Advertisement
Published: February 24th 2015
Edit Blog Post
Wow, where to begin?! Rio has the nickname ‘the marvelous city’ and it really is incredible. We’d decided to spend about a week here and could’ve easily spent another; it has so much to offer!
Staying with our tour group near Centro Historico we did another self-guided walking tour in the Centre of downtown. Though it was a little eerie walking around the deserted streets of Centro on a weekend. It gave a post-apocalyptic feeling with barely any people around but rubbish everywhere. Nevertheless, we took in the sights and stumbled across a bustling art deco patisserie where we bought Portuguese custard tarts for sustenance 😉 finishing the tour in an old, narrow passageway that would have been appealing enough just to look at, we found a café with live music and enjoyed an hour of samba. The set list must have been a few national favourites as literally everyone but us was out of their chairs dancing and singing in the street – I think they figured out we were tourists at that point!
Our final night on tour was to follow in usual fashion, with a fun buffet dinner! Swapping stories and details with our fellow travellers
and tour guide, we were glad we’d chosen this tour as it really was what we needed at this point of our trip: to give us a break from fulltime organization and to help us see Brazil quickly but effectively. Plus it was really nice to travel with new friends for more than just a couple of days, which had been the case for most of our trip.
The next morning we bid farewell to our tour and headed from Cristo Redentor. After seeing the queues for tickets to get the shuttle buses the day before we were up very early and lucky enough to summit Corcovado before the majority of the crowds. Standing beside Christ the Redeemer on top of Corcovado was a real bucket list experience for us with the mountain rising up and overlooking Rio city and harbour in a spectacular way. After visiting Cristo, we wandered to the gorgeous Escadaria Selarón – a stairway decorated with over 2000 mosaic tiles from around the world.
In the afternoon, we packed our bags and headed towards Ipanema beach and our new home. For the rest of our Rio experience we had booked with Maury, a São
Paulo expat who had moved to Rio to run his own business. We found
Maury through
AirBnB and it turned out to be a very good decision. Maury was wonderfully helpful and his
apartment is about three blocks back from Ipanema beach, right on the metro line and surrounded by bars and restaurants – perfect! We took advantage of our strategic location that afternoon and headed straight for Ipanema beach. On a 40
°C Sunday in a city of 6 million with only two beaches accessible by the metro system it is no surprise that Ipanema was crowded. We have never seen a beach with so many people, umbrellas, chairs and walking salesman ever! The waves and beach are nothing specular but the atmosphere and relief from the extraordinary heat and humidity was excellent.
The next day we headed to the other famous lookout of Rio; Pão de Açúcar, or in English, Sugarloaf. Pão de Açúcar is a rock formation that juts out of the coast line of Rio and is only accessible via rock climbing or a series of cable cars. We chose the less extreme of the two options and headed up the cable cars. It was a
bit cloudy in the morning which gave us a rather biblical view towards the city with Cristo Redentor floating above the clouds in the distance!
That afternoon we headed across the city to meet Barbara Olivi and experience a very different side of Rio – life in the favelas. Poor neighbourhoods, barrios or slums are not unique to Rio and we had seen them from afar in most of the big cities in South America and around the developing world however the favelas of Rio are a little different. The favelas are similar to many cities around the world in that there were shantytowns that were never accepted as part of the city by the government and so never received sewage, electricity or roads like the other residence areas of the city. However, because of the geography of Rio, the favelas developed up the sides of the very steep hills and mountains throughout the city resulting in a huge number of small, isolated favelas around the city rather than large barrios. This means that some favelas are stuck between wealthy established neighbourhoods, some are on the mountainside overlooking the ocean, and others slide up the side of the national
park and overlook the whole city from up high. In the last 20 years the government has been using some very brutal methods to ‘pacify’ the favelas and rid them of the drug lords who have historically had complete control. There are very mixed feelings about the approaches being used to pacify the favelas but it has resulted in some that are stable enough to have volunteers and tourists visit to help out and experience favela life.
Our guide, Barbara, had moved from Italy and set up home in the favela almost 15 years ago. She has since married a local Brazilian and together they have developed the organisation
Il Sorriso Dei Miei Bimbiorg ("the smile of my children"): a series of preschools, daycare and homework centers for the highly disadvantaged children within the favela. Walking the streets, seeing the people, their homes and hearing their stories was heartbreaking. It is a very different experience being in someone’s home and seeing the hardship compared to looking at poverty from a distance. Despite how difficult the favelas are to witness up close and personal, it was also an inspiring experience and a mandatory part of understanding the city of Rio.
The extreme heat
slowed down our last few days in Rio as we visited Jardim Botânico, the Santa Teresa bohemian district and blended in with the locals on Copacabana beach. The botanic gardens are in quite a trendy area of town with lovely cafés nearby and lots of street art decorating the local suburb. Santa Teresa was a lovely area to walk through the hills. Famed as being home to the artsy and alternative community, it’s filled with ornate mansion (some beautifully maintained and others in complete disrepair) and usually has yellow trams running passengers up and down the hills. Unfortunately, there was a fatal accident a few years ago due to poor tracks that are now being upgraded at a pace only acceptable in Latin America. So we settled for a taxi ride up the hill and meandered our way back down towards downtown taking in the antiquated beauty of the buildings and chatting to local artists in cooperative galleries.
Copacabana is famous for good reason: it’s a wide white sandy beach that’s 3km long between two hills (Sugarloaf in the north and a rocky outcrop that hosts the fortress in the south). It was the playground of rich and famous
while Rio was rising in international notoriety however since it became accessible to the masses by the city’s metro system, it began to lose its sheen as drugs, prostitution and theft became regular occurrences. This is when Ipanema took the crown as the preferred beach by many. However Copa is still a nice spot and, as mentioned in a massive city that experiences extreme summer temperatures, it is frequented by thousands of people everyday. We chose to walk the length of the famous beach before hiring a beach umbrella near Posto 1 (Leme) at the northern end to relax, swim and people while – including the beach tennis very popular among locals (especially Italians, according to some of our new friends).
A final dinner with friends from the
Tucan tour group and a catch up with an American girl (whom we met in Bolivia and has relocated there to work on the 2016 Olympics) rounded out a fantastic week in one of the greatest cities we have ever visited. A week was long enough to get a great glimpse of what the city has to offer but we could’ve easily spent another week following up on recommendations. Rio’s appeal lies in its diversity: a breathtaking location, complex cultural and socio-economic history, eclectic ethnic mix and continual international tourism have combined to produce a city that has something for every traveller. A trip to this part of the world is not complete without at least a few days in ‘the marvelous city’!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.097s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 7; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0414s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb