Argentina to Brazil

As the name of this post suggests we left Argentina today on plane and flew to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We landed in a balmy Rio and met with our guide Carla, an older woman who was quite a character. After a slight mishap at the airport that involved people going missing, others going after them, and then the original ones coming back while the new ones became lost, we eventually all collected and got on a van into the city. Rio is a very beautiful city, as you'll see in the upcoming blips, and has a real vitality and diversity. It's the kind of city that really has a character and a unique feel to it. However it still does have its slums, in fact one of the biggest slum cities in South America, today's blips is of a section of just that climbing up a hill side.

We got to our hotel which was quite a nice number, not too fancy but not to cheap and most importantly had excellent air conditioning. Carla ran us through some information about Rio and our plans, in quite excessive detail, and we then headed up to our rooms. It was already getting towards evening by this point so we all went for a bit of walk through the streets and got some dinner.

Ordering that dinner was probably the time where we had the biggest problem with the language barrier. Our spanish, while not great, had improved since the start of the trip, but as they speak portuguese in Brazil we were back to square one. Still we were able to order our food with only a little wondering what we might actually be given.

Later we went to the pool on the roof of our hotel (which had a phenomenal view I'm planning to use as a blip in the future) and had a very nice and very relaxing swim. We were in paradise and loving every minute of it.

- Damian