Rio and the perils of snorkelling

I can only second joe's enthusiasm about Brazil. I'm totally overwhelmed by how beautiful the place is. Three days in Rio and I want to live here - if  I could remember more of the Portuguese I was supposed to have studied...

Had an amazing birthday yesterday:  a visit to the Sitio Roberto Burle Marx just west of town, which are lush tropical gardens and a very cool house full of weird and wonderful artefacts from around the world. While we were waiting to go in we sat and watched two hummingbirds building a nest. And that evening I watched Skyfall AND ate cauliflower cheese. It doesn't get much better than that.

Have spent today watching toucans and marvelling at the botanical gardens. Joe has understandably had it up to here with birds and plants and has gone off to Sugarloaf mountain (or, I suspect, a bar on the beach)

The most amazing part about Brazil for me is just the natural abundance and richness, which you can see even in the cities: pavements are made with huge blocks of stone shot with minerals, furniture and even shutters from stunning hardwood, fruit juice sellers have more flavours than you can be bothered to read, and the trees have flowers on them! Huge shocking pink, red and yellow flowers in the canopies. Wow. Even the swallows are bigger here, and some of the butterflies are the size of bats. Fortunately I haven't seen any of the nasty eight-legged fauna. Us Europeans may have pillaged all the gold and most of the diamonds, but the country is just a natural splendour, and the people we've encountered have a happy, chilled out attitude.

Other good things include roadside caipirinha sellers (who err on the generous side with the Good Stuff), stunning old churches which are like gaudy, over-the-top Italian ones, and sponge cake for breakfast! (A revelation) I think the language also sounds really cool, in a way Spanish and French doesn't. And of course there is the sheer joy of moving through warm, tropical air rather than festering under 2 jumpers and a raincoat.

We have found some idiosyncrasies. Pavements run out, or end in walls too big to climb. A snack is always fried thing, generally fashioned in part of tasteless manioc flour. You have to pay a tax of up to £3 to leave a bus station, and in bakeries you pay in one place then order at another - removing your God-given right to just point to tasty things you want. And of course we have seen very little of the poverty here, so can only speak as ill-informed tourists. 

Speaking of ill-informed tourists, Joe is being wonderful, and proving an ideal travelling companion. This is in part because of his own idiosyncrasies: I find he has brought more hankies than pairs of pants, his beard is going progressively more ginger, and he recently sustained an amusing arse-injury from a half hour snorkelling expedition. But I am too mean, and I am sure he will get his revenge in the next post.