Rio

It is generally advisable when arriving in a new country and culture to have your wits about you, and to be aware of what you are likely to face on arrival. Having had probably the most unpleasant flight we have both imagined, we arrived tired and slightly delusional to be confronted by an army of taxi drivers, airport "assistants" and many other unidentified yet uniform clad people, worryingly overexcited by our arrival. Everyone else on the plane was either in a pre-organised tour group, or seemed to be Rio veterans. During the completely incomprehensible exchanges of no particular language which ensued, if became apparent that being terribly polite and british is not always best. Eventually I managed to get to the information desk where a very nice young man, keen to practice the english he had clearly learnt from Noel Coward, gave me an impressively inconcise and confusing description of what I should do. The plan was to change money, leave most of our luggage, book internal flights to Brasilia and to find the bus to Ipanema beach. No worries - all very straightforward. Well, it would have been had my brain not have been construcing sentences in a language which had no contiguous structure or recognisable vocabulary. Rhea managed to remain typically calm and unphased through all of this, which was an immense help to me, as I was starting to get narky and I didn't like the way the policeman was looking at me through his opaque sunglasses. Having successfully negotiated the ticket buying, luggage depositing and dodgy money exchange with a man who had some money and a very persuasive way about him, we got on the "REAL" bus to Ipanema. It was only on the motorway that we really started to get an idea of how immense Rio is. Not only that but for several miles before you actually get off the motorway and start to reach the main districts, you pass enormous complexes of favelas, which are quite shocking to see, and you get your first taste of guilt for being quite as well off as we are in Britain. I don't want to talk about the favelas too much because fear of the third world in the west is such that violence and poverty are the first associations that many people have. Probably the most horrific thing we saw in Rio was an advert for tourists to go on a bus tour of the favelas, where the rhetoric of the advert was one of voyeurism akin to that you might find at an old fashioned freak show. The bus eventually dropped us off in Leblon - about a mile away from the hotel, but a pleasant enough stroll back along the beachfront. For me of course the main attraction was the sea. The first day when we swam it was quite strong, but nothing like it can be. It is much more dangerous to swim there than it appears and most people linger tentatively in the water near the shore, and never go beyond the breaking point of the waves. Of course, we did, and discovered soon why people don't do this very often. It's really very difficult to get back into shore again the currents are so strong. Rhea managed with relative ease, whereas my 20 a day habit had clearly taken its toll. 15 years ago I was in similar sea and I remember it being exhilirating. This time it was just exhausting. However, over the next few days we managed to get more used to it and worked out where the good and bad currents were. We wandered around Ipanema a lot, sampling the food and beer. We only had two whole days there so it was hard to do everything and I wasn't in the mood for power sight-seeing. We managed Corcovado, from which the view is pretty incredible, and Santa Theresa which is an incredibly beautiful older part of town which you get to on an old rickety tram. As you go up the hill the people who live in the favelas nearby jump on and off happily getting lifts up the hill - it's like a free form of transport for them essentially funded by the tourists. I really enjoyed the atmosphere in this part of town - it was like a bohemian little village right in the heart of this huge city. Some not very good pictures are here.