After an amazing time in Florianopolis, we were sad to move on. Especially since the day we left was the best weather we’d seen our entire time there. But getting to Rio de Janeiro was an easy flight, and the view from the air was amazing! Rio looked crazy down below – a huge city built around the coast, lakes, and hills that were everywhere. Since Uber is so widely used here, getting to our AirBnb was a breeze. We picked a spot right between Ipanema and Copacabana, about a block from the beach in one direction, and two blocks in the other. Perfect! Side note – I drove John nuts all week singing “Copacabana”. When I wasn’t singing that, I’d switch to “The Girl from Ipanema”. He loved it.

As soon as we got to our AirBnb, we quickly threw on our swimsuits, lathered on tons of sunscreen, and scampered over to Postos 8 and 9 on Ipanema, where we’d read the beautiful and/or gay people hang out. Unfortunately in the time it took us to get ready, the sky turned from bright sunshine to full on cloudy. Sigh…we brought the weather from Floripa with us.

An Imperfect First Impression…

As we walked along the boardwalk and down onto the beach, we quickly realized that beaches in Rio are the opposite of the beaches in Barra da Lagoa. In Barra da Lagoa, the beaches are clean and there’s plenty of space. And at Ipanema … they just weren’t. John got cranky/homesick for Barra da Lagoa pretty quickly. And as excited as I was to be in Rio (I’ve been dying to go for years, ever since there was a grad school study abroad there that I couldn’t get into), I had to agree that this beach wasn’t as nice as the one we’d just come from, as we sat there in the dreary weather on top of trash. But it was still Rio!

I tried to salvage John’s Rio experience by researching a Brazilian steakhouse to go to. Which, I had to admit, was just mediocre, especially after the spectacular one we went to in Foz do Iguaçu. Sigh.

…but the Second Impression is Fantastic

The next day we’d decided to devote to going to the beach. The plan was to walk down a small bit of Ipanema and then continue down Copacabana. But, as we got near the end of the boardwalk at Ipanema, we noticed that the beach below us had a lot of space. And the sand looked relatively clean. And the water was spectacularly aqua. We made a game-time decision to park our sarongs on the sand right there and frolic in the waves for the rest of the afternoon.

The water was fantastic – clear enough to see fish, and with waves we could bounce in. Until later in the afternoon when they became pretty rough and the surge kept pushing us to move our stuff further and further back. We decided to walk the length of Ipanema, going from Posto 7 all the way to Posto 12. We made it to Posto 10 before giving up. These beaches are long! I wish we were able to count our steps, but we made an effort to travel lightly to the beach, and left our phones at home for safety reasons.

While mentioning safety, I’ll take some time to digress about my thoughts on safety here. Before arriving in Rio, we’d told two Brazilians, one an old friend from Accion and one our new friend from the Pousada in Floripa, that our next stop was Rio. The first response from both friends was “be careful”.

Noted.

An Uneasy Tension

We’re careful when evaluating where to travel, but also treat everything with a grain of salt as some fears appear to be inflated. For example, we had multiple people worried about us in Colombia, and the State Dept. advisories would make you think you’re about to die at any moment. But we didn’t see any reason for this. Be alert and aware of surroundings – yes. Don’t visit there – nope. That being said, I take the recommendations of safety from locals at face value.

Violence in Rio in the favelas and during Carnival is nothing new, but the federal government, for various reasons, has recently put the Brazilian army in charge of the police, fire departments, and prisons in Rio. Which for us meant seeing camo jeeps cruising the streets with four to six soldiers carrying automatic weapons. This was deeply disconcerting and didn’t make me feel any safer, particularly after reading some articles regarding the lack of training in policing or the HRW report indicating that the military’s policing mandate allows them to use deadly force to protect property.

All that being said though, we did feel pretty safe in Rio after taking some precautions. We took nothing of value and no backpacks to the beach. One night we stayed out late, so we took an Uber back home. And we watched where we stood on the metro and were on watch for pickpockets. So basically things we’d do anywhere else we travel.

Anywho, back to our day! After cleaning up after the beach, we had some errands to run, like dropping off laundry and getting John a haircut. John’s hair had been getting out of control for a while, but we’d been avoiding barbers because we had no clue how to ask for a haircut in Spanish. So clearly it made sense to wait until Brazil where neither of us speaks the language!

(I swear we’re trying to learn, but we still don’t have enough words to form sentences. And in the rare instances where we do actually know the words, no one can understand our accents. But we’re trying!)

John had done some research, so we went to the barber after some liquid courage. John tried to communicate what he wanted, and we showed a picture of him from the wedding, and away the barber went! I kept threatening to ask the barber to shave a Brazilian flag or some other snazzy design into John’s head. John was unamused. The end result came out great!

And, the haircut came with a free beer!

Venturing to Copacabana…

The next day we talked again about sitting out on Copacabana, but once again opted for Ipanema, wanting to experience again the perfect spot we’d found the day before. But that evening after we’d cleaned up, we walked a good portion of Copacabana, and overall liked the scene there better than Ipanema. The hotels and buildings lining the beach were prettier, and waves were calmer, and of course Sugarloaf was in the background. The restaurants lining the boardwalk seemed more established, with live music streaming from them, and there were a lot of people on the boardwalk out for the evening. So fun! Needless to say, by this point Rio had grown on both of us. We were falling in love!

…and to the Rest of the City

The next day we finally decided to tear ourselves away from the beaches and see what else Rio had to offer. And we’re glad we did! This city is huge with so much to do! We took a free walking tour to explore the downtown area, learning more about the Portuguese colonialism. The tour ended at the Escaderia Selarón, tiled stairs created by artist Jorge Selarón.

Naturally, we couldn’t let a day go by without seeing the beach, so after our tour we headed back home and straight out to Copacabana for a late afternoon swim. We’re getting used to this beach life!

The next day, we decided it was time to see Christ the Redeemer, a world site that’s been high up on my list of places to visit. And made even more special knowing that my grandfather visited here during WWII when his naval ship was docked here. So John and I got up relatively early (for us), and took the subway out to where you pick up the bus to go to the top of the hill. Except the guy selling tickets for the bus warned us that Jesus was up in the clouds. And no, I don’t mean Heaven. I mean a thick, dark cloud that meant when we looked up at the top of the mountain we couldn’t see Jesus, and looking back down from there, there would be no view of the city.

Not to be completely deterred, we hopped an Uber across town to the other main tourist attraction, Sugarloaf. Arriving at the base of the mountain where the cable car is, it looked a little deserted. Because it was. There are two cable cars to take you to the top of Sugarloaf – one that goes midway, and the other that takes you from the midway point to the top. And the one from the bottom to the midway point was closed for maintenance for the next week. I was on the verge of tears over not getting to see the biggest attractions in Rio, but the woman who worked there explained that we could hike to the midway point and take the functioning cable car the rest of the way.

So John and I, in our street clothes, flip flops, and with three good knees between us, proceeded to hike up to the midway point. As John joyfully pointed out, when life gives you limão, make caipirinhas! The hike started out easy enough along a paved road with great views of a quiet beach.

But then changed to a dirt trail that climbed steeply in altitude. This would’ve been fine if we’d been planning on a hike, but in my old, slippery flip flops and 200% humidity, we were quickly dying from the heat. After about an hour, we made it to the midway point, and happily hopped on the cable car for the rest of the journey.

Once at the top, we were rewarded with amazing views and a sweat quenching breeze.

Coming back down the mountain was no easier, and my knee was definitely not enjoying the trip. But, we needed to get back home to shower because we had plans that night! Because we’re old and not really the partying type, John and I had yet to go out while traveling. But it just seemed wrong to not get a little crazy while in Rio.

Party in Lapa

The tour company we’d used for the free walking tour the day before offered a pub crawl tour of the party neighborhood, Lapa. We signed up, knowing it’d be more fun to go out dancing and drinking in a group. So we got ready, and headed out to the first samba bar to meet up with our group. We met new friends from Peru, Brazil, Australia, Nigeria, and various countries in Europe. The tour guides taught us the basics of samba, and between their instruction and the liquid courage of caipirinhas, we hit the dance floor. And it turns out, we’re pretty good at basic samba! John and I like to dance anyway, and apparently the way we normally dance basically passes for samba 🙂

We went to two more clubs as well as took some shots of cachaça on the street with our group. And whereas John and I paced ourselves well, the rest of the group started to get pretty lit. Which made it super entertaining for us to watch as two of the guys in the group from Australia tried to mack on any woman in the group.

We found out one of the women in the group was going to be traveling to Bolivia next, just like us, so John tried to get her number, but she didn’t want to give it out in front of Mike from Australia. John did exchange numbers with Mike though, which made it really funny when Mike texted John during the night thinking it was one of the women. Mike was also hoping to get the whole group together the next night, clearly a not-so-clever guise to try and mack on the women again. Good luck Mike! We hope the rest of your trip through Brazil was more successful!

Around 2am, John and I were ready to head back home, having danced ourselves out, but not before stopping by one of the many street food vendors to buy an X-Tudo. What is an X-Tudo you might ask? Why, it’s a hamburger with literally everything on it. And it was delicious! I’m still nostalgic for our X-Tudo.

Lula on the Run

Given our late night out, we slept in and didn’t exert ourselves the next day, instead opting to relax on Ipanema one last time.

Walking to dinner that evening, we passed breaking news on the TV of a restaurant we passed. During the week we were there, former president Lula was appealing his jail sentence. A day or two earlier, the court had ruled he did indeed need to start serving his sentence while running through all his appeals. He was given a time by which to report to jail, which he missed while barricading himself in the union headquarters, surrounded by his supporters. What we were witnessing on TV was him conceding to turn himself in, and his drive to prison. News articles referred to this as Brazil’s OJ Simpson moment.

Before, during, and after the court decision, we’d seen protests across the country on the news as well as accidentally run into two protests in Rio. What surprised us was that we were never warned about this by the State Deptartment alerts. Wherever we travel, we register for the STEP program, and what we’ve noticed is that the announcements and warnings we receive throughout the countries we’ve visited greatly varies. For example, we received multiple email alerts while in Colombia as well as read the dire warnings on the State Dept. website, but in Brazil, we were never warned even though there were widespread protests, the army was controlling Rio, and yellow fever was in a resurgence. I don’t expect the State Dept. to hold my hand, and I accept full responsibility for my own personal safety, but on multiple occasions we felt let down by the lack of advisories.

Our ‘Come to Jesus’ Moment

But back to the fun stuff. On our last day in Rio, John and I did something we never do. We got up early. It would be our last chance to see Christ the Redeemer. We’d found a Christ-cam online that shows you the view from the top of the mountain. And all we saw was whitish-gray. Christ was in a cloud again. I was really depressed. But we packed up our stuff, and got ready to go. And by the time we were ready, you could faintly see Christ on the Christ-cam for a couple seconds. That was all I needed to convince me we should go!

So we hopped on the subway. And this time when the guy selling bus tickets warned us there was no visibility, we said fine, and went anyway. And I’m glad we did, because once we got to the base of Christ, the clouds lifted for just a bit, and we could see both him and a fantastic view of the city below. Trip made!

What’s Next?

After seeing Christ, we raced back to our apartment to get our things, and headed to the airport for our quick flight to São Paulo. Check back next time to hear about our time in the biggest city in South America!