Day 249 - Parade time

Rio De Janeiro - Ibis Hotel

Today we hopped on the southbound train and decided to follow the crowds. Everyone got off at Ipanema and headed for the beach, so we did too, stopping off at the Sunday "Hippy Market", which was really just another tourist market. Everything here was quite expensive and noone was particularly interested in serving or bargaining.

The beach was packed, never before have we seen a beach so crowded, it was difficult to see a patch of sand (or pale skin for that matter). We walked the stretch from Ipanema to Copacabana, stopping for lunch beachside on the way before heading back to our hotel for an attempt at a nap, as tonight is our night to visit the Sambadrome, the event goes all night, starting at 9pm and finishing around 6am.

We walked to the Sambadrome, there were plenty of police everywhere so we felt completely safe. Talking to other people in the stands, we found some of them had horrid trips of over two hours trying to get there so we were lucky we were close enough to walk.

There are six samba schools on each night and they perform for 80 minutes each with an interval between each group, and each school has 8 floats with thousands of participants, the floats vary from being massively  over the top to more ordinary.  Every school is started with a fireworks display, the money spent on the whole extravaganza is mind boggling!

To our surprise the dancers came in all shapes, sizes and ages, as well as the types of dancers you'd expect, all decked out in their amazing costumes, there were also older and less fit people who did little more than walk around waving their hands in the air, and some that looked like old ladies who'd just come from church.

Initially the spectacle was amazing, the colours, sound and movement creating a magnificent display, and some of the floats were incredible, but after sitting through about four schools it all started to blend in together, and the musical theme for each school is a single song repeated over and over and over and over and over and over ...... so after about 5 hours or so, at 2.45am we decided we had seen enough and walked back to our hotel, alongside some of the performers still in their costumes. On the way back, we had to make our way  through a very large crowd of possibly gay men, based on the numbers of male couples making out all over the place .....