On the road again!
After meeting up in Mexico Nadia and I are tripping our way down through Central America and around South America with no particular agenda and 4 months to play with.
Brazil and the bus rides from hell...
BRAZIL | Saturday, 12 September 2009 | Views [422] | Comments [1]
Leaving Buenos Aires was sad for us both as we had had such a great time there, but onwards to Brazil! We got on a hellishly long bus from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro after discovering that we really did not want to pay for the exorbitantly pricy flights. After arriving in one piece we navigated our way from the bus terminal to our hostel which was called Stone of a Beach and was two streets back from Copacobana Beach! That is where my excitement ended. The dorm rooms are unbelievably hot and stuffy and FILTHY. We may just have just been unlucky and arrived when bad room mates were around but it was gross. Anyway, we dumped our gear and headed to Copacobana Beach to at least get some sun time on our first day in Rio. It was exactly what I had expected, people everywhere and a long curved bay of water with the city as a backdrop for it all. I think that Nadia and I are both glad now that we made ourselves go on that first afternoon as the next 3 days were grey and rainy :-( For me, Rio was not the place to be unless the sun was out but we made the most of it and went up to the statue of Christ the Redeemer on the second day. We also did a Favela tour and went to a huge street party in Lapa one night with people from our hostel and then went back again the next night for dinner and some more street drinking. Nadia went hang gliding over the city too. It was Independence Day on the Monday so the city was packed with people for the long weekend. So we managed to fill our days easily enough but to be truthful all I really wanted out of Rio was a couple of hot, sunny days to lie on the beach at Copacabana and Ipanema. Luckily on our last day in Rio we got the sun back! So having had a day spent lying on the beach at Ipanema I was able to leave Rio as a happy camper instead of the slightly grumpy one that the rain had brought out in me. Now to live up to the title I will tell you how we then got to Belem which is where I am writing this from. Nadia and I are nearing the end of our trip as we have to fly from Salvador to Cancun on the 26th of this month (eeeek!) So, we decided that in order to get up to Belem fast and then have some time to cruise back down the coast and stop at some little beachy towns we should bus the whole way up with out stopping if it was possible. End result is that on the 8th Sept at 10:30am we got on a bus from Rio to Salvador. No less than 27 hours later we arrived in Salvador. Once there we had two options. Get over to the beachy side of town (bus station is 7km from the centre) and stay for one night and leave the next day at 4pm OR hang out at the bus terminal for another 4 hours and get straight onto the 6pm bus to Belem. Naturally, being insane as we are, we got on the 6pm bus. A mere 37 hours later we arrived in Belem! Finito, we made it :-) and we didn´t even kill each other, ourselves or any random passengers on the way. So now that we are in Belem we are going to do a cruise on the Amazon tomorrow which will also take us over to some of the islands and to a beach for lunch and swimming. I think we truly deserve it!
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