Ponta Dois Irmãos

We started the morning with a favela tour of one of the ‘nicer’ favelas called Vidigal. The favelas are known in Rio to have a lower socioeconomic demographic and hence less opportunities for people in terms of employment and education.
We visited a couple of sites where people have been trying to make a difference by starting different programs to give opportunities to younger people.
The first location we visited consisted of a group of people who had cleaned up one of the viewpoints previously filled with rubbish and had started planting crops/trees with a view to then be able to sell to the local markets.
The next location was a music school which was set up to help with providing youths an opportunity to learn skills and keep them off the streets. The school had previously done an exchange program with France and also performed at the United Nations.
Gab and Daniel, also with a few other group members were then able to show off their drumming skills under the direction of the teacher!
We then sampled some of the local beer, which is being brewed at home by a married couple. Their initiative is to mass produce their beer by getting funding from a bigger beer distributor to then enable greater employment in the favelas and raise money for initiatives in the area.
The group then walked down to exit the favelas, and we were able to complete our visit by watching someone getting arrested and thrown in the back of a police car! Thankfully, we are all safe! Though, then we both went off for adventurous afternoons!
Gab and one of the other group members, Brittany, went off to do their hang glide - see more in the other footprint!
Daniel went with the rest of the group back to the hostel in a local bus which was a small van with many people crammed inside.
After a quick freshen up, Daniel and some of the group were picked up to go to the local football match that afternoon - Flamengo (Rio) vs Corinthians (Sao Paolo).
We were dropped outside the Maracana, Brazil’s national stadium and entered inside the 65,000 capacity stadium.
We arrived about 1 hour before kickoff and the stadium was already half full, before being completely full still 20min before the start.
It was a close match the entire game, the atmosphere was electric and the fans never stopped chanting! Thankfully, in the dying minutes of extra time - the home team scored and won 1-0! This made for a very fun walk out of the stadium and trip home :)
After we got back and Daniel was reunited with Gab who had survived her hang glide, we showered and then went out for Brazilian BBQ.
It was the same style as back in Sydney, all you can eat meat until you can’t anymore! The quality of the meat was fantastic and we were very full afterwards! There was also a really nice salad, seafood and cheese buffet.
We then went to the beach bar for some Caipirinhas and chilled with some of the group. Gab decided to call it a night after around 1am whilst Daniel went clubbing with some of the group in the centre of Rio for a few hours which was a lot of fun!Read more