Beatrix pottering: Aventura en Sudamérica! 🌎

Family Goodwin is off to South America - Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile 🇧🇷🇦🇷🇺🇾🇨🇱

I’m not planning a daily blog, but little photo updates if you would like to get a glimpse of our adventures.

First instalment: arrival in Rio.

And first impressions: it’s definitely different! You could smell the heat and humidity, even in the plane tunnel. Very efficient airport (Stansted could take lessons), then out into an already hot early morning sunshine.

Our taxi ride across the city was accompanied by Take That, Adele and Roy Orbison - incongruous background for a tropical view. So colourful, with bright paintings on the overpasses, and so green! Trees everywhere, and tall jungly mountains looming over it all - it felt like the rainforest could overtake at any moment.

Our hotel was in Copacabana - you’ve got to really - and as we got closer you could see people wandering around the streets in bikinis or speedos, some barefoot. We couldn’t check in straight away, so had brunch, then had a swim in the rooftop pool overlooking the enormous sweep of Copacabana Beach - the best view I’ve ever had from a pool, and a genuinely impressive beach: wide, golden powdery sand, stretching in a huge arc, overlooked by Sugarloaf Mountain.

After a snooze, we walked to Pedra do Arpoador, a rocky headland sticking out between Copacabana and Ipanema beach (they are next door, slightly at right angles). The custom is to watch the sunset from there, and we were not alone! Maybe a thousand people on the beach and all over the (very hot) rock - it was like sitting on a stove - with vendors walking around selling trays of caipirinhas. We sat next to two young women from Rio and I tried out my very basic Portuguese - I’d learned a few words from our taxi driver, to his hilarity.

Dinner was at one of the many “kiosks” along the back of Copacabana - beach restaurants basically, with very tasty beef skewers and shrimp rice, and, of course, caipirinhas! The whole of the beach was floodlit, with people still swimming at 9pm, and crowds watching a form of beach volleyball where people use their chests, not their hands.

I’m surprised by how excited I’ve been to be here - it is just brilliant to be exploring somewhere so new. And so far, from the weather to the people to the food, it’s all been great. Off to Iguazú Falls today!