This missive comes to you from Rio de Janeiro - more specifically the Ipanema Plaza, a mere bellyflop from Ipanema Beach. As the hub of Rio's gay quarter, this stretch of shore is normally full of fabulously attractive young men playing volleyball as their pants struggle to contain their willies. Today, however, it's full of gypsies.

I'm here following Gogol Bordello, everybody's favorite multi-ethnic Balkan punk band, as they weave through Brazil on a South American tour. I write this at 6am. Singer Eugene Hutz is playing acoustic guitar and drinking copious amounts of Caipirinha. Singer and dancer Pamela Racine is giggling and swimming towards the horizon. I'm just doing everything I can not to melt.

continued...

I've been in Brazil for four days now - yesterday I went to see the band play at the Fundição Progresso, which kinda marks the point where London's Brixton Academy meets the youth club in 'Grange Hill'. That said, it's really rather unlike any venue I've ever been to; by day it's a place where the kids from the favelas can come, by night it's a rainbow-painted megavenue. Gogol's set starts at two in the morning. By the time they finish, just after four - with an encore that sees Eugene, violinist Sergey Ryabtsev and accordion player Yuri Lemeshev accompanied by a local gypsy family – the crowd are chanting their name. It lasts long into the night.

Gogol have quite the relationship with Brazil, especially Rio. They've been here three times and on the way back from the Fundichao Progresso Eugene shows me a photo he's just been emailed of him and Brazilian football god Ronaldo that was taken on a Sao Paulo talk show a few days prior (on another football tip, he also tells me he went to school with Andriy Shevchenko, but I digress).

Eugene has lived in Rio for the last three years, and is well-known around town. This means that NME's photoshoot at Arpoador Beach – hosted by our man Danny North in a role that reminded me a little of Sgt Hartman from Full Metal Jacket, only if the metal was, like, Iron Maiden or something - is frequently stopped by locals wanting autographs. I don't speak Portuguese. But spend any amount of time here around Gogol and you'll hear the familiar words 'Gogol' and 'Bordello' segued into sentences containing plenty of other words you won't understand.

I've never been anywhere like Rio. It's beautiful – staggeringly beautiful. But it's violent and scary too. On my first night here, the band took me to a party where the doors were armed by two men with machine guns. Another night I saw a carjacking. But there's a rhythm that flows through the city. You can't go anywhere without hearing music. Or seeing people being better at football than you. Or without everyone being, like, totally buff super-hotties.

Gogol's show aside, the highlight of my trip has been going to the football with Sergey and Yuri. This involved going to see Fluminense vs Atlético-PR at the 100,000 capacity Maracana (Brazil's most famous stadium, and the scene of their loss to Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup final – incidentally, it's estimated that there were 210,000 people there that day). Given that I watch most of my football at Leyton Orient, it really was quite something.

Fluminense are a fascinating club; long considered to be Rio's aristocrats, they had problems with racism in the early part of the 1900s. In fact, in 1914 a 'mulatto' man decided to 'white up' with powder in order to turn out for the team, and for this reason – which I'm hoping is more out of a desire to take the piss out of this questionable incident in their history than to celebrate it – Fluminense fans take bags of flour to games with them and… um 'white up'.

This evening I leave – sunburnt, hungover from too many cubra libres, but happy. It's been an amazing trip, and one I'm very much looking forward to writing up for the magazine in a few weeks' time. For now, though, I'll leave you with some words taken from the mouth of Eugene Hutz: "Rio de Janeiro is a little like the music industry. It isn't safe, and there are bad people everywhere. But once you learn to keep one eye out for trouble, there's nowhere that's more fun..."

Adeus Rio!