Off to Rio. This time tomorrow we will be in Rio. Will attempt to keep up the blog from there, but if not Feliz Natal!

Recycling and the Environment. One small anecdote to leave you all with. Being conscious of our environment, Rach and I have tried to recycle our garbage when we can. In York this was made easier by a fantastic council facility which, when we were packing up 23 Surtees Street, meant almost all our junk was sorted and recycled. In Brazil, there is still a way to go with the green agenda. Nonetheless, we spotted a few containers for recylcying dotted randomly around. This morning Rach and I dutifully pulled up on a busy road by the beach to deposit our empties. Despite seperate holes for metal, plastic, paper and cardboard it soon became clear that everything was being funnelled into the same bin. In other words, there really was no point sorting our rubbish - even though the colourful labels encouraged us to - as it all gets mixed up anyway. A bit disheartening that. We`re not sure where our recylcables will end up. Probably the local landfill.

My Father in Law reckons that recycling will take a long time to catch on because Brazil is so big, nobody has a sense of land being wasted by rubbish - there is always more space to move into, runs the argument. We met a very interesting man last week in Natal - a British ex-pat who has bought up land for conservation and is completing a PhD in Environmental Education. In many ways, Brazil could do with paying a bit more attention to the sorts of things he is saying...

With that in mind, we will keep an avid interest in the development of A Rocha Brazil: www.arocha.org