adeus Rio!

OK, nearly time to head south and wave goodbye to Rio (it's Mauro again this time, by the way, I promise Becka will be back next time!) She's had a few days of being pretty under the weather with a crippling stomach bug - mysteriously, all she could manage to eat in that time was cake! But thankfully she's better now. Personally I reckon the açai (sorbet made from an Amazonian berry) that you can see me consuming in this pic had something to do with her recovery - this stuff is amazing, it can sort anyone out!

There's the odd twinge of regret that we didn't get to do some of the things we'd intended to do, such as revisit our favourite old Copacabana botequim for a goodbye drink, or visit the Sambadrome, but we did manage to catch some live samba action in Lapa at the weekend (great stuff, though not cheap - we had to ration ourselves to one drink while we were in there!). Still amazed at how everyone in the venue seemed to know all the words to all the songs, and managed to dance pretty much on top of each other without anyone getting arsey. A more enthusiastic crowd I have rarely seen. Though strangely, as soon as the final note was played, there was no attempt whatsoever to coax an encore or anything, everyone went their separate ways immediately...

Which, as it turned out, wasn't as easy as all that, as another storm had hit Lapa, and the pavement and road outside the club had disappeared, to be replaced by a river of rank, rubbish-strewn water. The rain showing no signs of abating, we had to join those who removed their footwear and braved sloshing through the filth to try and hail a cab (another mission, but you probably guessed that by now!). My trip to the Vasco da Gama match was another experience, notable for the maniacs and chancers we met outside, one of whom, despite only having one tooth and a face reddened by decades of alcohol abuse, saw fit to slag off my soul patch (muito feo, he reckoned - the nerve!!).

Anyway, it's been an exhilarating couple of weeks here, we'll definitely miss Casa 579 and all the staff here, some of the other guests (such as the particularly entertaining German who kept punctuating all his anecdotes with "Oh my shit!" and referring to Sugar Loaf mountain as "Sugar Head"), though not so much the English girls who never said hello to anyone and just stayed in watching crap romcoms on DVD in the common area. Goodbye to Rio and (an 18-hour coach ride later, more storms are predicted - wish us luck!) hello to Florianopolis tomorrow some time!