Krista Sidhu Photography: First Stop, Brazil!

After a year of planning and many years of dreaming, we finally left for our 1 month vacation exploring 4 different countries in South America.

24 hours after leaving Vancouver, we arrived at our first stop, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The view from the plane as we descended into Rio gave me butterflies in my stomach!

The first day we went out to explore, we learned a very good lesson

When it rains, it pours! We knew we were going during the rainy season in Brazil, but we weren't expecting this type of down pour! We waited undercover for about 20 minutes, then caved and ran in the rain to buy an umbrella. We kept this umbrella at our side for the rest of our time in Brazil. Luckily for us, the rain would only be like this for a max of 30 minutes and the day would continue to be warm and beautiful.

We got to ring in the new year (2011) in Rio and decided to spend it with the many locals and tourist on Copacabana beach.

The beach on a normal day.

New Years Eve

There was a few things we didn't read about before we arrived to Rio in regards to New Years. The day before New Years Eve, we found out that the subway system required pre-purchased tickets slotted for a specific hour for you to ride from 6pm-11:59pm. We went to purchase tickets and they were sold out. We were about a 40 minute taxi ride from the beach and were told we would be ripped off if we got a taxi. So, we took the subway when we were still allowed at 5:00pm and headed out for dinner. We'll we finished dinner by 6pm and had nothing else to do (a lot of stores in the area were closed because of the celebrations) but to go and sit on the beach.
When we got to the beach, there were already a lot of people set up for the nights celebrations

We were told it is a tradition of the locals to dress in white for New Years Eve. The people in Brazil believe in customs of bringing good luck and fortune on New Year. White is the color that brings good luck. People in Brazil on New Year wear white clothes, as it is believed that it would bring them good luck and peace for the rest of the year to come.
So, the day before, we went out shopping and found new outfits in ring in the New Year and bring us good luck!

People in Brazil follow a custom of visiting beaches, jump seven waves and throwing flowers in the sea and making a wish. The Brazilians believe this to be a New Year custom that would bring them good luck and fortune as you can see in the background of this photo

I was watching this reporter on t.v covering the festivities on the beach earlier in the day, so i was excited when i saw him and wanted to take a photo. Obviously he wasn't very impressed as you see him glaring at me in that photo :)

There was 2 huge stages set up on the beach. They were far quite far from each other, so we picked this one, it was closer :

They had performers on here from 6pm till 4am! The closer it got to midnight, the more excited the locals got so i'm assuming the performers just kept getting more famous because by 11:30pm, everyone was singing along to all of the songs.

Just before midnight, they released the logo for the 2016 Summer Olympics!! So we were one of the first to see it!!

Look at the crazy amounts of people. It took us 30 minutes to walk across the beach through all these people to get to the washroom (during the day it would take us 2 minutes)

At midnight, there was a huge firework display. Probably the best i've ever seen. It went on for about 30 minutes!

A few days later, I completed #40- go Hang Gliding on my list of 101 things to do in 1001 days
Thanks so much to Rio-Hang-Gliding for a great time! I had never been before, and i was a little nervous but they made me feel so safe.
My ride was so exhilarating! Such an amazing feeling to be calmly gliding around with the amazing views of the city and ocean!!

I dragged my leg on the landing and ended up with a little road burn on my shin.

Happy i did it!

Bitu was after me:

We only have a few other photos of our time in Brazil. Unfortunately, we were using Bitu's camera a majority of our time in Brazil, but it was stolen out of his checked bag when we were travelling from Buenos Aires to Lima with TAM airlines.
Here are a few others i liked:

Christmas display in the mall. Glad to see they love Christmas as much as i do :)

This cool building had a good restaurant we ate at a few times.

Skinny path way to our hotel. There is about 4 or 5 restaurants in this little alleyway. We ate at one of the restaurants and when i asked for chicken i got a whole chicken! It was crazy!