A Slice of Sugar Loaf

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Day 9-14th September

Well after 2 days of doing sweet f all, we were bright eyed and ready to head back out. Our time in Rio is nearly at an end and we had to start organising our next stop as we leave on Thursday. We have decided to head south to Foz Do Iguaçu to see the Iguazu Falls. We have heard a lot about how amazing they are and the wildlife is also meant to be pretty spectacular, excellent opportunity to use our lovely SLR! It’s approx 1500km from Rio but the flights are a little out of our financial reach so the bus it is! We’d been on the old internet to find out how to get there and decided that we’d use a company called Pluma, however we could not for the life of us work out how to buy tickets on the website as the buying online bit confused the heck out of us (being in Portuguese). So we had a choice, either turn up on Thursday and buy the tickets, or try and sort it out early. We could see on the website that there was only 1 bus a day that left at a decent time and the seats were selling fairly rapidly so we decided to not risk it and get it sorted as soon as possible.

So off we headed to the Rodoviária Novo Rio, that’s the bus station, to try and sort it out. I’m getting a bit more confident with the Portuguese so I was determined to stop being so lame and try and buy the tickets in Portuguese. I have to say, I didn’t do too badly!! The great thing about this city is that they really appreciate any attempt to speak the language, no matter how rubbish it is. We found the booth for Pluma and in my best Portuguese I said, ‘Quero duas passegem para Foz Do Iguaçu por Quinta-feira’, and the lady understood me! Yay! I’m pretty sure my accent and pronunciation and possibly word order was rubbish but she got what I was trying to say which is the important bit. The rest we managed on both sides by lots of hand gestures and smiling and soon enough we were the proud owners of two buses tickets to Foz Do Iguaçu, leaving on Thursday at 13.30, result!

The organising bit of our day out of the way we decided to head on over to Urca and go to the Sugar Loaf. You cannot come to Rio and not see this thing, it dominates the cityscape and being one of the most famous landmarks in Rio, it’d be rude not to go (!). To get to the top of the Sugar Loaf (Pão de Açúcar), you have to take a series of cable cars, first of all to Urca Mountain and then a second one to the Sugar Loaf. So we bought our tickets which would take us right to the top and hopped into the first cable car. It was so cool! It was amazing seeing Rio appear before us the higher we got, 3 minutes later (yes it’s pretty quick!), we were on Urca Mountain.
Urca Mountain has a pretty large flat top and it there are several shops and a bar up there. We’d been told that you could also take a short helicopter ride from Urca up to the Christ the Redeemer and back again for about R$40 each, we thought this sounded wicked and were fully prepared to take our first helicopter ride. However when we got there we discovered it was a huge R$150 each, for a 7 minute ride, and it was a 3 person minimum. This was way more than we could possibly afford, and as there were only 2 of us, it was not meant to be. We were pretty disappointed; however we were quickly distracted as we saw a monkey! And then a lizard! Ellory fired off about a million photos and we forgot our disappointment. We then decided to sit down and have a drink as it was absolutely boiling and this turned out to be a great idea as the monkeys came to investigate, and nearly swiped my drink! Cheeky sods. However it made for some great photos and it was wicked just sitting there having a cool drink while the monkeys climbed all over the chairs and tables, looking out over Rio with the Sugar Loaf right in front of us.

About an hour later we decided to head up to the Pão de Açúcar itself and caught the second cable car. This was incredible, Pão de Açúcar is much higher than Urca and the views were amazing! We couldn’t believe how far we could see, the whole of Rio de Janeiro spread out below us with Christo de Redentor far in the distance ahead of us, Copacabana and Ipanema to the left and the favelas covering the sides of the mountains. Fantastic. We wandered around the top of the Sugar Loaf, taking photos of the views from all sides and just generally taking it all in.

Later on, I noticed that there was a sort of nature trail leading down the side of the mountain and we went off to have a look. We both got a bit over-excited with how beautiful it was and ended up taking hundreds of pictures of bamboo, flowers and anything else that we liked, Ellory filled the memory card on the SLR! I had the old ‘point and shoot’ with me as well so there was no fighting over the camera. As we walked back up, we saw more monkeys, and along with everyone else, we sat there for ages just watching them jumping around, having monkey bundles and once again, taking lots of photos of the little critters!

By this time, the sun was starting to set, and although it wasn’t our intention to stay up there so long (been there for about 4 hours by this point!), we are so glad that we did. I can’t describe how beautiful it was, I’ll just have to let the photos speak for themselves! It was so wonderful and we’re both really glad we were there to see it. We had lots of random chats with people up there too, including a guy who had lived in Rio for 20 years and had never been up the Sugar Loaf before. Think he was glad he’d finally managed it!

Once the sun had disappeared behind the mountain, we decided to head back down ourselves. We were very wary of how long this would take due to our long wait at Christ the Redeemer and were prepared for it. However we were to be pleasantly surprised as two rapid cable cars later we were back on firm ground, we were very pleased!!

We celebrated ones of the best days we’ve had in Rio with a drink on the roof terrace on the hostel and a chat with some of the people we’ve met since we’ve been here. We all then went to the supermarket to get some food for dinner and mindful of our budget, we ended up getting 3 packs of Brazilian supernoodles for the grand total of R$2.70. (It’s what we wanted to eat, alright?!). However when we got back to the hostel, the kitchen was busy so we went up to our room to wait....and promptly fell asleep....and woke up at 9am the next morning.....Fail!

All in all, an excellent day.

Lots of love
Liz xxx

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Comments

[Lolly]

Thank you both so much for keeping the blog going so well, it's the first thing I check for when I turn on the pc. I love the monkeys! Well done Liz with the portugese. Good luck with the next part of the adventure,we're all looking forward to the next instalment,and the photos get better and better too. Loving and missing you. xx