It took me all night to get to Rio. Flying to São Paulo first, sleeping at the airport (or at least trying and failing) and then another early morning flight to Rio. Once at my hostel there seemed to be a mix up with my reservation. The mix up being they couldn't find it! They did eventually, but there were no dorms left for that night so I was upgraded to a private room! Great! The hostel is brand new. It opened 10 days ago. So last night there was an openings party. With free drinks, snacks and pizza! And that meant caipirinhas! The national drink of Brazil.

The hostel is located one block away from Ipanema beach.

Fun fact about Ipanema beach: it's fake! The sand is imported synthetic sand. I noticed as soon as I set foot on it. I guess tourists want to see perfectly white sand next to the crystal clear water and so they decide to make it that way. Every now and again a bit of the real beach can be found. It's a little more yellowish and has a lot of tiny shells. I guess Scheveningen should start claiming that it's beach is better than Ipanema!

It is also a short walk to Copacabana beach! The weather is prefect for the beach. About 20 degrees and sunny. Today's plan is to lounge around at the beach. I think I'll pick Ipanema for today, although I'm sure I'll get bored at some point and then I'll walk down to the point where the two beaches meet.

This is Copacabana beach with Sugar Loaf Mountain is the distance.

I spent 3 days lazing around on the beach. Just relaxing.

With the occasional wander around when I got bored of the beach. Like to the Havaianas store.

On my last day in Rio though I had decided to do the touristy things. That meant a morning Favela tour followed by a trip to Sugar Loaf mountain for the sunset.

Not wanting to aimlessly wander through a favela myself, I joined a guided tour. The photos above was the view at the start of the tour. We started at the top of the favela and walked our way down to the bottom. Rio de Janiero has 100 favelas. 1.5 million people are living in them. We went to the biggest favela in Rio, called Rocinha. The photo above is the view from the starting point of the tour. It is not possible to take photos within the favela. Only at certain points, usually within buildings or on balconies, so a lot of the photos on this blog were taken by the guide. The people trust him and so he is allowed to take photos anywhere.

On our way down we stopped at a couple of places, first was a bakery.

For 5 reals (€1.30/£1.15) we could buy various Brazilian treats. I choose the wrong thing! I had a coconut cupcake but it wasn’t light and fluffy like a cupcake should be and I didn’t eat it all. The people who had the passion fruit cake seemed much happier. From the bakery we walked a bit further until we came to a couple of souvenir stands, where the ladies were selling all kinds of things, some of which were self-made.

After the souvenir stand we got to a “local band”. They were equipped with on a couple of buckets and some sticks but they were pretty impressive. The boy at the left was the dancer.

The following photos were taken by the guide walking through the favela.

This was the group I was with. There is a lot of graffiti, an attempt to make the place look nicer. Some of it was really cool!

This was the view from the bottom, looking back up to where we started. It’s a bit hard to see on such a small photo, but we pretty much started all the way at the top and had walked all the way through.

In the minibus on the way to Rocinha the guide had explained what the expect and he had repeated over and over again that we shouldn’t be scared and that we were completely safe. I think this had some of the group quite worried. I wasn’t one of them, I didn’t have a clue what to expect but figured it wouldn’t be dangerous in any way. And I was right, at no point during the tour did I feel unsafe or that someone was going to pickpocket me. As with the rest of my trip really. A lot of people have asked me along the way if I thought that it was unsafe, travelling alone. But no, it hasn’t been at all. Maybe it helped that I had completely missed the guys holding AK47’s…!