Full Circle!!

Luckily after the kille bus journey to salvador we had had the foresight to book a flight from Salvador to Rio well in advance for a quarter of the price. The first day here we just slept as we had stayed the previous night in the airport. The next day we headed in to town and jumped on the bondhi tram up to Santa Teresa and relived our first day of the trip, strolling round the cobbled streets and having a beer in a nice old school bar where we spent our first night, 10 months ago (we even saw a guy in there that we´d met on the first night).

We walked down from Santa Teresa using the Selaron staircase- a set of 215 steps leading from Lapa to the Santa Teresa convent, with each step tiled in different colours and tiles from all over the world by a local artist, which is really cool. The artist was even sat at the bottom doing a bit of fixing.

That night we headed round the corner from our hostel and had a few beers in the street and chatted about all the things we´d done since we were here last. Rio seems much nicer this time, maybe because we´re better travellers now or maybe its just that Rio is getting ready for the world cup and olympics and the council are making an effort to clean the place up and make it safer. We also went for a stroll along Ipanema beach and went and watched some cute dogs getting pampered and having haircuts in one on the ´Dog Salons´. On Saturday night we decided....´its nearly our last night, lets have a big one´- so we headed out to Lapa. THE place to go for music, dancing and drinking. There are loads of stalls everywhere selling cheap hot dogs and even cheaper Caiparinias. There were tons of upmarket salsa clubs all charging sky high prices to squeeze in and stand shoulder to shoulder in the packed bars, but there were so many open air bars with live salsa music that we couldnt really justify paying to get in. We ended up having an awesome night wandering up and down the main street stopping to buy capirinhas, listen to the live bands, and watch a roaming group of Hare Krishnas jumping about and having a singsong. Before we knew it, we were very merry, and it was 4am- so decided to head home. We were just about to get a taxi when a bus stopped right next to us- and took us right outside our hostel. So we ended up having a pretty cheap night out!