Doo DeeDoo DooDoo DeeDoo, doo-Doo DeeDoo DooDoo DeeDoo...

We had both been looking forward to Rio as much as any city we have visited on this trip. Some of our stops, like Hanoi and Buenos Aires, have benefited from our arriving with few preconceptions but Rio is one of those places that instantly brings to mind a barrage of images. From its flamboyant Carnaval and love of samba music to the notorious favelas portrayed in City of God this spectacular city, squeezed between lush mountains and the famous beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema, means something to everyone - usually something like this:

Unfortunately the defining feature of our time here has been something that people more commonly associate with Seattle than Rio. Rain. Every type of rain. Little bitty stingin' rain... and big ol' fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath.

As our life is already a one-sided struggle to prevent our clothes sprouting, this developement has been quite disappointing but we have made the most of it and thanks to a wonderful couchsurf have still had a good time. Our host for almost all of our time in Rio was a great guy called Zelson who generously opened his home to us and made up for insisting we go for a run as soon as we had dropped our bags by cooking us a delicious dinner! After such a warm welcome we were a little slow moving on our first morning but managed to take advantage of what was to be our only sunshine with a trip up to the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer. The views are absolutely spectacular and the statue itself is quite powerful given the millions of lives it oversees:

From there we took a long walk along the beach at Copacabana and took in the views of the iconic sugarloaf mountain (her name is Lola):

After an evening with Zelson spent preparing for our imminent return to the US with some good TexMex food and caipirinhas the next morning found us hiking around the beautiful neighbourhood of Santa Teresa and enjoying yet more views. From there we took a terrifying trolley car down to "Centro," the lively, bustling commercial heart of the city:

The next day the rain arrived in earnest and, although we put up a good fight and spent a couple of hours in the excellent Museo des Belles Artes, the sogginess eventually got the better of us and we headed home. After a warm hour of Tim Gunn exhorting us to 'make it work' via our laptop we rallied and headed out to the nightlife area of Lapa for a fantastic evening of live music - we had been told several times that three caiprinhas is enough to master Portuguese and Megan can now confirm that a fourth also enables you to dance the Samba!

Ashamed of the previous day's poor performance we steeled ourselves for another dousing and after moving to a nearby hostel we headed of for a tour of a couple of the city's favelas. As in Mumbai we were somewhat wary of the potential for such a tour to be voyeuristic but were again very impressed with the professionalism of our guide whose description of the role these improvised communities play in the city's life was fascinating. Over 20% of Rio's population live in favelas yet they are not marked on maps and basic services like rubbish collection and sewerage are only being extended gradually by the government. It will be interesting to see if that process speeds up before 2016. While the tour itself was very safe the guide made no bones about the prevalence of organized crime and the violence that it occasionally causes.

That evening we had a great dinner with Zelson and his girlfriend Marcella and we were very sad to say our goodbyes at the end of the evening but hope we get the opportunity to host them in New York in the future.

Our last day was supposed to see an improvement in the weather but that never materialized so after ticking the box with a soggy slog along Ipanema beach we retired to the warmth of our hostel to catch most of the 9 hours of the Hawaii Ironman - I miss my bikes! We caught a night bus back to Sau Paulo and when we finally arrived early the next morning it was, inevitably, to glorious sunshine! Shelving our plans to hole up in a hotel for the day we headed out to explore a couple of more neighbourhoods including the city's China town and Little Italy. Thanks to Megan's witchlike sense of direction we found our way to a couple of great markets and saw some very special local traditions such as the annual 'running of the goths.'

And with just enough time for one more light, vegetarian meal we were suddenly at the end of our time in Brazil with only Peru to go.