What grandparents do in Rio de Janeiro

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The Maracana

Ana and I arrived in Rio having begun the journey without pause 30 hours before. We left Lisbon on the overnight train to Madrid, said goodbye to Rachel (who we will see in a few weeks in Buenos Aires) and went straight to the airport to check in for our flight. Then flew to Brazil. Iberian air is a bit of a misery. I do not want to use this blog as an endorsement or name and shame forum but this flight was funny. We are absolutely convinced that after the first meal, the captain turned on the seatbelts sign just so the cabin crew could lounge around for 4 hours! During those 4 hours, there was not an iota of turbulence. People were sent back to their seats despite wanting to go to the toilet, but after the first hour we all got a bit savvy and just ignored the cabin crew. They returned us the favour.

We were excited about returning to South America and to be going to a new place. Brazil is the second most expensive country (after Chile apparently) in South America for travellers (the drawback of having a stable economy I guess) and we had only scheduled ten days in Rio. The plan was simply to bum on the beach and maybe take a few day trips around Rio; getting a feel for Brazil but hardly anything comprehensive.

So we arrive exhausted at ten o'clock at night and get shown to around our hostel, Mellow Yellow. It is a cool place with an excellent bar and fun staff. A bit dirty in a Brazilian kind of way and overpriced, but that is simply due to being 150m from Copacobana beach! We were not too fussed as we were not planning on spending too much time in the hostel. Boy were we delluded. We wake up on the first day and hit the beach; it was a Sunday and Sundays in Rio are all about the beach. The whole city goes to the beach. It is incredible walking along this three mile, white sand beach with lush green hills towering out from the apartment highrises (one atopped with the famous Christ statue), watching tens of thousands of people tanning.

The beach culture in Rio is charming. There were many children running about (all the girls in string bikinis no matter what age), very few people in the water (some people comically bought jugs so they could pour sea water on themselves while only getting in up to the ankles) and, of course, very little bathing costumes. The men were in all shapes and sizes but mostly tanned and athletic and nearly all played football in the shallows. The Brazilian men take good care of themselves and I stood out both because of my pale white skin and my well-developed beer belly. The women also came in all shapes and sizes but that did not stop them from wearing the smallest possible bikini that could physically hold them in. It is somewhat touching to see an older, very large woman wandering aroung in a g-string.

The Brazilian morality regarding nudity is interesting. There is about a sum total of one-square inch of the female anatomy that is not allowed to be exposed but that one-inch is guarded incredibly jealously by bits of string and the occasional piece of fabric. After Spain and Portugal, the lack of nipples was surprising and sexily refreshing.

We strolled the length of Copacobana absorbing the scenery and people, relishing the differences, and then hit a hippie market near Ipanema beach (the upstart beach that is supplanting Copacobana as the beach to be at). After that we wandered back along the busy streets, smelling roasted chicken, because we had a date. Our hostel was taking (at a very healthy profit) a group of us to the Macaranã, a stadium with 120,000 capacity, to watch Flamengo play Gremio. Flamengo is the Rio football team with the largest number of supporters (and claims to have the largest number of members of any football club in the world), so we were admist about 74 000 Flamengo fans, and about 1 000 (if that, it seemed a lot less from where we were standing) Gremio fans. The atmosphere was amazing! We got there about an hour before kick-off and the crowd was already getting warmed up 45 minutes before the game! And when I mean warmed up, I mean that the crowd were about as excited as the people get in Bay 13 at the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) at the Aussie football grandfinal!

No one sits at the game. From an hour before it started (which was when the attached video was taken) people are jumping up and down, screaming, singing, lighting flares, throwing toilet paper but all in buena onda. This is an Argentina phrase meaning easy-going or friendly. We never felt like there was going to be a fight although the Gremio fans were hundreds of metres from us. The seats are filthy because no one sits them; their sole purpose is to give you extra height to see over the people in front of you standing in their chairs. The football was not that great quality-wise, but we were there for the atmosphere and that was delivered in deliriously chaotic spades.

We got back about 9:30 exhausted and retired to our double room to enjoy the bed as the next day our self-indulgence was up and we were moving back into dorms. The next day we woke up, enjoyed our wonderful free breakfast of fresh fruit and moved into our dorm room. There we met two Aussie girls, Justine and Alex, just getting up (a Mellow Yellow tradition appears to be never get up before noon). It was Justine's birthday and they had decided to catch a cab up to Concorvado, the hill named Hunchback after its shape and is atopped by the beautiful white Christ the Redeemer statue that appears to be about to swan dive off the hill.

The views from up there were incredible, revealing the beauty of Rio. The sea wasking up on white sand beaches meets constant ugly apartment blocks and highrises only to be interrupted by clear blue lakes or the amazingly verdant hills rising too steep for even favelas to totally cover them up. Even though it was a clear day, cloud clings to the tall hills, making our view disappear and reappear at a moments notice, as did the enormous statue behind us.

On this little trip we became friends with Alex and Justine and this friendship affected the rest of our time in Rio. When we got back to the hostel we met some more people they had met in Buenos Aires: two Aussies (Lucas and Luke), two Irish (Eamon and Mark) and one poor pom (Rob). They were great people and made our trip a lot of fun.

Another night in the bar drinking and learning card games (Twenty-Wan not Twenty-One, an Irish game apparently but lots of fun) lead to Tuesday. Tuesday it started raining. When it rains in Rio there is very little to do as the whole town is geared towards outdoor activities. Even the biggest club scene is a street party. It rained for the next three days. Hard.

Tuesday we spent watching videos and drinking in the bar playing more card games. It was fun to have some time out but we only had ten days in Rio and were hoping to see more of it. In some ways we were lucky as we had been thinking of taking three days to Ilha Grande, a tropical paradise some hours from Rio, and some people we met went during this time and were miserable. If there was nothing to do in Rio, there was even less to do in Ilha Grande.

All the tours were cancelled but there is one thing I wanted to talk about. There are many organised favela tours that are really expensive to go on. They are so expensive to protect the tourists; the favelas are not just slums but home to organised crime and dangerous gangs. The people who went on the tours said they were great and that money goes to day care centres in the favelas. But we had seen far greater poverty in India and I hated the idea that people had become so poor that rich tourists have to pay lots of money to go and look at them. An ultimate irony in many ways.

Wednesday, after more rain and videos, we finally cracked and decided to play beach football in the rain. It was great fun as we took on a group of Americans and Swedes who took us apart completely. While it was an absolute blast playing football at night, under floodlights, in the pouring rain on Copacobana beach I was grateful that only crazy gringos were doing so as our spectacle was shameful. The girls happily drank wine and chilled out at one of the cafés lining the beach, laughing at our antics. When we finally tired out (or stopped playing as I was so unfit that I got tired after three minutes but manfully kept ploughing slowly up and down the field) the waitress of the café grabbed the ball and demonstrated some skills so lamentably beyond us that I felt like crying until she screwed up and accidentally kicked the ball at Alex's head. All's well as ends well.

On Thursday the only thing we did of interest was to go to lunch at an all you can eat Brazilian restaurant, or churrascarias (?). We unfortunately went too down market for well cooked meat but got to sample to our heart's content a lot of local foods and have the pleasure of meat skillfully carved next to our ears with huge, very sharp knives. No sudden movements allowed. More bar to top the evening off.

Finally on Friday the sun came out and woe betide us. Justine, Ana, Eamon and I headed out to Ipanema beach where we spent a wonderful afternoon sunbathing, body surfing and watching the highly entertaining female surf competition. The photo shoot was great. Unfortunately Ana and I got so completely sunburnt that I am still peeling today, two weeks later. We were so sunburnt we could not sit back in chairs, let alone accompany everyone to the Lapa street party. This was lucky in one sense as it started pouring down with rain the moment everyone arrived there and they all got stuck in one bar.

Little else but beach and bar held our attention for the few days we had left except for two notable exceptions. On Saturday we headed in to the center of town to explore. Apart from the Saara, a huge street market selling everything from flip-flops to mobile phones, the center of town was abandoned for the beaches. It was somewhat eerie. Nearly all the colonial buildings have been destroyed and replaced with highrises and none of the museums were calling us so we caught a tram to Santa Tereza, a hillside neighbourhood of some repute. The tram, when we saw it, was hilarious. It looked like a toy train that you can ride around in in amusement parks. The controls consisted of two wheels. There was nothing to hold you in, which scared me at some point when I looked down and saw that down was a good 20m to heavy traffic on the street below. Also, paying seemed to be optional as people run and jump on, holding onto the sides until they are rudely knocked off by overhanging vegetation. The views were fantastic and the old dilapidated houses charming; the neighbourhood used to house the bohemian intellectuals and still has a wonderful feel to it.

To top our afternoon off we had an amazing Brazilian lunch; we were not that hungry so we ordered for one and still could not finish the meal off, which consisted of bean stew (Brazilians love their beans), spiced meat, yam chips and some weird but tasty flour. A great day that we finished off with more caiparinhas at the bar back at Mellow Yellow.

Our Sunday afternoon found us trawling Copacobana beach, swimming and laughing at the US beach football team. These guys were fit, enthusiastic and committed. They loved their tactics and group huddle but for some reason did not like to score. We saw them practice for over an hour with a forty minute scratch match and they did not score one single goal the entire time! Even though they would have outrun us completely, I reckon we could have beaten them by simply taking pot shots from the other side of the field! God it was hilarious.

Back at the bar, our hostel treated us to a Capoeira show which was is the Brazilian dancing, non-contact martial art. It was a school based in a favela that teaches kids as an opportunity to get out of the favela. It was amazing watching them, their leaps and timing were outstanding. The show started off with some gratuitous bum-wiggling by some lovely ladies that had the gents mesmerised but then turned ugly when audience participation was required. They made a lot of people (Ana and Rob were the only people on our table who clung grimly to the corner and avoided dancing) get up and spar, pushing to do moves that were well beyond. I was wearing quite tight pants which was a mistake, especially when I tried to stand on my head and kick at the same time. When Eamon was called up he gave his wallet and camera to us and then made straight for the door in the smoothest escape I have ever seen. Shame on him as Mark was the best of us.

But the night was far from over: we had a favela funk party ahead of us. This was another overpriced hostel tour but would be something we would have never done by ourselves; we drove for the best part of an hour to this huge club in the middle of a favela. The street it was on had obviously benefitted from the club's presence as it did not look like a favela at all but the surrounding neighbourhood was pretty intense. Once inside, cheesy Brazilian pop mixed with western classics like Sweet Child of Mine dominated the music scene while bodies grinded together in a sweaty mess. I know it was sweaty because the men danced with their shirts off. It was great, but the best was yet to come.

An English lad named Jess (so English, pale skinned, long blonde hair) who we had played football with was dancing with an attractive Brazilian girl when an MC made an announcement in Portuguese. She dragged him to the front of the stage and they were both chosen with about 8 others to come up on stage. It was too late when he realised he was in a dance off against 9 attractive, black, rhythm crazy Brazilians. The women all danced the same dance which consisted entirely of ass-shaking so close to the crowd that the men could grab their g-strings. The guys also just pulled their shirts off to reveal their carved abdomens and then just thrust and massaged their cocks in incredible rhythm. Jess was up. We held our breath...

He was amazing! It was like Napoleon Dynamite! You had to be there! He won the competition just by being different and dancing his arse off with crazy white boy moves. Of course he took his shirt off, shook his arse and did some thrusting just to join in but then actually danced on top of rhythmic swaying and hip-popping. We laughed till we cried. He did so much for the pride of white people all over the planet and so few of us know about it. We apologise for not having any photos, someone else did have video footage which was then shown on an overhead projector screen at the bar a few nights la There were van loads of attractive girls trying to take him home that night but he was too scared to spend the night in the favela. This of course did not stop Mark who somehow, with his Irish brogue and no Portuguese, managed to hitch a ride on a motorbike back to Copacobana the next morning.

So the answer to what grandparents do in Rio: if they are Brazilian they wear microbikinis and hang out at the beach. If they are called Chas and Ana, they get sunburnt and hang out at the hostel bar. I do not think we will ever go back to Rio as it is only a party and beach town. But in no way do we feel we have done Brazil any justice and would love to return to explore the South and inland jungles.

And so back to my spiritual home of Argentina we went...

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Photos

The sea of red and black
And I was wearing blue. Gulp.

A cheap rodizio
Worth every penny

A funky metro station
The walls were molded concrete featuring odd art of distorted female bodies

A beautiful Brazilian lunch in Santa Tereza
And yes, I shaved my head. Sorry afro fans