Rio de Janeiro

· Brazil, Featured, South America

Rio is a truly stunning place and has been our favourite city yet. It has a great energy to it and the scenery is amazing with the mountains, beaches and city all intertwined. Here are some photos from Sugarloaf:

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image Head up Sugarloaf an hour before sunset for incredible views

By chance we ended up in town at the same time as the “Rio+20” conference – a UN conference on the environment that bought thousands of people to the city. Unfortunately for us, this meant accommodation prices went through the roof – we ended up in a dorm for the first time and still paid 80 Brazilian Real (NZ$50) each per night.

A side benefit of the conference was the huge number of cops and army around in town. Though we had read countless horror stories about tourist safety in Brazil (and particularly Rio) we felt safe here.

image This was a common scene throughout the city

It doesn’t show that well in this photo, but this cop had clearly seen too many action movies – he was carrying his normal sidearm, a revolver on the other side and a cigarette in one hand! They don’t like you taking photos – but we worked out a sneaky way: Sal was pretending to pose for a photo in the foreground!

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The conference changed the vibe a bit – our Copacabana hostel was mostly full of delegates and in the evenings the place felt like an internet café. Breakfasts were more social, though with more suits and formalwear than the usual hostel. Hilariously, every second person attending seemed to be making a documentary on the conference!

Although warm by NZ standards, it was a cloudy week, so the beach wasn’t as pumping as we’d expected. It was still nice though and it would be awesome in hotter weather. We did manage a quick swim. One good thing about a quiet beach: lots of room for Frisbee!

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We split our time in Rio between Copacabana and a nice hill suburb called Santa Teresa. We’re glad we did – we were worried about staying in a full 10-bed dorm, but it was the nicest hostel we’ve been in so far. This was the view from the balcony:

image View over Lapa (Lapa Cathedral, mentioned later, is lit up to the left)

We were just a few minutes from the Lapa steps, a famous art work made of tiles collected from around the world. We managed to find the cool Tiki near the bottom.

There is also a funny cathedral in Lapa: from the outside it looks like the lair of an evil henchman. But inside was a huge open space with giant stained glass windows and with hymn reverberating around the dome. A big contrast from the outside, we ended up sitting for quite a while in the serene space.

Our last night in Brazil was an enforced all-nighter, since our flight left at 5am and we didn’t want to pay for accommodation. We ended up going out with some people from the hostel to a venue for Forró dancing – one of the most popular dance styles in Brazil.

The night involved a few Capirinhas – a delicious cocktail made of cachaça (a cheap liquor made from sugarcane), lime and lots of sugar. Tasty! We also had a hilarious quasi-English conversation with some locals over some meat-on-a-stick from a street vendor. Good times :-)

We were pretty exhausted by the time we reached Cusco (with flight delays, long queues and ticketing errors testing our patience so early in the morning). After only just making our connecting flight we left Brazil behind and began our time in Peru.

P.S.: We went on a Favela tour while we were in Rio, which you can read about here.

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