(Byron)  Welcome to Carnaval!  We´re in Rio and the city is alive with the Samba beat.  It`s 30 degrees and sunny and there are street parties happening all over the place and people dressed up in weird and wonderful costumes.  We are trying to shift our bodies onto a different time zone, as both tonight and Tuesday night we need to stay up until at least 6 am:  we´re going to parties which don´t even start until way after midnight.  Tonight we´re off to the Sambadrome to watch the main Carnaval parade and Tuesday is the Gay Ball ... the most outrageous ball of Carnaval on the final night before the party ends and Lent begins.   So the plan for the rest of the day is sleep .... and fortunately for the first time in a couple of weeks we have our own room, a comfortable bed and air conditioning.  Luxury!  So much so that we have decided we´re going to stay here for a further 5 days after Carnaval, until we fly to Spain, as there is so much to do here (and we´ll need a LOT of sleep!).  It´ll be the first time since June that we have stayed somewhere more than 6 nights.  We have even ventured to unpack our rucksacks. You have to travel for a while to know just how exciting that really is!

Anyway, that´s all future.  So what have we been doing in the last fortnight in Brazil?  All sorts, actually ....

In Bonito, where Becca left off last time, we spent a couple of days exploring the fantastic wilderness.  We visited the Blue Lake Cave, which is exactly what the name suggests ... you trek down 300 rocky steps into almost darkness and then it opens up into an amazing, almost phosphorescent lake that seems to light up the cave.  Something to do with minerals and refracted sunlight apparently, but it looked like food colouring to me. Stunningly beautiful, although you´l have to take my word for it for now as this internet cafe has no facility for uploading photographs.  We also went on a walk through some very humid forest to a series of waterfalls, and had a very refreshing swim amongst the butterflies and fish.  The next morning I went quadbiking with a few other guys from the trip and spent an hour getting satisfyingly dirty tearing through rivers and mud.  Great fun.  The only downside was trying to clean off the mud ... our shower had an interesting electrical fault which meant that if you touched the tap while wet you got an electrical shock.   Hmmm, tricky.

From there, onto the Pantanal, which is the biggest wetland areas in the world, about 10 times bigger than the Everglades.  The birdlife there is absolutely stunning ... on one morning drive we must have seen over a thousand different bids of all different varieties ... toucans, hawks, storks, waders, macaws, vultures, ibises, herons, spoonbills, parakeets and so on.  Unfortunately, one of the reaons there are so many birds is the abundance of mosquitoes.  There are millions of them and we got eaten alive.  Even covered up in the 35 degree heat, we each got bitten through our shirts about 30 times.  These little bastards were simply viscious and to be honest took the edge of what was otherwise an awesome place .... it was somewhere I had wanted to visit ever since a was a teenager and, other than the mossies, it was wonderful.  As well as the morning drive, we also went piranha fishing (we both failed miserably, though some guys on the trips caught several), canoeing, and I rode a horse for the first time.  It was a little unnerving, but fortunately it never went faster than a gentle trot so I managed to hang on.  This was partly, I like to think, due to my latent equestrian skill, but mainly I suspect due to the fact that I had an obese mare who refused to go more than 50 metres without stopping to munch some of the abundant greenery that we were moving through!  Either way, I had a sore butt that evening. 

We left the Pantanal after a couple of days and embarked on a 2.5 day drive on the truck through southern Brazil.  Needless to say, not a lot to report as all this really involved was reading, sleeping, listening to iPods and eating ice cream to relieve the boredom.  However after 1500km we eventually arrived in Paraty, which is a delightful little old colonial town about 4 hours south of Rio.  The historic architecture is wonderfully preserved and its the sort of place that you could spend a couple of days just walking round (carefully though, the cobbled streets are lethal)!  We spent a day on a boat trip, gong round the many islands on the stunnng coastline, and a day wandering round town and up and down the beach.  This gave us our first  real views of Brazilian swimwear fashion.  Unfortunately it`s not just the beatiful people who wear dental floss bikinis or speedos (budgie smugglers).  Even more unfortunately, such attire is not restricted to the beach.  You would regularly see leathery old fat men, wearing just flip flops, budgie smugglers and a big medallion walking round town.  And some of the women are so large that the dental floss becomes almost invisible.  It kind of took the edge off the views, but was very amusing at the same time.  Needless to say,  we haven´t invested in local fashion items!  Also needless to say, there ARE some beautiful people, so it`s certainly worth keeping an eye out ....

And so on to Rio ........ and now it`s time for a nap.  I´ll load some photos if we can find somewhere to do it.  If not, you´ll have to wait until we get home.  Which, sadly, is in less than a fortnight.