Rio de Janeiro (January River)

"Tall and tan and young and lovely. The girl from ipanema goes walking. And when she passes, each one she passes goes - ah.... When she walks, shes like a samba. That swings so cool and sways so gentle. That when she passes, each one she passes goes - ooh....."

Take a large city. Give it a twisted coastline and a number of beaches. Place a few steep jagged mountains in the middle of it. Put a jungle around the far side of it. Fill it with a mix of people from around the world. Build a large statue on a big mountain in the centre of it. What have you got? Rio de Janeiro...a fantastic city with incredible natural beauty.

We expected that Rio would be nice to look at but we were amazed at just how stunning it actually is. We think that it is the odd shaped mountains that are scattered throughout that really make it. You just don't see them in a city normally. The city has two main viewing points (the statue of "Christ the Redeemer" and the "Sugar Loaf" mountain) and because of the varied landscape the city looks different from both viewpoints.

Unfortunately we had a few cloudy days during our stay there so our pictures just don't do it justice, but we'd highly recommend anyone in that neck of the woods to visit Rio and see for themselves (Marcel!)

Of course Rio has it's darker side aswell. There are apparently 700 slums and you can see them easily as they're on the hills throughout the city. But when you're smart enough, it's easy to stay out of trouble.


Oh yeah....and Kadi even got to do a bit more monkey feeding, with some wild monkeys on the Sugar Loaf :)


It was in Rio that we had a bit of an embarressing moment for our little "project". (More about our project later in the future.)