Rio de Janeiro

Yes, we made it there! After being told we couldn't drive there, we took help from a travel agent to put together a trip from Belo Horizonte.

It was very much worth it, and we had a few days with a really nice experience. It had been raining heavily for several days, and when we flew in it was cloudy and grey and we thought we had run out of our luck with the weather. The next day we went to see Sugar Loaf Mountain and Christ the Redeemer, with dry weather and almost no people. Magic!

We stayed in Copacabana, around the corner from the famous beach. The next day we went on a city tour, with lunch at the Confeitaria Colombo, a famous institution in Rio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confeitaria_Colombo

Our guide told us why we couldn't drive in Rio. It is simple, if inadvertently we would enter a favela, which is easy to do when there are lots of them and the maps often direct drivers to the fastest route, they shoot first and talk second when they don't recognise the car.