Rio de Janeiro -- Day 2

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Rio de Janeiro -- Day 2

The previous day, we had taken a stroll along the Ipanema Beach because our hotel was on the beach.

Though we had read about the beach-culture in Rio, we were still aghast to see the guests of our hotel come to breakfast barefoot, in bikinis and swim-trunks, over which they had draped some flimsy shirts.

This was still OK, but we were not prepared for the sight of the guests walking in through the door, dripping wet in their skimpy swim-wear.

After the breakfast, we had gone to the Ipanema beach and I was absolutely mesmerized by the beauty of the beach. The fine, white sand, the aquamarine-blue sea, a plethora of small hills jutting out of the sea, the bright, azure-blue sky, the craggy islands just in front, the while sails of the sail-boats far out in the sea -- everything together made a pretty picture.

Thousands of people were enjoying this pretty picture – swimming, surfing, jogging or just lying in the sun, tanning themselves.

Perfect waves were pounding the beach foaming at the crust. They were perfect in the sense that they were not frighteningly tall (We have seen such waves at Hawaii and Bali) and they were not small enough to be ignored. They were just the right size for surfing by swimmer and non-swimmers alike.

No wonder the beaches of Rio – Copacabana, Ipanema, Leblon, Leme and a few others, are world-famous and feature in many songs. They are worth making a song and dance about.

So, this day, I suddenly decided to surf at the Ipanema Beach, even though I did not have a swim-suit. (Please note that by ‘surfing’ I do not mean surfboarding or surfing the Internet, but only enjoying the waves.)

When I told Avi that I wanted to surf, he was completely taken aback and I had to put in a lot of effort to persuade him.

Between the two of us, I am the impulsive one while he is the staid one.

So, after breakfast, he donned his swimming-trunks and I wore a drip-dry salwar-kameez and we went to the beach. I felt extremely self-conscious and over-dressed there. This feeling was aggravated by people staring at me.

We spent a very enjoyable half an hour surfing the sea, more so because the water was warm.

Avi thanked me for dragging him to the beach to surf at last. He had immensely enjoyed it.

After that we came back, showered, DRESSED properly and took the bus to the Sugar-loaf Mountain.

Everybody must have seen the photos/videos of this iconic mountain of Rio. If not, I highly recommend watching the James Bond movie ‘Moonraker’ in which there is a fight between James Bond and the ‘Jaws’ on the cable-car.

This cable-car to the summit is actually two cable-cars, one is from the ground to the ‘Morro de Acucar’, the smaller mountain and the second is from the ‘Morro’ to the top, the ‘Pao de Acucar’. These two cable-cars run at 90 degrees to each-other.

As the second cable-car ascended, we saw a rock-climber sticking to the rock far below through the glass panel of the car. He looked just like a colorful lizard for all the world.

You get wonderful and different views of Rio from the top. For example, the red-sand-beach “Leme” is seen from the Sugar-Loaf Mountain but not from “Christ the Redeemer”

We enjoyed this visit more because this being a Monday, the crowds were considerably thin, which makes me think that the local populace is as fond of sight-seeing in Rio as the tourists who flock it.

Avi had a sandwich at the top and I had a Coke.

The table which we sat at, had a clear plastic mug with a little beer at the bottom, left by someone; and I saw a honey-bee inside it, merrily drinking the beer. Every now and then she would dip her proboscis (I looked up this word.) in the liquid, take tiny sips of the beer with the delicacy of a connoisseur and pause with an ecstatic expression on her face. Sometimes she would rub her legs in enraptured bliss.

Then she flew away (rather drunkenly, I believe. Good thing that bees do not have traffic-police, or do they?) and brought back four of her friends who proceeded to taste the contents of the mug.

I wonder what sort of honey they will be making and if this ‘beer-flavored’ honey would be intoxicating.

I wanted to buy some T-shirts for my grand-daughters so we descended to the ground via the cable-cars and decided to walk to the nearest mall.

This was a big mistake. The ‘nearest’ mall turned out to be more than a mile away and walking in the hot sun made me quite peevish.

Anyway, we did reach the mall and bought the lovely T-shirts with pictures of Rio on them.

Then we took a taxi to the famous jewelers ‘H. Stern’.

Normally, I do not go jewelry-hunting in strange cities but my daughter, who had visited Rio before me, was totally sold upon the ‘Imperial Topaz’ stones that she had seen at ‘H. Stern’, and my other son-in-law had urged me to visit ‘Amsterdam Sauer’.

Many precious and semi-precious gemstones are mined in Brazil.

We could not afford ‘Imperial Topaz’, which is costlier than diamonds, but we could afford to buy the Citrines. I found that the colors were almost identical and we just could not distinguish the difference between different gemstones.

However, the jewelry displayed at both ‘H. Stern’ and ‘Amsterdam Sauer’ was a feast for the eyes, especially the Sapphire wrist-watches, which are a collector’s item.

Between ‘H. Stern’ and our hotel there was a fruit-drinks stall. Most of the tropical fruits were familiar to us – mango, pineapple, custard apple, papaya, watermelon, you name it. However, we had often seen local people drinking a thick, rich, purple-brown concoction that we could not guess which fruit it was made of.

So we pointed out the drink and ordered one.

It is quite a good drink with a tart taste, but it could not compete with our favorite, the ‘Sitaphal drink’.

We were told that it came from the fruits of ‘Assai Palms’. These ‘Assai Palms’ looked similar to our ‘Shindi Palms’ to me with the same sort of leaves and the same sort of clusters of fruits hanging from them. However, not being a Botanist, I cannot say that they are the same.

The next day, our flight was in the evening, so in a relaxed manner, we shopped for touristy kitsch like the ‘stone-birds’. I wanted a memento (This is the correct word but people often think the ‘momento’ is the correct word and use it even in Scientific Conferences.) in the form of the Toucan because I had seen the flight of the bird.

Beautiful birds, made out of colorful stones and mounted on crystalline Amethyst or Quartz bases, are available in every shop but they are expensive. Moreover, all the Toucans were made out of some black stone and looked very dull compared to the live specimen I had seen.

So, instead of stone-birds, I bought two key-chains with colorful felt-birds hanging from them, which now adorn my living-room.

We had been in Rio for three days but had not trod on the famous Copacabana Beach, so we took a bus to the Copacabana Beach and had a nice stroll, looking at the sand-sculptures, some of which were quite obscene, and snapping photos. (You won’t find the photos of the obscene sand-sculptures here. We are quite prudish.)

We did not much like Copacabana Beach. Compared to the Ipanema Beach, it is rather seedy and ill-kempt but much longer.

We came back and now it was time to bid goodbye to lovely Rio.

We still had some Brazilian money left, which we spent in buying a beautiful stone, (Not a gemstone) again from ‘H Stern’ at the airport.

My son-in-law had asked us to buy ‘Cachaca’ (an alcoholic beverage) for him. So, we wanted to buy a pack of two bottles of 1-litre each but the store-person advised us that we should buy only 100-ml bottles because as we had to change from international terminal to domestic terminal at Frankfurt Airport on our way to Dusseldorf, our duty free bottles of 1 litre suddenly become terrorist weapons and they would confiscate anything liquid above 100-ml bottles. You can carry 10 small bottles of 100 ml. each but not a single bottle of 1 litre. This is the new security rule the international travel authorities have imposed.

He also gave us a taste of Caipirinha, which is a cocktail made out of Cachaca with fruit juices.

While traveling, we generally eat very little. This is advisable because travel interferes with your body-clock and the timings of your body-functions.

So, when we tasted the Caipirinha, we were practically empty-stomached and it hit us with a force. Avi said he had tingling all over his body, while I was feeling quite woozy. So, after buying 10 bottles of 100ml each of Cachaca, hastily we went to the other section of the store and bought ‘Pringles’, which we ate immediately, thus reducing the effect of Caipirinha on us.

Apart from this, our flight to Dusseldorf was uneventful.

BTW, the store-person had given us very good advice because we saw that at Dusseldorf Airport, a security officer simply threw large bottles of shampoo etc. in a dustbin, which a lady was carrying in her cabin-bag.

They are really enforcing the new rule with vigor.

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