Rio de Janeiro – world by westy

Rio Again…

I know it’s been awhile since our last Thanksgiving post, so I’m playing a bit of catchup here…

We left Ihla Grande and made our way back to the mainland and towards Rio for our last day before leaving Brazil. A boat and bus ride later we were checking into a hostel and planning out our last day in Rio. After a lunch stop at a cute café around the corner (the highlight of which was my iced mate), we decided to start with a visit to the Santa Teresa neighborhood we’d failed to reach on our first go-round. This time we did a bit more advance planning and found the right series of buses to take us up into the hillside.

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… Rio again!

We thought we’d be ready to move on by Sunday evening. But, between checking the weather report for the surrounding areas, and realizing there were plenty of other things we wanted to do in Rio, we decided to stay one more day. And we were so excited to wake up to sunny bonus day in Rio on Monday morning.

We found the right bus and made it to our first stop at Lago Rodrigo de Freitas to rent bikes for a cycle around the lake. Only once we had arrived did we realize that neither of us had brought along an ID to leave as a deposit – hilarious, considering Wolf has a bit of experience with the whole how-to-rent-bikes kind of thing. We haggled with the guy for a while, mostly through a translation app on his phone (which was actually kind of fun), eventually figured out a solution and away we went.

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Rio de Janeiro!

Based on our original, albeit loose, plan for our trip, we should be somewhere on the coast of Central/Southern Chile by now, well on our way to Patagonia, camping on a beach somewhere. Instead, we’re still waiting for our van to arrive and so we’ve made our way to Rio de Janeiro. Not a bad backup plan.

Our flight from Foz do Iguazu was delayed slightly, which was actually pleasant because a group of musicians (umm… a Chorinho? Stephie?), who were also waiting for their flight, spent the time playing some amazing tunes for everyone waiting in the tiny terminal. The prior evening we attempted to book an apartment via Airbnb for our stay in Rio. Our first request didn’t work out so we found ourselves trying again the morning of our flight, and landing in Rio before we knew where we would end up sleeping that night. After a bit of battling with the frustrating Rio airport Wifi, we eventually received a message from our host, in a delightful Portuguese/English hybrid, with instructions about where to go. We attempted to negotiate with a couple of taxis on a rate and then were off on our way to Copacabana beach.

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