One outstanding feature of winter in the southeast and southern regions of Brazil is the presence of thick morning fog. Between June and September the airports of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are often forced to halt their operations due to heavy fog. The international airport of Guarulhos in São Paulo (also known as Cumbica) was built on an area that in the tupi-guarani language means “dense fog”. No wonder the airport is often a victim of the phenomenon. When an airport is closed flights are diverted to other cities. Brazilian airports are not equipped with advanced instrument landing systems allowing pilots to land with no visibility.

Unfortunately for passengers arriving from Europe, the time of the arrival of the majority of planes from the northern hemisphere coincides with the formation of fog. Our advice is, if you are arriving in the southern states of Brazil early in the morning during winter (in the southern hemisphere) make sure you leave plenty of time if you are planning on catching a connecting flight right away.

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Finding affordable hotels in Rio is no mean feat, as many of you will have already found out first-hand. You can search for hotels in Rio de Janeiro through our Hotels Combined search engine, a unique free tool that searches multiple hotel reservation websites simultaneously to help you find the lowest rate instantly. It eliminates the need to search major websites one by one in order to compare prices and availability. An amazing time and money saver!

The results open on a new page.

1. Budget hotels in Rio

The French hotel chain Accor has three budget hotels located in the centry of the city and it is promising new hotels soon:

• the Formule 1 Rio de Janeiro Centro at Rua Silva Jardim, 32.
• the Ibis Rio de Janeiro Centro right next to the previous one, also at Rua Silva Jardim, 32.
• the Ibis Rio de Janeiro Santos Dumond, right next to the domestic airport and a few hundred yards from the centre of Rio.

An outstanding feature of the hotels mentioned above is that they don’t hold any surprises – a bonus in the context of hotels in Rio. They are simple, to the point of being spartan. You won’t find charm or glamour in them. But in return for that, their fares are more friendly than the ones charged by most hotels in town. Their rates do not include breakfast. If you have stayed previously at a Formule 1 or Ibis hotel you know what to expect.

2. Bed & breakfast in Rio

There are now three networks providing Bed & Breafast accommodation

• Cama e Café. At its website you can check details of the houses providing accommodation. All the houses are located in the Santa Teresa neighbourhood.
• Rio Homestay is the upper market version of Cama e Café. Most of its apartments are located along the corridor that links Copacabana to Leblon, passing through Arpoador and Ipanema.
• Bed & Breakfast Brasil. It has 60 houses in Rio, on the most popular neighbourhoods (Copacabana, Ipanema, Leblon, Santa Teresa) and on places slightly more unusual for a hotel (Cosme Velho, São Conrado or Urca).

3. Youth hostels

On Youth hostels in Brazil we listed all the Brazilian hostels affiliated to Hostelling International. As well as those there are dozen of independent hostels in Rio. We advice you extreme care when you choosing them, as they rank from the professional to the outright rip-off.

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FIFA is setting up a giant arena at the Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro during the world cup. Soccer fans and tourists alike will be able to watch the world cup games in a festive atmosphere. During the matches played by Brazil the giant TV screen will face the ocean so around 100,000 can watch the game.

Access to the arena will be free – six other cities across the world will host similar events. We had already seen at the blog how the World Cup atmosphere had began to mount.

There is more information on the event at FIFA’s Official web site.

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The entire Michelin guide for Rio de Janeiro is available for free consultation at the following link on Google Books. Plenty of worthy information and details to help you plan your visit to the city of Rio.

At the Books on Brazil section of this blog you can check the details of other printed guides with focus on Brazil.

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The 1st edition of the 2010 Rio Restaurant Week will take place between 10 and 23 May (the 2nd edition will be between 18 and 31 October). During that period, a long list of Rio restaurants taking part in the initiative will serve lunch and/or dinner for a fixed price. The meal must include an appetizer, a main course and a dessert. Lunch costs R$27,50 (plus a R$1 donation to a charity) and dinner costs R$39 (+R$1).

The Restaurant Week is a great chance to try some restaurants that would normally be a tad beyond your budget. Make sure you book in advance as restaurants get quite crowded during the event.

The official website of the Restaurant Week features a list of restaurants taking part in the event as well as the food that will be served in each one of them. Pay attention as not all restaurants serve both lunch and dinner.

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Here’s our anual rewrite of our list of our list of favourite places in Brazil (previous editions include Top 10: favourite places in Brazil and 10 must-see places in Brazil). Here is the 2010 ranking of my 10 must-see places in Brazil. Click on the names of the places to go to their full destination cards here at the blog, and find out more about them. Some of the destinations are really well-known. Others fall within the hidden jewel description. I have only included places I have been to (places I’ve read/heard about but I haven’t visited didn’t make it into the ranking).

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1. Fernando de Noronha (Pernambuco)

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2. Paraty (Rio de Janeiro)

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3. Lençóis Maranhenses (Maranhão)

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4. Ilha Grande (Rio de Janeiro)

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5. Iguaçu falls (Paraná and Argentina)

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6. Brasilia (Distrito Federal)

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7. Boipeba (Bahia)

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8. Bonito (Mato Grosso do Sul)

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9. Inhotim (Minas Gerais)

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10. Rio de Janeiro

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The Association of Rio de Janeiro’s Escolas de Samba (LIESA) has announced the prices for the carnival parades at the Sambadrome: LIESA anuncia cronograma de venda de ingressos para o Carnaval 2010. At the same website you can see a map of the venue at Sambadrome map to understand better where each sector is located.

The escolas de samba enter the Sambodrome from the left on the map, right next to Setor 1. Setor 1 tickets are the cheapest of all because from that location you don’t actually get to see the parade but rather the gathering of the different groups. The parade ends on the right hand side of the map, in the part known as Praça da Apoteose (although the name doesn’t feature on the map). Tickets here are more affordable as the escolas arrive here quite tired after one hour parading through the Sambadrome.

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The city of Río de Janeiro sports a brand new official tourism site, the Rio Guide. For anybody familiar with the previous version of the website the first impression landing on the new page is one of admiration. The functional design of the new site makes it so much easier to locate information.

When the guide was launched strong emphasis was paid to the incorporation of social networks. Thus, the guide has accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, You Tube and Flickr. There are also four Portuguese-language blogs associated to the page: Blog do Mochileiro, Rio Alternativo, Dicas do Rio and Botecos Cariocas.

WHAT WE LIKE THE MOST ABOUT THE NEW PAGE

• The guide contains an incredible amount of useful information. It is accessed through menus and sections. Most areas of interest for a tourist are covered on the guide.
• Visitors can download for free a PDF tourist map of Rio. It won’t be of great help to find your way across the city but it is an incredibly helpful resource to help you understand Rio and the location of its most important sights.
• Also available for download in PDF format, the excellent Guia do Rio, a superb entertainment guide (bilingual edition, Portuguese and English) regularly updated. Congrats to whoever had the idea of making the guide available.

A MINOR IMPROVEMENT

• When you hover over a number of links on the page, they don’t change colour. So you can’t tell when a group of words contains a link or not (you can by looking at the status bar of your browser). Links should be clearly visible, this is good practice in web design.

NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED ASAP

• Hard to believe, but the official tourism website of the most visited Brazilian city only has a Portuguese version. When the page was launched I contacted RioTur to find out when versions in languages other than Portuguese would be made available. The answer I got was that a multilingual site would be online at the beginning of October. We are half way through November and the multilingual version is nowhere to be seen. We hope we’ll be able to announce the launch of the multilingual version soon. In the meantime, what a shame. UPDATE: Rio’s finally got an English version for its tourism site. Check it out here: Rio Official Guide.
• The blogs associated to the page seem to have been launched and subsequently abandoned.

OVERALL VIEW

The new tourist website is a step forward and a recognition of the massive role played by the internet. While the Rio Guide doesn’t go as far as terrific pages like the Portal Oficial de Turismo de Buenos Aires, it deserves special recognition in the Brazilian context. Congratulations to those responsible for the page are in order. We hope the multilingual site will be online sooner than later, needless to say that Olympic Rio can’t present itself to the world speaking just the one language.

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The cities that will host the FIFA World Cup 2014 in Brazil have been chosen. They are Belo Horizonte, Brasília, Cuiabá, Curitiba, Fortaleza, Manaos, Natal, Porto Alegre, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and São Paulo.

It is almost certain that the World Cup final will take place at the Maracanã stadium in Rio. São Paulo and Belo Horizonte are fighting for the right to host the opening game.

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Google has just incorporated a transit layer to its maps. It contains information for a number of world cities, including an important selection from Brazil: Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Recife, Río de Janeiro and São Paulo.

When you turn on the transit layer (accesible through a drop-down menu on the top right-hand side of the map) you will be able to see lines showing the layout of rail transportation in the above-mentioned Brazilian cities. Both underground and above-the-ground train services are shown. It is a very useful tool as you can easily see whether there is fast and convenient public transportation to any point in the city.

Let’s take Porto Alegre. You are arriving in the airport and want to know whether there is any transportation into town. You just have to locate the airport on the map, activate the transit layer, and you will quickly find an visual answer to your question.

If you click on the symbol of any station you will find out more information about it.

How about the location of São Paulo’s underground stations?

The only care you need to take is not to confuse the subway/underground lines with the suburban trains – both exist in the case of São Paulo. A single click on any station will allow you to see which means of transportation is available there.

A warm welcome to this additional layer of information. You probably know we are big fans of Google Maps. Our work landed us recently a double-page spread on Info magazine (GoogleMaps on the Brazil Travel Blog). Might be nice to see more people using Google Maps in Brazil. At times it seems the institutions and powers-that-be responsible for putting out tourist information are completely unaware of its existence and usefulness.

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