As you may have gathered from my last post (if you made it through to the end!), our time in Rio had got off to a bad start. But we were now in the city of sun, sand, sea, havaianas, bikinis and the Big JC! Things couldn´t stay bad for long, and they didn´t….
Our first proper morning in Rio the sun had come out and we had headed of to visit Christ the Redeemer – a huge statue of Jesus built on a mountain overlooking the city. The statue is lit up at nigh so, providing it is not too cloudy, you can see the statue from miles away day or night. We wanted to see it close up though. Following our fateful bus ride we decided not to join the queue for the train but instead pay a whole 2 pounds more to get a minivan up. The views from the viewpoints were truly stunning – I had never really paid much attention to pictures of Rio before and arrived at our first view point to overlook the city which is on the coast but surrounded by picturesque hills rising from the sea and land each covered in tropical rain-forest. It was an awesome view which made the journey worth while.
We soon headed up to the statue which is absolutely huge, though we can´t tell you much more than that as any tourist information was conspicuously absent at the top. We had to wait a short while to get a proper view, as a large cloud had decided to hover over the mountain. We got a 20 second clearing in which to really appreciate the true scale of the monument, and get a few decent photos too!
Our second day was spent on the Copacabana beach – just has to be done in Rio – with a friend of a friend whom we had agreed to meet as she was in Rio on holiday for a couple of days by herself. Of course, there isn´t much to really talk about as we mainly sat on the beach, got knocked over by a few waves in the sea and did generally very little. Sorry, boring day to report on here! It was a very nice beach though, packed with a wide range of tourists and locals enabling us to stand out completely as the whitest of white people to be found on the entire 4.5km stretch of beach…!
On the Sunday it rained again – that kind of grey, drizzly rain we get in England. We had spent the brighter morning changing hostels once again (we probably spent about 2 whole days in Rio finding and then moving between different place we stayed), but we were at least now staying in a location near to the Copacabana beach in a small, safe neighbourhood. As it was raining, we got a bus to the Ipanema neighbourhood (you know the one ¨Tall and tanned and young and lovely, The girl from Ipanema goes walking…¨ - Frank Sinatra?) to the hippy fair where we wandered the stalls getting very wet and only purchasing another purse (for Clare, not me!). The Ipanema area seemed nice though – we´d come back when it wasn´t raining!
Having spent 4 days moving hotels in Rio we were no longer so bothered about leaving Rio again to go anywhere else before our flights to Salvador a week later, so we spent a large amount of time of the remaining 5 days relaxing and cooling off on Copacabana and Ipanema Beaches. These were pleasant times though really notable for only two incidents. One of these being on Ipanema beach on our last day in Rio where, standing knee deep in the sea I was hit by two huge waves, knocking off my rather expensive prescription sun glasses and washing them away in the strong under-current. I was not best pleased (I´m still without sunglasses, hopefully Specsavers in Auckland will come to my rescue!).
The second incident was one afternoon when we arrived on Copacabana beach, putting our towels down under a sun umbrella. Looking out for someone to watch our belongings whilst we went in the sea, we spotted a guy in an England football shirt 2 metres to our left. Looking closer Clare exclaimed ¨Isn´t that Jordan, from Pucon?¨. ¨Who? No, surely not¨, I replied, not recognising the guy who we had stayed with in a hostel in Pucon over 2 months earlier (and certainly not remembering his name). ¨Jordan?¨, Clare called. Jordan looked up, looking puzzled – how did these random people know his name? ¨Were you in Pucon in Chile in September?¨, Clare asked. Yes, he was, as it slowly appeared to dawn on him that he had actually met us before, for one day two months earlier, at the other end of the continent. It was quite a coincidence, especially as he had been trying to persuade us to come to Brazil when we hadn´t really planned on it at the time….!
The rest of our time in Rio was spent doing a few of the other attractions, standing in supermarket queues (we could now only afford to eat packet noodles!), doing a little bit of window shopping (note the noodles comment!) and drinking Brazil’s famous fruit juices – pretty much any fruit you can think of will be juiced while you wait. We visited the small Saint Theresa district, built on a hill overlooking the city, which was nice for a walk around but nothing special – we soon left to go to the beach! We also spent a morning riding the cable cars to the top of Sugar Loaf mountain where you get and excellent view of the city, including Copacabana Beach and JC, as well as doing a bit of Capuchin spotting!
The final activity to mention in Rio is Clare´s Hang Gliding experience, where she got to run off the top of one of Rio´s mountains within Rio´s Tiguana national park and soar over the forest, coastline and beaches for 15 minutes. I went along to watch her take off, and we were both driven up to the top rather manically in a souped up tin-can with four wheels, no indicators and a suicidal driver. ¨The most dangerous part of the trip is the drive up there¨, the instructor joked to Clare. I was going back down with him too…. As it happens, we both arrived safely back down at the beach (Clare 10 minutes before we made it back by car) and we headed off in a long and stressful taxi-ride back to our hostel in Rio´s awful traffic. We got back and headed off, you guessed it, to the beach!
One final activity I haven´t mentioned is a tour of one of the Favelas in Rio (after a morning spent on the beach, of course), but which Clare will talk about in a separate blog posting. I´ll be back after our flight up north to the coastal Afro-Brazilian city of Salvador…
Tags: Beach, Brazil, Christ te Redeemer, Copacabana, Ipanema, Paragliding, Rio, Sugar Loaf Mountain
