Apparently there are kangaroos in Rio - I have so much to learn
I’m really not at all well prepared to go to Rio .........
This is a bit of a worry for someone who is usually quite meticulous about travel planning. In the lead up to the 2014 World Equestrian Games in Normandy, I’d visited the venue several times, including attending the Test Event, worked out exactly where I was staying, knew all the back routes to the event through the countryside (which turned out to be quite useful) and could speak French.
In 2012 (the year we started An Eventful Life as a ‘proper’ website) I wasn’t accredited for the London Olympic Games but we had an English freelance journalist working for us in the media centre, I was blogging from the stands as a spectator and I knew London like the back of my hand. So at both of those major events, I was pretty smug about the whole thing working well.
Let’s say I’m really not feeling at all smug about this trip to cover the Olympic Games. I have never been to South America and know nothing about the country (or is it a continent? Case in point).
I haven’t even googled travel stuff about where I am going which is my usual way of overcoming being geographically challenged; I am flying to Santiago en route to Rio and only today realised, when I looked at the airline ticket, that Santiago is in Chile (mind you, my first marriage was to a man from Tasmania and I thought for some while that I was going to visit his parents in Tanzania)
So for those of you who have followed my ‘major event travel blogs’ in the past I apologise if the upcoming ramblings are less knowledgeable than they should be. On the other hand it might be fun ...
Of course I can’t start my road to Rio without a song and you just know which one it has to be. This video of the Boy From Oz himself, Peter Allen singing 'I Go To Rio' with some Rio type arty stuff in the background is about as far as my travel research has gone to date, god help us
