A nightmare in trying to leave Rio

This morning Kate and I woke to one hung over Andy, so we decided to have a day to ourselves while he recovered. We walked out the door and headed for coffee. We were going to go to the Sugar Loaf but detoured for coffee and cake. Over coffee and the most heavenly chocolate cake that either of us had ever had, we decided that we should get organised in arranging out flights out to Salvador, so when we finished we headed back to the Hostel to get Andy. He was gone. To make a long story short he changed his mind about staying in and headed over to the Sugar Loaf to find us, not knowing that we detoured. So that was the first drama for the day. The second was trying to book flights. You cant book internal flights over the internet without a Brazilian Social Security number, that was the first pain. The second being that as a non resident and without a Brazilian issued credit card you can not pay for airfares at Travel Agents, unless you have an American Express card. Thirdly, we could only pay by cash and neither Kate or myself had the funds in our accounts to cover our flights let alone the M.I.A Andy. We spent hours and hours going from travel agent to travel agent, getting on line and again surfing the airline webpages in a hope that we could do something. I was texting my dad to see if he could run to the bank and make a deposit for me, not knowing it was 4.30am Sydney time. In the end I had to take a massive cash advance on my credit card so that we could go and pay cash for our tickets, only then to be ripped off by the travel agent by telling our flights cost so much and giving us an e-ticket itinerary with no pricing on it. When we got our boarding passes at check-in the price of our tickets were on that. Lets say the travel agent made himself a nice little profit for his 10 mins of work.

Anyways, the day was almost over and we hadn't made it to the Sugar Loaf, but we were determined and even though it was now 4.30pm we jumped onto that bus and headed off. We were both glad that we did go as the view was amazing.