The beach in front of our hotel Ipanema Beach from our hotel (David writes) As you will already know, if you follow P on Facebook, we arrived in Rio de Janeiro yesterday morning at 7:25am. The flight from Lisbon was OK (?) in an aging Airbus 340. Unfortunately some wayward bug attacked my gut (or I drank too much wine during our stopover in Lisbon) and I slept most of plane journey (a good thing) and then slept most of the day at the hotel.

Fingers crossed, I'm feeling quite a bit better today, but we're "taking it easy", which means that I'll catch up on photos and P will catch up on her TripAdvisor duties.

Rio is outrageously expensive, so we picked a hotel out of the really "hot" places (Ipanema, Copacabana). We are at the end of the district called Leblon, next one past Ipanema. That's fine, because it's reasonably quiet and hotel runs a shuttle down to the busy areas and back.

The first photo above is a view of Ipanema from our hotel window and the second is the beach in front of the hotel – not too shabby!

I'm sure we'll go up Sugarloaf and get to see Jesus, but in the meantime, we're taking it easy!

Best wishes, D+P