Woke up and had breakfast on the outside terrace. The was a cereal and cake and a selection of ham and cheese that you could stuff into a piece of French stick. As well as tea and coffee or juice. I just had some bread ham and cheese to put something solid into my stomach for the morning.
Soon after I had eaten breakfast I saw Moses wandering around. Apparently, he couldn’t sleep in the night so had gone to the beach at aout 5:15am this morning. He said that he was going to the large Christ statue up on the hilltop. You can see it for miles, so I grabbed my camera and we headed off.
Luckily for me he could speak Portuguese and wasn’t backwards in coming forwards so he managed to find out what buses we needed to get to the statue. We jumped on two buses at a cost of just 2.20 Brazilian Dib dabs (whatever they are called) each which is about 70p, we then ended up at the foot of the big hill in the scorching heat. There were loads of tour buses at the bottom of the hill that took you to the top but Moses had a better idea and said he could get in cheaper so we wandered around the corner to ask someone. Apparently there were motor-taxis that you could get a lot cheaper. What I didn’t understand was that these motor-taxi’s were actually a dodgy looking guy on a motorbike and you just hopped on the back. Anyway they were 15 dib dabs each but Moses managed to get it for 10 each and off we went. The hill was a bout a 10 minute ride round hair pin bends and up a really steep gradient. I’ve never rode on the back of a bike before and was a bit daunted at first cos you have to just hold on to a handle behind you which at first didn’t feel very safe but I soon got the grip of it (pardon the pun) then it was okay.
Once we reached about 3/4s of the way up I noticed a massive queue that I presumed was tobuy tickets for the statue thingy…WRONG!! That was people who had already queued to buy tickets and were waiting to get in one of the small vans to the statue. Just as I started to walk into the queue one of my flip flops snapped…GREAT ! I can’t moan I guess I’ve had em about 4 years, but It just meant I had to walk around barefooted all day, unless I could find a shop that sold em.
Anyway we hatched a plan that I would get in the massive queue while Moses went to queue to buy tickets. He was only gone about 10 minutes so I’m guessing either the queue wasn’t very big or he befriended some old lady so he could push in lol.
We eventually got to the front of the long queue and jumped in a van to the statue. The statue was huge and people were lying on the floor in order to try and get it in the photo properly, whilst their friend would stand in front of the statue in the arms out like a cross pose. Needless to say Moses was the one doing the daft pose and not me lol.
Took some pics and then bought souvenirs on the way back down (well it saves carrying them around all day). I bought Moses a little wrist band thing with the name of the place on and then he went and bought me a bloody little cup that said “ I love Rio”, bless him.
After getting a van back down to the ticket sales place we set off walking back down the massive hill as they wanted 150 Dib Dabs for the trip down in a taxi. Moses said we could probably just bum a lift off one of the cars going back down. I’m sure he would do that even if he was on his own, but there is no way I would. In the end he flagged a taxi headed down hill and managed to pursued them to take 10 dib dabs as they were going that way empty anyway so it was better than nothing (good plan)..
We got to the bottom and then got a bus back to our hostel. Moses suggested we get some food from the supermarket and cook something. He said “lets get some bread and stuff” to which I replied “that’s not cooking lol” so I managed to talk him into getting a few different bits from the deli. We got some really nice pieces of steak in a mushroom sauce, some pancake things filled with veg and some roast potatoes.
After dinner I just chilled out in the hostel for a bit and got chatting to a girl from Australia called Marissa. We decided to head out to meet her friend in a bar and then maybe to a club in the next resort over so asked one of the stoners who was staying at out hostel, if they knew where to go. We got ready for about 8:30pm and headed out in a taxi to the street where the bar was meant to be (she’d just picked one out of her lonely planet guide). When we got there we went up and down the street but it was nowhere to be seen so I suspect her book is out of date. In the end we gave up finding it and then went into a local place for some food. I just ordered a few things that looked like nibbly bits (as they said 12 pieces) but no idea what they were. She ordered tagliatelli. When mine came it was one plate of what tasted like sausage/burger long things like sausage but crispy and another plate of what looked like espanadas (I’d had them before) which were assorted little pasty type things. Some had meat in, some cheese and others shrimp paste, but all were nice. We decided to just share everything as Marissa’s Broccoli pasta looked a bit boring lol.
After food we headed over to a bar that I had spotted early that looked was busy with very good looking people so I suspected it might be a happy bar lol. We ordered a glass of “draught wine”, and couldn’t understand why it was cheaper than the wine by the glass. We soon found out when we tasted it and it was like really sweet blackcurrant or something and was rancid. It didn’t even taste like alcohol BBBRRR.
The stoner suggested somewhere (I cant remember the name now) that was meant to be popular. POPULAR !!! I should bloody cocoa, when we got there 30 dib dabs later there was a queue half way down the street. It didn’t even seem like it was a club. It looked more like a bar and was in a street of restaurants so we only had the alternative of a restaurant type place to go to. The “club” was on 3 levels and had balcony’s overlooking the street. Neither of us fancied queuing for about 2 hours in the rain (as it wasn’t moving cos it looked like they were already doing “one out one in”), so we just decided to have a drink in one of the restaurants.
We had a couple of drinks and then decided to call it a night as we had almost spent up with the cost of the bloody taxis.
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