Rio de Janeiro Day 1

Big surprise, our bus was a few hours late arriving into Rio. We got here around early afternoon instead of 10am. We navigated from the bus station to a separate parking garage to get a short Uber to our hotel. Even up on the outskirts of the city center it is pretty crazy!

It took a little while, but we got an Uber up to our hotel. After a gate opening up on our arrival and a slow, confused walk up a long driveway, we found reception and got checked in. It's a pretty big place with several buildings and its own chapel and cafe. It looks like an old convent that's been converted into an old people's home and one of the former old people's buildings was converted into hotel rooms. It was a nice big room and very quiet because they close over Carnaval starting tomorrow.

We didn't linger long in the room so that we could get some food and get down to Copacabana Beach for sunset. There was a local place our reception guy recommended across the street so we went there for the traditional 'lanchon'. It was cheap and a lot of food!

We got an Uber but were cutting it close with sunset. Instead of walking to a viewpoint, we just sat on the wall at the beach and took it in. After the sun went down, we took a long walk through Copacabana to the Atlantico Hotel where we needed to collect our T-shirts and tickets for the Sambodrome. It was a nice walk along the beach and we stopped a few times to see 'futvolei', a local game where they use football touches to get the football over the volleyball net. It was pretty cool!

Once we got to the hotel, we were shocked by how many people were in line. There were a ton of people, a few different lines, and it was total chaos. Once we worked out which line was for tickets, we begrudgingly walked a fair distance down the sidewalk to the end of the line. It was slow...but there was a woman handing out popsicles and water which certainly helped the general demeanor of everyone waiting. After at least an hour and a half, we finally got inside the building to pick up the tickets. Turns out our box seats are wristbands instead of tickets which is why they had to be collected. We also picked up our tshirts before they closed which was ideal because I did not want to have to come back and do all this again!

When we finally had all of our carnaval items, we got a bus back to our hotel and walked for about 20 minutes. It really is so much quieter in the north of the city away from the beach. We chilled out and watched a bit of netflix before heading to bed after our long night last night.Läs mer