A loaf of sugar and a visit to see Jesus.

I forgot to mention that when we visited the Museum in Niteroi we found the probable hiding place of Osama bin Laden. Alert the feds! The little sign hanging under the door says something along the lines of ´Where the taliban come to meet´. Great.

The Sugar Loaf in all it´s glory.

The clouds rolling in. They were moving pretty rapidly over that little ridge.

Jesus with some scaffolding.

Us two at the top.

We tried to visit the Sugar Loaf mountain but things didn´t go quite to plan in the end. We´d heard that you could climb up to the first station and so saving half the price of the cable car lift fee. We asked a handful a people on the way and everyone pointed us in the direction of a path so off we went. Unfortunately, the only path we saw upwards said that it required climbing gear including ropes and the such. So dressed in our beach shorts and flip flops, this route might be out of even our flip flop trekking league league (think back to Kat´s flip flop trek in Bariloche). The walk was nice anyway and we headed back to look at the price of the cable car up. At 20 quid each (of course only 5 for Brasilians) we decided we´d save our money for the visit to Jesus the next day. The mountain sure looked nice from the bottom though.

So today, sunny again and after the obligratory visit to Ipanema we headed up to see the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer. We had another funny example of how tourists are sometimes treated here when we got off the bus at the bottom of the hill. There are two options up to the statue, either a cheaper option of the train or a slightly more expensive option of a minibus. The minibus drivers all congregrate around the bus stop waiting for the prey and the first thing we were told was that the train had ´broken down´! We thought we´d check and of course it hadn´t! The cheeky bugger! So we took the train up and up and up we went. It got so steep at some points you started to realise how high up the statue is.

It turned out that we´d timed our visit perfectly. Just as we stepped out to see the view the clouds slowly started rolling in. It would have been desperately dissapointing to go up only to be up in the clouds! It was great to see the whole of Rio and the only pity was that the statue itself is under restoration and so is covered in scaffolding. Oh well, the view was still great.

So here we are, our last full day tomorrow before we head home on Thursday. We have nothing to do now but sit on the beach and wait for our flight home. Not that we´ve totally exhausted the city of everything to do but we´re sure that sitting at home in the UK next week, what we´ll want to remember is plenty of time on the beach. Milk it as much as possible! I´ll give another little post before we catch our flight..........