Hola!

We´re into our last couple of hours in Rio - we leave this evening for a 21 hour (!) bus journey up the South coast to a beach town called Itacare.

We´ve been the ultimate tourists here, we went up to see the Christ the Redeemer statue yesterday - in hindsight, we should have gone up very early in the morning, but we got there at midday and it was packed out with tourists (almost all South American). You get a taxi up the mountain - all hairpin bends and drivers blasting each other out of it. The statue was just amazing - built right at the top of a cliff. The views were incredible.

We came back to Ipanema then and got our plans for the next three days sorted - it´s really strange to always be planning the next leg, rather than our usual thing of holing up somewhere for a week or two and not thinking about anything other than getting ourselves home again! We had the most amazing meal then last night - we went to a rodizio. We each had a poker chip on our table, one side red and one side green. When you want more food, you have the green side up, and vice versa. Waiters come around every two minutes with the biggest chunks of roasted meat and slice some onto your plate. We had about five different types of steak, pork, turkey, chicken, sausages, and fish as well. This is not including the gigantic salad/sushi bar, or the five or six side dishes they put on our table too. It was just gorgeous, of course we totally pigged out - we were wishing we could have a huge table of everyone from home so you could all share it with us!

We were up bright and early today, and went to see the Sugar Loaf mountain - you get cable cars up to the first mountain, get off and have a look around, and then you get one on again to the higher second mountain. The views were AMAZING - literally a panoramic view of all of Rio. There was a tiny airport on a small bit of land jutting out from the bay, and we saw two planes landing there - it can´t have been longer than half a kilometre, so they were almost touching the water before they landed - wow!

We finally got to the beach then this afternoon - we couldn´t go on Monday or Tuesday as it was lashing rain, then we were doing Christ the Redeemer yesterday, so it was great to pan out and soak up the rays. Of course, we were the palest there - but we´re hoping that after another few days we´ll at least be blending in! We only spent a couple of hours out there, with lots of sunscreen, but my face is slightly scalded, Jay has a lovely brown face already though, hmmm! We stopped into a juice bar on the way back from the beach, and shared a huge cup of frozen acai berry juice - so refreshing and very very good for us apparently!

We´ve packed up in the hostel now, so our backpacks are ready to go on their next adventure. We´re going to grab some dinner soon and our bus leaves at 9,40pm. We´ve lots of reading to do, plus we need to devour the Portugese phrasebook, as it would really help us getting around etc. Our bus gets in at 7pm, then we need to get another bus for 1.5hrs to Itacare, where we´ve booked into beach bungalows (thanks for the tip Em!) for three nights. We´re planning three days of totally vegging out before we head to Salvador and the islands just off that.

Signing off for now - we´ll update you as soon as we can!

PS - pics will be up asap!

PS - as the pics are of limited resolution on this site we have set up a flickr blog so if you want to view them in more detail, please find the link below

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jayandlorraine/

Lorraine & Jay