Che Lagarto Hostels Copacabana Rio de Janeiro

The Pan American games finally arrived in Rio. An official countdown had begun almost a year ago on television and every week they would update how many days were left. Then as the day drew closer, they began updating more frequently. I remember starting to get REALLY excited around 94 days or so. This is a huge sporting event...like a mini-Olympics, if you will. It goes down every 4 years and 1 year before the summer games (Olympics). With the Pan American games, only countries from the Amer...

Okay, so it took about 20 hours to get from Florianopolis to Rio De Janeiro and it wasnt too bad, cause i slept most of the way. Usually its a struggle to sleep on the bus because of the bumps and stops. However, this one was pretty good. The more and more time i spend in Brazil, i realize that i am spending lots of money. This is probably the most expensive country in South America. Its hard to believe because there is so much poverty here and only 1 percent of the population owns all the la...

Sunday today and it has rained all day. We are staying at Copacabana now (since yesterday) our hostel is the pits!!! and we are in dorms, not getting much sleep. Because of the rain we got a bus to a shopping mall and looked around a bit before going to see the new Batman film at a cinema.

We made the best of a bad weather day really. Looking at the forecast, things should get better tomorrow and the next few days, so that will enable us to do more e.g. Christ the Redeemer and Sugar L...

Today we decided to go on a tour of a favella in the afternoon. We really enjoyed it and had lots of fun! We got picked up around 2pm and a woman drove us to the foot of a mountain. We hired motorcycle taxis to take us to the top, it was a white-knuckle ride all the way up and great fun! there are 33,000 people live in Rochina itself and it is completely governed by drug lords. The place had a really strong sense of community and we meet loads of colorful characters. I had ideas of what it wo...

Well I finally have got some time at a computer to start blogging so here goes....Arrived in Rio after a long flight from London after a pit stop at Sao Paulo. We stayed in Copacabana as its one of the safter places to stay and is by the beach. Rio is a huge city, nestled between the mountains and the sea which makes for a nice backdrop! We decided the best way of see Rio was taking a tour around as the favelas can be dodgy, so we did a trip around to the Sugar Loaf, Christ the Redeemer, Marc...

Monday 20th April. We arrived back in Rio de Janeiro to teaming rain and decided to get a taxi to our hostel which we had booked this time near Copacabana beach where we thought we would get to see the beach at least. Arriving at the hostel we found the Che Legarto (a hostel chain across Sth America we had used in the past) was excellent and clean and close to the beach area. We had a small double room and were just in time to sign up for the evening meal they offered of pasta yummo after **...

Hola,

Itīs the end of the tour and we are a little sad itīs all coming to an end, however what more than compensates for that is weīve arrived in Rio de Janeiro. A short 3 hour journey from Ilha Grande by boat and by bus took us into a city full of high rise buildings crambed in between tall mountains and the beach, our first hotel in Rio was nice enough, only 2 blocks from Cocacabana beach it had air con which is essential as the temperature during the day was touching 35C+.

Fi...

Just as a precurso to unfolding events ... we're only into day 3/4 and I'm already getting confused with my days - so future entries might not be dated - we'll see.

Anyway ... back to the matters at hand (I'll try to keep this brief-ish). Yesterday, day 4, after internetting it up below the dodgy shop we bought ourselves food in the supermarket type place. Food consisted of chicken, tomato sauce stuff, pack of random veg, a huge portion of watermelon and a bottle of drink which, after...

Day 6
Temp between 25-29c - the sun has his hat on = red shoulders.
Can't write too much today, it's late here and been out much of the day.

Bullet points (because you like them Sophie)
- We moved from the Che Lagarto Hostel to the Hotel Toledo to join our intrepid trip
- We enjoyed our 'more adequate' breakfast at the Che Lagarto, cereal, toast, fruit, cake, coffee, more coffee, juice, cake, more coffee, 3 bananas
- The bananas are GOOD
- We stayed in a dorm we 5 Ja...

When we arrived in Rio it was pretty dull and grey not what we were expecting at all. At first the hostel seemed to be a hole with a few annoying Americans running about but as time went on and the rain kept coming it didn't seem like such a bad place. We had planned to stay in Rio for two weeks and hang around with all the beach babes on Copacabana but that didn't happen because it rained the whole time. Instead we sat at the bar every night with a guy from Manchester who worked there, he wa...