RIO DE JANEIRO (PART 1) INCLUDING CORCOVADO MOUNTAIN AND CHRIST THE REDEEMER STATUE AND COPCABANA BEACH--Wednesday and Thursday, December 18-19, 2013

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Wednesday 18^th-21^st Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Instead of doing an itemized daily itinerary on our stay in Rio, I am going to just write about some of the highlights of what we did, while we were there for the 4 days.

I have gone over the process of disembarking from cruise ships on several blog entries. Basically, it is the same for all cruise lines as they systematically must get all passengers and their luggage off the ship in one morning so that the rooms can be cleaned for the next group of passengers coming aboard that afternoon. Times for each group (early to catch flights, later for people on excursions, very late for people like us, with no time specific activity scheduled) is given to us the night before, but so far the time has never been met. We were given a 9 to 9:15 time frame for leaving and were called to get off the ship about 11:00. We got a porter for our luggage and then went through nothing much of an immigration and customs process. We walked out of the terminal building and queued in an efficiently-run taxi line.

The cab driver we got spoke English and understood that we were interested in what we were driving through, so he gave a commentary as he took us into and through some of the main streets of Rio. We passed several interesting looking churches and buildings on our way to the Apa Hotel. The small hotel is located about 2 blocks from the beach in the Copacabana Beach area.

We settled into our room with its extremely narrow inside hall and foot high step up into the bathroom and watched a couple of bananaquits building a nest in a tree just outside our window. Valerie walked across the street and brought back some drinks and some food for lunch and then we got ready to take the first of 3 scheduled tours we had booked from home.

The tour, starting at 2:00, was for a look at Christ the Redeemer statue and a climb to the top of the mountain it is on. The iconic statue of Rio sits on an outcropping of rock at the peak of Corcovado Mountain in the Tijuca Forest National Park. The sprayed on soapstone covered, concrete statue was built between 1922-31 and is 98 feet tall, not including its 26 foot pedestal, and its arms stretch 92 feet wide.

The bus drove along the Copacabana and Ipanema beaches with a couple of interesting sand art pieces and stopped to pick up more tourists at the fancy hotels. The bus circled a nearby lagoon with sports venues around it and a huge floating Christmas tree and then traveled through several neighborhoods, a tunnel, and a variety of shopping districts.

We arrived at the Cosme Velho cog rail station to board the tram to begin the 20 minute raise through the rain forest (like going through a forest of your house plants on steroids) up the mountain to the end of the line. Valerie took some pictures of the views below out of the tram windows, but it was so foggy they are not very sharp. At the last station, we got off, and took an elevator up to the next level. From there, we rode escalators to the plaza in the front of the statue. Unfortunately, when we got to the top, there was so much fog or low clouds that we could only see his outline towering above us and absolutely nothing of the stunning view of the city and bay below. Sigh!!!

Valerie took pictures anyway and we soon got out of the very brisk (blow you off the mountaintop strength) wind by ducking in back of the statue into a very tiny chapel (you couldn’t take pictures there). On that backside were also two busts noting the visits of two Popes.

With no hope that the weather conditions would clear, we reversed our route going first down the steps, as the down escalator was not working, and then down the elevator to the tram station. There we killed time by checking out a small souvenir booth and wondered how anyone could take a beautiful statue and make it so tacky by casting and then covering it in purple and also green velvet flocking. We finally joined the tour group on the tram and made it back to street level where we moved to a small plaza with an interesting statue and an old tram car.

There we were told that the bus would not pick us up for another 20 minutes or so. I opened up my cane chair and sat myself down. Valerie looked around and spotted a small store on the corner and bought some drinks and some more Kleenex for her poor nose (dust from the horse show in Argentina set off her allergies). We still had more time to wait, so Valerie decided to explore a church across the street. We could see a nativity scene set up in the space against the fence. She came back and showed me the picture she took of a cat sleeping in the empty manager. The bus finally came and stopped hotel by hotel dropping people off until we were back to the Apa Hotel.

As we exited the bus we were told that the next day's tour was cancelled either due to the same fog or landslides--we were given both reasons for keeping the tour from operating. The next morning it was raining on and off, so we decided to chill for the day. The only plug we could find in the room was high on the wall for the TV and we needed to recharge our computers. So, we brought over the large duck taped-up suitcase and put my chair cane on top of it to allow the AC adapter to sit on the seat to keep the weight from pulling out the plug. It worked fine, but looked really weird.

We did walk the two blocks to the Copacabana Beach to stick our feet in the water. Pretty beach and setting. They were setting up for their big bash on New Year’s Eve when 1000's crowd onto this beach. On the way, we had lunch at a restaurant. We split a chicken that they didn't allow to grow up as it was the size of a squab and the plate came with a pile of plain white rice and cooked sliced potatoes. No veggies at all. Lunch cost $35 for the 2 of us to split one entre--food here is not cheap. We did take some of the meal back to the hotel to have for dinner.

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