RIO DE JANEIRO: Hundreds of thousands of revelers flocked to Rio’s elegant city centre on Saturday for the second day of carnival revelry.

Bearded men in drag jostled with grandmothers and young children as drummers beat out intricate samba rhythms accompanying the Cordao de Bola Preta — Rio’s most traditional carnival band.

In the midst of the madness, Norwegian tourist Sjur Andre Midthun, 29, of Oslo stood looking on with his elderly parents, who appeared to be in a pleasant state of shock.

“I think it’s crazy, Brazilians just don’t care,” said Midthun. “There’s only 200,000 people in Oslo, here you got a million partying on the street, you can’t compare this to Norway.”

From Salvador and Recife in the north to the southern metropolitan sprawl of Sao Paulo, Brazilians staged elaborate parades led by dances and massive street parties fueled by bands atop tractor-trailer trucks rumbling slowly through city streets.

Rio’s big carnival action comes on Sunday and Monday nights, when the city’s top 12 samba schools mount 80-minute spectacles at the 88,500-capacity Sambadrome, featuring hundreds of drummers, thousands of dancers and about a dozen over-the-top parade floats.

But until then, street carnival groups — called “blocos” — own Rio’s neighbourhoods. Eighty drummers decked out in pink and green marched their way through the bohemian neighbourhood of Lapa late on Friday.

The madness in the streets has gotten so severe that some blocos have started keeping the time and location of their parades secret, to thin massive crowds.

“Every year, more and more blocos pop up spontaneously, so many that most of the e-mails I receive these days are complaining about how there are too many,” said Rio de Janeiro Mayor Cesar Maia.

For some the craziness is too much, and many well-heeled Rio residents flee before it starts.

Even Maia officially opened the carnival on Tuesday, while hardly anyone was partying, so he could jet to France for vacation.

The Sambadrome competition seems like anarchy, but it is actually a hard-fought competition as each group vies to be declared the year’s champion.

That distinction brings little more than bragging rights, but because a single flaw in costumes, floats or dancing can doom a group’s chance of winning, the parade at times seems tense.

Cordao de Bola Preta expects some 600,000 people to turn out for their parade on Saturday morning, more than the 400,000 who showed up last year.

“In reality, what we do is more like standing than parading, but we are a very democratic band and we always do our best to please the crowd,” said Pedro Ernesto Araujo Marinho, Bola Preta’s vice president.

Sometimes there are so many revelers, it is hard to hear the music, and Marinho concedes that if crowds continue to grow, they might have to do something to stem the tide.

“It was a very serious problem the year before last, when we had 50,000 people in the streets. It made for an interminable parade,” said Joao Regazzi Avelleira, the carnival group’s president.—AP