It's half six in the morning and for the fourth consecutive day I've got home at daybreak, again taxi-ing through the city at dawn as sunrise casts soft pinks and oranges across the mountains and misty harbours.
I am back from the Sambodromo where, surely, one of the greatest visual spectacles on earth unfolded in front of us.
Nothing - absolutely nothing - prepares you for the Samba schools astonishing displays of costumes, floats and choreography, and the electrifying atmosphere. And any preconceptions are quickly blown out the water.
14 schools compete for an hour each over two nights, starting at nine and finishing at six the next morning. Each parade is launched with a massive fireworks display.
The scale is unimaginable - the concrete catwalk alone is three quarters of a kilometre long - and tens of thousands of dancers and performers parade to loud, intoxicating samba beats, while nearly a hundred thousand people cheer them on from the stands of the purpose-built stadium, the Sambodromo.
Floats the size of large houses, with animatronics and fountains; spectacular Amazonian women (I think) in feathers and sequins on 8 inch heels, shimmering ahead of their schools; beautiful bronzed men gyrating to the rhythms; bands of musicians, 300 strong, beating drums, and thousands and thousands of choreographed dancers.
The desfile, or parade, is an electrifying and relentless spectacle - it's everything you've seen broadcast around the world but a thousand times more incredible.
There were moments of such overwhelming beauty and wonder that at times I stood with tears in my eyes. Like everything about this city, it is over the top and out of this world - and something to be experienced once in a lifetime.
And now I need some sleep.
(I'm dissappointed with these photographs. My little camera didn't handle the situation very well and the pictures do the event no justice whatsoever).
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