Rio De Janeiro

We arrived in Rio a couple of days ago after a long 36 hours of travel. On the plus side we travelled business class for the 2 flights, even though they were short flights it was quite nice, would be easy to get used to the luxury. Things kind of went down hill when we arrived here though. Lindsey's bag never left Cuzco and since there is only one flight per day they told us it would not arrive until 11am the next day at the earliest. Then we arrived at our apartment we rented and the lady was not there to meet us. So, after being up for 24 hours straight we had to sit on a bench for 45 minutes waiting for her. When she did show up she was very pleasant and helpful which was great. We both crashed for a nap for 3 hours or so and then we headed out to check out the surrounding area. Unfortunately I was not feeling great and to add to it my credit card fell out of my pocket on the beach somewhere. We could not find it so I ended up having to cancel it. I ended up spending most of the rest of the day in bed.

The next day we slept in and hung out in the room for a bit hoping Lindsey's bag would show up sooner rather than later, she was not super keen on wearing the same travel clothing again for the 3rd day in a row. I ended up heading out to one of the MANY juice places everywhere in Rio and bought a couple of mystery acai drinks for breakfast, they were interesting to say the least. Lindsey enjoyed hers, it was a blended cold smoothie but mine was a pudding consistency and interesting.. Eventually we got tired of waiting so we went to the hippy market near ipanema beach. There was lots of hand made crafts, paintings, and jewellery. Nothing caught our eye though. Finally that afternoon Lindsey's bag arrived which was a huge relief. One of the things I have not mentioned is that we have found brazil to be a challenging place to travel. Portuguese is not an easy language and not too many people speak English here which makes communication a challenge. Any way, we went to a sushi place last night (apparently rio has the second highest Japanese population in the world), unfortunately the sushi was a big let down, not good at all.

Today we had a late start, had a delicious breakfast at a little cafe. We booked our bus to Arraial Do Cabo for tomorrow and headed to the Christ Redeemer statue. We arrived to discover it was a 2 hour wait to catch the train up which we were not impressed about as today has been the first really good beach weather day. Nonetheless we bummed around for a couple of hours, had a fresh coconut to drink, bought some beers from a market and had some frozen yogurt before heading up. The train is kind of slow and takes 30min to get up but eventually we made it. It was a very impressive view from the top.  We both agreed the view was more impressive than the satue itself. Although the statue is very large it seems to pale in comparison with the first 2 wonders. We got some good pics and enjoyed the view and then headed down to try and get some beach time.

We hung out for the rest of the afternoon on Ipanema Beach drinking the local drinks, Caprihanha's and watched the sunset. We are just about to head out for a big Brazilian buffet, which they have everywhere! I think we picked out a really good one though, fingers crossed.