Rio de Janeiro

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After Iguazu, we finally had a chance to slow down a bit and enjoy the trip as our next destination was Rio. We were in Rio for 5 days and it is more of a place that you experience as opposed to a place that you go to see a bunch of sights. Regardless, we were sort of in the sight seeing mode after Cusco and Iguazu so the fist day we spent checking out Impanema beach and we also went to Corcovado to see the Christ Redeemer statue. Ipanema is an amazing beach because it is a city beach but the water is so clear that you would think that it is some remote island in the Pacific. Most of the pictures are from the point between Ipanema and Copacabana beaches. We actually stayed at a hotel in Copacabana but it was really close to Ipanema, which was good because, in my opinion, it was not as nice of a beach and it was filled with prostitutes, many of which were transvestites. It was funny at first to see a 6 and a half foot girl that you just knew had to be a guy, but they actually acted like guys too! They would spit and burp... just like downtown LA homeless people!

Anyway, we soon found out that Rio is a place of extremes, perfect beaches with crowded roads and polluting buses, amazing hillside forests mixed with flavelas (shanty towns), and homeless without a pillow to sleep on in front of huge beachfront hotels. It made me think to LA and how everything is sectioned into different areas with poor, middle class and rich while Rio is just mixed all together. Even in nice areas such as Ipanema there were flavelas, but unlike nearly anywhere else I had been, the flavelas were close to beautiful beaches and were often on hilltops with better views of the city and beaches than the rich!

The trip to Corcovado was a good thing to do on the first day since it offered great views of the city and it made me realize how much of Rio is actually waterfront since the beaches curve around to form the different districts of the city. There is even a lake in the middle. The Christ Redeemer statue is an amazing work of art because it literally looks down on the city with open arms. It can be seen from many different districts and every once in a while I would find myself looking up to see where it was.

We also went to watch a Samba show at Rio Scenarium, which was an awesome old 3 story music and dance hall. The music has a lot of percussion instruments and jazz influences so I really enjoyed the experience. The cool thing about the place was that we were some of the only tourists and many of the Brazilians actually knew how to dance really well.

The last day the surf finally got big. It went from 2ft to 6 to 7 ft in about a day! We had plans to go to the city center so I didn´t have time to rent a board, so I figured I would go body surfing instead. I swam out and caught a couple medium size waves before I finally sucked it up and took a really big one. I was a little behind when paddling into the wave and I got sucked up the face of the wave and slammed into the shallow sand bottom. A week later and my back is still hurting.

The city center did have some cool stairs that were covered with tiles by a Chilean artist named Selaron. We actually got to meet Selaron since he still works on these stairs and is constantly changing the tiles. I have to admit that I first saw the stairs on the Snoop Dogg video ¨Beautiful¨ and have always thought of them when I thought of Rio, but they were actually really cool to see in person and read about his story.

That night we went to a soccer game at Maracana, which was at one time the largest stadium in the world, holding 200,000. We saw a game between Fluminense and Santos, which turned out to be a bit of a disappointment since it was Valentines Day in Brazil and the crowd was small.

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Comments

[Kathy Baker]

Fun! Beautiful!
Looks like you and hombre are having a great time and I loved the waterfalls!!! Take care of yourselves.