Rio de Janeiro Travel Guide 2026: Everything You Need to Know

This is the Rio de Janeiro travel guide we wish someone had handed us on the first trip, ten years ago, before the taxi driver overcharged us and the mountain was hidden in cloud. Rio rewards a plan and punishes a fantasy. So here is the whole city laid out from the hillside we now call home: when to come, what it costs, where to sleep, how to move, what to see, and how to stay safe without spending the week afraid. Read it once and you will land like someone on their third visit rather than their first.

Most first-timers arrive with two pictures in their head. One is the postcard: the statue with its arms open, the sweep of Copacabana, a caipirinha at sunset. The other is the fear: a city they have been told is dangerous, where every stranger is a threat and every camera a target. Neither picture is Rio. The real city is warmer, more ordinary, more logistical, and far more manageable than either extreme suggests. It is also enormous, spread between mountains and sea across a bay the size of a small country, which means the single biggest mistake you can make is treating it as a place you can wing.

We run an apartment near the top of Vidigal, a neighbourhood on a hillside between Leblon and São Conrado, directly under the twin Dois Irmãos peaks. That vantage point shapes this guide. We watch the weather roll in off the Atlantic before the beach neighbourhoods feel it. We send guests up the mountain and down to the sand and out to the islands every week of the year, and we hear what worked and what did not when they get back. What follows is not scraped from a database. It is what we actually tell people over coffee on their first morning.

Rio sits just inside the tropics, so it does not really have four seasons. It has a hot wet summer and a mild dry winter, and the calendar is upside down from the northern one. Summer runs December to March. Winter runs June to August. The single fact that changes more trips than any other is this: the famous months are the hardest months. December to February is peak heat, peak crowds, peak prices, and peak rain, all at once. The postcard was shot in that light, and the postcard did not show you the queue.

The sweet spot is the shoulder. Late April through June, and again August through October, gives you warm days in the high twenties Celsius, sea temperatures that are still perfectly swimmable, thinner crowds at the icons, and hotel and rental prices that drop noticeably off the summer peak. The light in these months is cleaner too, which matters more than it sounds, because Rio's whole appeal is a view and a view needs a clear sky. We cover the trade-offs month by month in our best-time-to-visit breakdown, but if you want the one-line version: come in May or September and thank us later.

Winter, June to August, is underrated. Days are dry and clear more often than not, temperatures sit comfortably in the low-to-mid twenties, and the mountain is far more likely to be free of cloud, which is the entire game when your reason for climbing it is to see. The sea is cooler but cariocas still swim, and you will have space on the sand that a summer visitor cannot imagine. The catch is that a cold front can drop the temperature and grey the sky for two or three days at a stretch, so pack a light layer and do not plan the whole trip around a single tan.

Summer is for a specific kind of traveller: the one who wants the heat, the crowds, the all-night energy and the two big set pieces. New Year's Eve, Réveillon, puts more than two million people in white onto Copacabana beach for fireworks over the water, and it is genuinely one of the great nights on earth. Carnival, usually February, is the other. Both are spectacular and both are the most expensive, most crowded, most logistically punishing times to be here. If your trip is built around either, book everything months ahead and accept the premium. If it is not, avoid those two windows entirely and your money goes twice as far.

One weather truth for planning the mountain: clouds cling to the peaks, especially Corcovado where the statue stands, and especially in summer. The view is often clear in the early morning and clouds over by midday. Keep your climb flexible. If you wake to a clear sky, drop your plans and go up that morning. A rigid ticket for 2pm on your one clear day is how people fly home never having seen the thing they came for.

The e-Visa, and the arrival stuff that actually trips people up

Start with the paperwork, because in 2026 it caught a lot of people out. As of the first of January, Brazil reintroduced a visa requirement for citizens of the United States, Canada and Australia, who had travelled visa-free for years. It is an electronic visa now, applied for entirely online through the official VFS portal, and you must have it approved before you board. The fee is roughly US$81, it grants a multiple-entry visa valid for up to ten years with stays of up to ninety days at a time, and processing runs around ten working days. Apply at least a couple of weeks out. Do not leave it to the airport, because there is no visa-on-arrival to fall back on. Citizens of the UK and the EU do not need one for tourism at the time of writing, but confirm your own passport's status before you book anything.

A word of warning that saves money: use only the official government portal. Search results are thick with lookalike sites that charge a fat markup to fill in a form you can complete yourself. The genuine process is not complicated. We walk through it, along with the SIM card, the money and the airport transfer, in the visa, money and arrival essentials guide, but the headline is: do it yourself, do it early, keep the PDF on your phone and printed.

You will land at Galeão international airport (GIG), out on Governador Island, about forty minutes to an hour from the South Zone depending on traffic. Do not take an unmarked car from a tout in the arrivals hall. Order an Uber or a licensed taxi from the official rank, expect to pay somewhere in the region of R$90 to R$150 to the beach neighbourhoods, and know that during rush hour it can take considerably longer than the map suggests. If you are coming to us in Vidigal, a car drops you at the base of the hill and a moto-taxi runs your bags up the last stretch, which sounds exotic and is simply how everyone here arrives home.

Money is simpler than it looks. The currency is the real (plural reais, written R$). Cards work almost everywhere, including for tiny amounts, and Brazil's instant-payment system, PIX, is used constantly, though as a short-term visitor you will mostly lean on contactless card and a little cash. Withdraw reais from a bank ATM once you land rather than changing money at home at a bad rate. Carry a modest amount of small notes for beach vendors, moto-taxis and the corner bakery, and keep the rest on your card. Tell your bank you are travelling so the first transaction does not get frozen.

Two practical bits people forget. Get a local eSIM or SIM so you have data the moment you land, because Uber, maps and WhatsApp are the operating system of a Rio trip and everyone here communicates by WhatsApp, hosts included. And bring a plug adapter that handles the Brazilian socket, the three-round-pin type N, and note the voltage is not universal across the country, so check before you plug in anything with a heating element.

What a Rio trip actually costs

Rio can be done cheaply or expensively, and the range is wider than in most cities because the good and the cheap overlap so often. The best plate of food you eat all week might cost eight reais, handed to you in a napkin. A sunset drink with a view might cost forty. Both are correct. Here is how the numbers break down for a typical mid-range trip in 2026, with everything in reais.

Daily food, if you eat like a local, is genuinely inexpensive. Breakfast at a padaria counter runs R$10 to R$20. A per-kilo lunch, where you build a plate and pay by weight, lands around R$40 to R$55 for a full one. Dinner at a botequim, grazing on fried snacks and cold beer, can feed two for under R$100. Eat at hotel restaurants and tourist-strip terraces every meal and you will pay three times that for food that is rarely as good. Our carioca food guide maps the whole canon and what each dish costs.

The icons add up, so budget for them deliberately. A round-trip Sugarloaf cable car ticket is around R$170 for an adult. Reaching Christ the Redeemer by the official Corcovado cog train is roughly R$130 including the platform access, with the van route up from Paineiras a little cheaper. A guided Maracanã stadium tour is in the region of R$75 to R$94. None of these is expensive on its own, but stacked into one week with day trips they are the biggest discretionary line in the budget. We run the full daily math, from backpacker to comfortable, in the cost breakdown.

Accommodation is where the range is widest, and where staying up on the hill quietly changes the whole equation. A room in a good Ipanema hotel in high season can cost more per night than a spacious apartment with a terrace and a full kitchen in Vidigal, and the apartment gives you the thing the hotel cannot: a place to cook the extraordinary cheap produce from the Leblon street market, a place to host, and a view that hotels charge a fortune to approximate. Self-catering even half your meals turns a mid-range budget into a generous one. That is the lever most visitors never pull.

Where you sleep decides what your trip feels like, more than any single attraction. Rio's tourist heart is the Zona Sul, the string of beach neighbourhoods along the Atlantic, and unless you have a specific reason to be elsewhere, that is where you want to be. Downtown, the Centro, empties and quietens at night and is not where you want to be based as a visitor. Barra da Tijuca, further out, is a wall of condos and malls with good beaches and no soul, built around the car. Stay in the classic Zona Sul and you can walk to sand, food and nightlife.

Within the Zona Sul there are really four choices, and they have distinct personalities. Copacabana is the grand old dame: a two-and-a-half-kilometre curve of sand, a wall of mid-century hotels and apartment blocks, cheaper than Ipanema, busier, more mixed, and frankly a little frayed at the edges in places. Ipanema and neighbouring Leblon are the polished, moneyed end, with the best restaurants, the smartest bars, the calmest streets and the highest prices. Botafogo and its little sibling Urca are quieter, more residential, more carioca, with Sugarloaf on the doorstep. And then there is Vidigal, on the hillside above Leblon, which is where we live and where we send people who want more than a hotel corridor.

Here is the honest case for the hill, and we will make it plainly because we have skin in it. Vidigal is a favela, a community of around thirty thousand people that grew up the mountainside without a planning department. It is not a resort and it is not a slum, two lazy words that both miss it. What it is, for a visitor, is a real neighbourhood with the single best view in the city, prices a fraction of the beach strip, and a texture of daily life that the hotels down below have to import. You wake to the whole South Zone spread out under Dois Irmãos, you buy your bread from a bakery where they learn your order, and you are a ten-minute descent from the sand at Leblon.

The comparison people really want is Vidigal against the postcard neighbourhoods, so here it is side by side. We go deeper in the dedicated Vidigal versus Copacabana and Ipanema piece and in the broader where-to-stay overview, but the shape of it is this.

The trade-off is real and we will not pretend otherwise. Vidigal is a hill, a steep one, and getting to the top means a moto-taxi or a van rather than a stroll. If your idea of a holiday is rolling out of bed straight onto the sand with zero friction, book Ipanema. But if you want a genuine sense of the city, more room, a kitchen, a terrace, and a view you will still be describing to people years later, come up. Most guests who try the hill do not go back to a beach hotel. The apartment we run is one option among several up here; see the condo for what a top-of-Vidigal base actually looks like.

Getting around: metro, Jaé, Uber and the moto-taxi

Rio's public transport is better than its reputation and its traffic is worse. The single best tool in your kit is the metro, MetroRio, which is clean, safe, air-conditioned and cheap, and which links Copacabana, Ipanema, Botafogo, the Centro and Maracanã on a straightforward set of lines. A single ride is R$7.90 flat regardless of distance. Since 2026 the city has moved to the Jaé card as the standard fare medium across metro, bus, BRT and light rail, though contactless bank cards also work at the metro turnstiles now, which is the path of least resistance for a visitor. Buy a Jaé at a station if you plan to use buses; tap your phone or card if you are sticking to the metro. Our getting-around guide from Vidigal has the station-by-station detail.

For everything the metro does not reach, use Uber. It is cheap, ubiquitous, and it removes the two classic taxi problems at a stroke: the price is agreed before you get in, and there is no negotiation and no meter-fiddling. A hop across the Zona Sul runs roughly R$15 to R$35. Rio's taxis are fine and metered, but Uber is simpler and usually cheaper, and it is the default for cariocas and visitors alike. Avoid driving yourself. A rental car in Rio buys you nothing but stress, parking fees and unfamiliar road manners; the only time to rent is for a specific out-of-town day trip, and even then a driver or a tour is often the calmer choice.

The last hundred metres up any Rio hillside belong to the moto-taxi, and Vidigal runs on them. These are motorbike riders, organised at the base of the hill, who ferry residents and their shopping up the single steep main road for a few reais. They are woven into the fabric of the place, they know every door, and they are the fastest and most sensible way up and down with anything more than an empty daypack. Hold on, keep your knees in, greet your rider, and enjoy one of the small genuine thrills of staying up here. Buses exist and are cheap, but as a visitor you will rarely need them beyond the odd specific route, and the metro-plus-Uber-plus-moto combination covers almost everything.

There are a handful of things you came to Rio to see, and they are worth seeing, cliché be damned. The skill is in doing them well rather than doing them at all. Here is the checklist and, more usefully, the timing and the tactics that separate a good visit from a queued, clouded, disappointing one.

Christ the Redeemer. The statue stands 700 metres up on Corcovado, arms wide over the city, and it delivers exactly the view the photos promise, on a clear day. That last clause is everything. Corcovado attracts cloud, and a foggy summit means you paid to stand next to a statue you can barely see, looking at grey. Go early, go on a clear morning, and keep the plan flexible so you can move it to whichever day the sky cooperates. Reach the top by the Corcovado cog train, a charming rack railway that climbs through the forest for around R$130 return including platform access, or by official van from Paineiras. Book a timed slot ahead in high season. From Vidigal the approach is quick and we lay it out in the Christ from Vidigal guide.

Sugarloaf. If you only have the appetite for one mountain, this is the one we send people up, because the view is arguably better than Corcovado's and the cloud risk is lower. A two-stage cable car, the bondinho, climbs from Urca first to Morro da Urca and then to the Sugarloaf summit, with the whole of Guanabara Bay, the beaches and Christ himself laid out around you. Round trip is about R$170. Go for the last light: ride up in the late afternoon, watch the sun drop and the city switch its lights on, and come down in the dark. It is the best-value ninety minutes in Rio. Full detail in the Sugarloaf cable car guide.

Maracanã. Brazil is football, and the Maracanã is its cathedral. If there is a match on while you are here, especially a Flamengo or Fluminense game, go. The noise, the flags, the drums and the sheer devotion are worth more than any museum. Buy through the official channel or a reputable operator, sit in a covered section, and travel by metro straight to the stadium. If there is no match, the guided stadium tour, around R$75 to R$94, walks you through the changing rooms, the pitch-side and the history, and is a solid morning. We cover both the match and the tour in the Maracanã guide.

Lapa and the Selarón Steps. Lapa is the old bohemian quarter downtown, arches and samba bars and a street party that spills across the whole neighbourhood on Friday and Saturday nights. A short climb away, the Escadaria Selarón, the tiled steps the artist Jorge Selarón spent decades covering in ceramic from around the world, is one of the most photographed spots in Rio and free to visit. See the steps by day, when the light is good and the crowds thinner, and take on Lapa by night, with your phone tucked away and your wits about you, because the nightlife and the pickpockets keep the same hours. The Lapa and Selarón guide has the timing and the safety detail.

Beyond the big four, the greatest hits keep going: the Botanical Garden with its avenue of imperial palms, the bohemian hill neighbourhood of Santa Teresa reached by the little yellow tram, the Museum of Tomorrow's swooping architecture at the revived port, and the Tijuca forest, the vast urban rainforest that Corcovado sits inside. You cannot do all of it in one trip and you should not try. Pick the icons that matter to you, do them properly, and leave room to sit still.

The visitors who love Rio are not the ones who saw everything. They are the ones who saw four things well and spent the fifth afternoon doing nothing on a terrace, watching the light change on the water. — what ten years of guests have taught us

The beaches, ranked by what you want from them

Rio's beaches are not interchangeable, and locals treat them almost like different rooms of the same house. Copacabana is the grand public square, all ages and classes, footvolley and vendors and the old and the young; it is a spectacle more than a swim. Ipanema is the beautiful, self-aware one, divided into postos (numbered lifeguard stations) that each draw a different crowd, from the family end to the famously gay-friendly stretch by Posto 9 with its rainbow flags. Leblon, at Ipanema's western end, is calmer, wealthier and better for families, with a dedicated Baixo Bebê corner for small children.

Our own stretch is quieter than any of those. Below Vidigal, past the end of Leblon, the coast turns toward São Conrado and a small local beach sits almost at the foot of the hill; Vidigal beach is a working carioca beach rather than a tourist one, and it is a two-minute descent away. For the classic sweep, the walk from the base of Vidigal along the shore into Leblon and Ipanema is one of the best free things you can do here, and we map it in the beaches walk guide. If you want the wilder, emptier sands out west and the postcard coves, the best-beaches roundup ranks the lot.

How to actually do a Rio beach, since it has its own rules. Rent a chair and umbrella from the vendor who runs your patch of sand rather than buying your own; it is a few reais and it comes with someone who will fetch you cold drinks all afternoon. Take almost nothing with you: enough cash for the vendor, your phone, and that is it, because the beachfront is exactly where opportunist theft happens and the less you bring, the less you can lose. Drink the iced mate and eat the Globo biscuits from the walking vendors; it is the taste of a Rio afternoon. And note the flags, because the Atlantic here has real currents and the lifeguards are not decorative.

Food, drink and the rhythm of a carioca day

Eating in Rio is cheaper and better than newcomers expect, and it has a shape worth learning. The day starts at the padaria, the corner bakery, with a small strong coffee and a toasted buttered roll for pocket change. Lunch is the big meal, eaten out, usually at a comida a quilo buffet where you build a plate and pay by its weight, or a prato feito, the plate of the day with rice, beans, a protein and salad. Evening is for the botequim, the plain corner bar with plastic tables on the pavement, where you drink cold chopp and graze on fried snacks for hours. Saturday is for feijoada, the black-bean-and-pork stew that eats the whole afternoon.

The dishes to try, briefly: feijoada on a Saturday, the national ritual; picanha, the prized cut of beef, either as a simple grilled plate or the full all-you-can-eat rodízio; moqueca, the coconut-and-palm-oil seafood stew served in a clay pot; açaí, which in Rio is a thick frozen purple bowl eaten with a spoon, not a smoothie, and best straight off the beach; and the endless small fried things, the coxinha and the bolinho de bacalhau and the pastel, that fuel a night at the bar. To drink, the caipirinha of course, made with the sugarcane spirit cachaça, plus fresh fruit juices taken seriously and the ever-present cold beer. The full canon, with prices and the how of eating each thing, is in the carioca food guide.

The move that transforms the food side of a trip is having a kitchen. Ten minutes downhill from Vidigal, the Leblon street market on Rua Cupertino Durão sets up on Thursday mornings with fish landed that morning, tropical fruit for a few reais a bag, and produce that costs a fortune abroad. A whole fish, cleaned while you wait, plus coconut milk and lime and coriander, becomes a moqueca on the terrace for less than the price of one plate in a restaurant. Alternate: eat out for the things that are hard to make, the rodízio and the Saturday feijoada, and cook the brilliant cheap raw materials the rest of the time.

Nightlife, from the samba of Lapa to the hill

Rio goes out late and goes out often, and the night has as many registers as the day. The grandest is Lapa, downtown, where on a Friday or Saturday the streets under the old aqueduct arches fill with samba clubs, live bands, street sellers and thousands of people, and the party is as much on the pavement as inside any venue. It is loud, joyful, cheap and a little chaotic, and it is where you go for live Brazilian music and dancing. It is also where phones vanish, so take a little cash, leave the watch at home, and keep your wits about you; we treat Lapa's balance of fun and caution in the Lapa nightlife guide.

Ipanema and Leblon offer the polished end: cocktail bars, buzzing corners like the bars around Rua Farme de Amoedo, and terraces that run late. Botafogo has become the young, cool, informal scene, with craft beer and a student energy. And up on our own hill, Vidigal has a nightlife of its own that most visitors never find, from sunset drinks at the rooftop bars with the whole coast at your feet to the community baile funk parties that run very late and very loud when they happen. The hill's bars and the etiquette of the baile get their own treatment in the Vidigal nightlife guide. Rio is also one of the most openly welcoming cities in Latin America for LGBTQ travellers, with a long-established scene we cover in the LGBTQ Rio guide.

Whatever register you choose, the sensible pattern is the same: pre-drink somewhere local and cheap, take an Uber to and from the night rather than walking home alone across quiet neighbourhoods at three in the morning, carry only what you are prepared to lose, and let the evening run long. Cariocas do not rush a night out any more than they rush a lunch. The last chopp is never really the last one.

Day trips worth leaving the city for

Rio rewards a day or two spent outside it, and the coast and mountains on either side are some of the most beautiful in Brazil. The classic run east is to the beach towns of the Costa Verde: Búzios, a chic peninsula of beaches a couple of hours up the coast, and, in the other direction, the colonial town of Paraty and the island of Ilha Grande, a car-free paradise of forest and beaches reached by boat. West and inland, the mountain town of Petrópolis, the old imperial summer capital, offers cool air, a palace and a change of pace within a couple of hours' drive.

Closer in, you do not even have to leave the municipality for wild nature. The Tijuca National Park, the largest urban rainforest in the world, sits right in the middle of the city, with waterfalls, trails and viewpoints reachable in under an hour; we cover it in the Tijuca guide. And the finest short hike in the city starts on our own doorstep: the Dois Irmãos trail climbs from the top of Vidigal to a summit with a 360-degree view over the entire South Zone, and it is a manageable morning rather than an expedition. For the full menu of what is worth the drive or the boat, the day-trips guide ranks them by effort and reward.

The honest advice on day trips: pick one, at most two, for a week-long trip, and do not let them cannibalise your time in Rio itself. Búzios and Ilha Grande in particular deserve an overnight rather than a rushed round trip, because the travel time eats a day-trip alive. If your holiday is short, spend it in the city and save the coast for a return. If you have ten days or more, one overnight on the Costa Verde is a genuine highlight.

Safety, told straight

Let us handle this honestly, because it is the question every first-timer arrives with and most guides answer badly, either waving it away or leaning into fear. Rio has real crime, like every big city, and it also has millions of tourists who visit every year without incident. The truth is in the middle and it is manageable. The full picture is in our is-Rio-safe guide; here is the working version.

Tourist crime in Rio is overwhelmingly opportunist property theft, not violence against visitors, and it concentrates exactly where tourists concentrate with their guard down: the Copacabana and Ipanema beachfronts, Lapa late at night, and crowded buses. The pattern is a snatched phone, a bag left on the sand, a wallet in a back pocket in a crowd. The defence is boringly effective: take almost nothing to the beach, keep your phone out of sight when you walk, do not wear the expensive watch or the gold chain, use Uber after dark instead of walking home alone, and stay alert in crowds and at night in Lapa. Do that and your odds are very good.

Now the part that surprises people. Inside Vidigal, theft against a guest is essentially unheard of. In years of hosting on this hillside, we have not had a guest's belongings taken, and that is not luck, it is structure. A favela like Vidigal runs on relationships rather than paperwork, and everyone is known. Once people know whose apartment you are staying in, you are an accounted-for guest rather than an anonymous mark, and reputation is the local currency in a way that keeps the hill calmer for a visitor's things than the famous beach neighbourhoods below. This is a community-accountability effect, not a policing one, and it is real. We lay out the mechanism in full in the is-Vidigal-safe guide.

Two clarifications so this lands correctly. First, this is not a claim that no crime ever happens anywhere; it is a claim that a guest's day-to-day risk of petty theft is lower on the hill than on Avenida Atlântica, which is simply true. Second, ordinary Rio street-smarts still apply everywhere, on the hill and off it, and the same do-not-flash-the-phone habits are just good sense wherever you are in the city. Solo travellers, and women travelling alone in particular, do very well here with the normal precautions; we wrote a dedicated solo female travel guide for exactly that. The one piece of advice that trumps all others: listen to locals. If the people who live somewhere change their behaviour, change yours, without stopping to ask why.

A first trip, in the order we would do it

Pull it together and a first week has a natural shape. You do not need to follow this to the hour, and a rigid itinerary is the enemy of a good Rio trip, but this is the flow we would give a friend arriving for seven days, and it slots the weather-dependent things where they belong. For a tighter three-day version built around the hill, we have the three-days-in-Rio itinerary.

Day one. Land, settle, do not overreach. A bakery breakfast, a slow walk down to Leblon beach, a first swim, an early botequim dinner near your base, and an early night to shed the flight. Watch the sunset from your terrace or the sand and let the city arrive gradually.

Day two. Do a mountain while you have energy and, ideally, a clear sky. If the morning is bright, go up Corcovado to Christ early before the cloud builds; if it is hazy, save it and hit the beach instead. Keep the afternoon loose and eat a long per-kilo lunch.

Day three. Sugarloaf at the end of the day, timed for sunset and the lights coming on, with the daytime spent on Ipanema and a wander through its streets and shops. This is the classic Rio day and it is worth clearing the schedule for.

Day four. Culture and the city's other faces: the Selarón Steps and Santa Teresa by day, or the Botanical Garden, or the Museum of Tomorrow at the port. Keep the evening for Lapa if it is a Friday or Saturday, phone tucked away.

Day five. A hike or a day trip. The Dois Irmãos trail from the top of the hill for a working morning and the best view in the city, or a full day out to the Costa Verde if you have the appetite and the time.

Days six and seven. Slow down. This is when Rio actually gives itself to you: your own padaria, your own beach spot, a match at the Maracanã if the fixtures line up, a Saturday feijoada that eats the afternoon, and an evening of doing nothing on the terrace watching the light go. The best day of the trip is almost always the one with nothing planned.

That is Rio, laid out from the one vantage point that sees the whole of it at once. Come in a shoulder month, sort the visa early, base yourself in the Zona Sul and lean toward the hill, move by metro and Uber and moto-taxi, see the four icons well and leave room to sit still, eat where the locals eat, and carry ordinary street-smarts without carrying fear. Do that and you will not just tick the postcard. You will land like someone who already knows the city, and you will leave already planning the way back.