Rio ??

We reached Newark and Alex met us there. She wanted to shoot an ending scene to her film with the 3 of us leaving the US, backpack et al. For those of you who dont know Alex, she was shooting a behind the scenes on Barah Aana that has now gotten a life of its own as a feature documentary.

Newark to JFK was a breeze once again. Apparently we've been very lucky with the timing of flights. The roads around NY have been torn down in many places due the excessive snowing this winter and even then we did the trudge in under an hour.

Jfk to Charlotte is a 2 hour flight. Not bad, except that I was reminded of my early flights in India. Old planes, no entertainment system ( even on the 10 hour Charlotte - Rio leg), a big tv in the front that played a film we could all follow without the audio , $5 for the earphones, 7 for a beer ( blasphemous), generally unhappy crew and the story take a familiar twist.

Charlotte airport surprised us! It is a beautiful modern well appointed airport. Yannick's I- touch has been a godsend every time we need the internet, since I left my laptop in NJ.and switched Nu's ph off!!!!;-)
Our flight was to board at 9.45 pm so we trudge along to the gate after confirming there would be food on the flight ; yes sir, you will be served one hot meal, afterall it is a 10 hour flight!'' Thank you, thats very generous, I thought to myself!

At the gate I show the officers my passport and visa and they ask me for a ticket out of Brazil. we don't have one, I explain. We're going to bus it to Buenos Aires and will buy the ticket in Rio later but we do have a visa to enter Argentina, and a return ticket to India.They confer and discuss and shake heads and come back to me saying we will not be allowed to board unless we have a ticket out of Brazil as they believe the Brazilian passport control will not entertain us. I'm not sure what the legality on this is, but time being short the only solution was to buy a fully refundable ticket and cancel it after entering Brazil. The ticket costs me $ 6,000/-. I have no choice so I take it. The credit card foreign exchange fee alone will be $ 180 so I'm really pissed. We land in Rio after a bus ride of a flight except for luckily having a full row for Nu and me to share, and 2 seats for Yannick to sleep on. Passport control take 5 mins, no questions asked. Luckily we manage to cancel the ticket and they confirmed that it was fully refundable but I've not yet seen the credit! Made it easy to decide on what my prayer to Christ the Redeemer would be.

Exit the airport, take the onibus ( or Bus in English) to Rio Sul, then realise our 35 pound haversacks are really heavy especially after the wonderfully helpful lady walked along with us and took us a couple of kms around the building we were going to stay in. Even so, we all fell in love with the city right away. It is now my # 1 city in the world without a doubt! A one line describing Rio would be a rather long line but it would read; an Ultra modern Bombay mixed with the the portuguese traditional houses of Panjim, with huge open spaces , magnificient gardens, beautiful beaches and I would not do justice to Rio if I did not mention the spandex! Now  I'll leave somehting to your imagination...