....Rio

´The Marvelous City´ ...well, I certainly struggle to imagine a crazier or more beautiful geographic location for a city. This place is just gorgeous with hills absolutely everywhere. One hill stops to let another one start. Spread around the hills are lagoons and the most beautiful white sand beaches and coastline. We got an amazing view of all this from the top of Corcovado (Cristo Redentor), as well as got the chance to take some cheesy photos with some crazy English lasses hallucinating on Larium... (there were definitely NO monkeys! not even ones that resemble Fordham)

Here we experienced the first really social hostel of the trip so far, the Botafogo Easy Hostel, here we partied every night with the coolest bunch of people (both Brazillians and gringos) - as often as not initiated by us. It also became a default standard to have a leaving party when you moved on, even if you had only been there for 2 days!

We managed to get in a futbol game at the Maracana stadium as well. What an amazing experience. These fans seriously support their teams (even if they are crap); an exciting mix of joyous singing and aggressive edgyness that never feels far from escalating into full scale rioting. When we were there the stadium was only 1/2 full - it'd be amazing, but perhaps a little scary, to see it packed out for Brazil v Argentina... madness.

It was about this time that we discovered one of the absolute highlights of our time in Brazil (and perhaps Aaroncito's favourite aspect of Brazil).... the Kilograma, or more generally known as "Comida e quilo" -> "Food by the kilo". And eat it by the kilo we did... They had it all... salads, meat, veggies, meat, desserts, meat, seafood, and did we mention meat. The budget places you *could* get a wholesome, balanced meal for only NZ$2.50 and the more fancy places with a full on churrascuria (where you could get every type of meat imaginable, and beautifully cooked to boot) only cost about NZ$6. We say you '*could* get a balanced meal', because Aaroncito developed a passion for meat that Scottito had never seen the likes of before - he would proceed to load up his plate with every type of meat available (a real meat fiesta) in large-cat sized portions, and then grace his plate with just enough salad and vege to make a nice garnish... Hmmmm.... Needless to say, this meat-eating diet played havoc with his estomago...

We also took a tour through a Favela (slums that grow up on the hills surrounding the city). The land that the Favelas are built on is owned by no one (OK, loosely owned by the government but gifted to the masses) There are also no building codes, no taxation paid, people tap in and steal the electricity, and the whole place is run under the controlling eye of a number of drug families. We experienced this first hand when while walking down one of the numerous winding alleyways past the food sellers and kids playing beside open sewers, our guide taps us on the shoulder and tells us to blend into the wall to make way for a 14-15 yo kid with one hand full of cash, the other full with a gold plated revolver (status symbol, this guy is seriously high up the food chain) and with a couple of grenades on his hip (the latest fashion items). We also saw a lot of the arts and education programs that there are trying to put in place to keep the kids from working for the drug families and bringing in 3-4 times as much money as their fathers, tough ask!! If you are ever in Rio, this is a serious worthwhile thing to do. It is an incredible experience, and the money that you spend in the favelas goes straight to the people that need it. There are so many beautiful people trying to make an honest living against the odds, ´City of God´ is only one side of this.

.....then the rains came, we were lucky enough that after coming back to the hostel after an allnighter we still had enough energy (or alcohol) left in us to walk (4 of us arm-in-arm like the front row of a rugby scrum the whole way) and catch the first cable car up Sugarloaf mountain. This meant that not only did we have the whole mountain top to ourselves but we got back to the hostel as the rain started. This rain did not ease up for the rest of our time in Rio (and unfortunately stopped our plans to rock climb up Sugarloaf... bugger). Time to head north to the beach, we thinks...

PS Click here for photos from Rio