Rio de Janeiro and journey home 2

I said Sergita was a barrel of laughs. You have to imagine someone, whose native tongue is Brazilian Portuguese, with verbal diarrhoea in three languages who tries to put on a Bronx New York accent for all of them. At the end of every oration he'd say: "Ya unstand evvyfin? Yaa - righhh! Ya wai' 'ere an' ah get ze ticks (tickets). Ya unstand evvyfin? Yaa - righhh!

And thus we proceded as the coach disgorged us into smaller minibuses and thence to even smaller minibuses as the road upto Corcovado went into ever tighter and narrower hairpins.

I can't do justice to the statue as it keeps appearing and disappearing - just like the Ascension - in the clouds which seem to swathe the pinnacle much of the time - nor can the photos which we'll try to download to the other site today. You just have to go there. The carved face of the statue (itself 3 metres high) is remarkably beautiful but you never seem to see it reproduced on the postcards. Perhaps it's considered disrespectful - or just that they don't want to affect anyone's own mind picture of Jesus.

Rio's International Airport is a bit of a let down - to put it mildly. It serves 40M residents of RDJ state - and more plus all the tourists who are "flying down to Rio" and it's about the size of East Midlands Airport. It has one bar with a Nescafé coffee dispenser (out of order when we were there). Hello - this is Brazil where there's supposed to be an awful lot of it! In fact, we didn't get a decent cup of coffeee in the whole of South America compared to the one we had back at Barcelona Airport! I blame my "betes noires" - the likes of Nestlé and General Foods for that! Virtually everyone we met in South America was so helpful and friendly - amazingly and touchingly so! Not at Rio Airport where they only do their café services and announcements in Portuguese and think they're doing you a great favour to even bother serving you. They should sack the lot and replace them with the enthusiastic but polite shoe-shine boys on the other side of the entrance doors. Our flight didn't even appear on the few departing flights screens. We found we were leaving through lemming-like movement towards the gates just as a terrific thunderstorm broke. It was then we discovered the whole place leaked like a colander. We hoped to get some more of the blog done in our 4 spare hours at Barcelona but Iberia lost one of our cases - the one with all the presents and souvenirs - and my clothes in - so we spent nearly all our timwe there at the lost luggage desk. We've been promised that it will arrive today. We'll see!