Joe and Lou's Travel Blog

We woke up to a beautifully sunny morning (it´s been raining on and off for the past week which has made the temperature very pleasent) so Servia took us for a last minute ´mini tour´ to Ipanaema, and a beach where paragliders land. It was a great way to finish off this leg of the trip. One very iconic aspect of Rio (apart from the Christo sculpture) is the footpaths. They are quartz and basalt rocks fashioned into simple but effective black and white patterns (thanks Joy for that good description). Probably easier to show you. We have pictures but are unsure when we´ll be able to upload some more photos.

And so we left Rio with a feeling of `saudade`for the good friends we had made. Thank you so much to Luiz and Bruno´s families for making our stay in Rio such a special one. Saudade is a word in Portuguese that doesn´t have an English equivalent. It means a kind of sadness/longing/yearning for a moment/feeling you´ve had in the past.

We travelled on the plane for what seemed like ages and lost 3 hours crossing time zones. Finally we arrived at Lima airport at around midnight local time (3 in the morning Brazilian time!). When leaving the baggage claim area we were surrounded by taxi drivers "I be your driver...Official taxi!". We settled on one finally and got to our hotel only to find that we´d been moved to another down the road. We eventually got to bed and zonked out.