really did only speak Portugese (which by the way is not the same Portugese as in Portugal!) When we eventually reached Christ the Redeemer it was the afternoon so unfortunately most of our pictures are in shadow, but.... he. is. MASSIVE!
Stop number 2 was an organised tour to a Favela, Rocinha. Watching City of God beforehand was not the best idea. Various people told us not to take cameras or money so we took nothing only to find that all the people we met were really lovely and our guide was good friends with most of them. We've now had to resort to stealing pictures from all of the clever people in our group who took their cameras!
Still feeling overwhelmed by Rio we decided to move on but buying a bus ticket out of the city proved more complicated than we expected! It resulted in us staying in Rio for an extra day (things really did go that wrong) but we then sorted ourselves out and attempted to carry our bags for the first time. Needless to say, we copped out and got a taxi. After all the stress of Rio, the manner in which we travelled to Iguazu was heavenly! (Imagine first-class Virgin but on four wheels).
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