Apparently the weather was up around 40C the day before I arrived, the beaches were packed and the city was humming. By the time I got there it was raining and had dropped to a high of about 30C. The locals apparently get kind of grumpy when this sort of weather is around so I kept quiet about the coincidence.
Anyway, the city still had a pretty good buzz about it and felt pretty safe to walk around, even later on at night. They've been doing a lot of work to tighten up on that the last couple of years but one of the people I was talking to who lives here told me it had been slipping again recently. Let's hope they get it together before the World Cup shows up.
Anyway, some of the sights, and I was pretty lucky to get them. First day was Corcovado, the mountain with the statue of Christ on the top.
He's pretty big! And you get a great view of the city, providing it's a clear day. Fortunately for the short time I was up there the clouds stayed away.
The Maracana - famous football stadium where the World Cup final will be played.
Ipanema beach and a natural salt water lagoon.
One of the Favellas (slums) climbing up the hillside.
Shortly after we left there the clouds came in, but nothing like when I went up Sugarloaf the following day.......
It's two cable cars to go up. The first takes you to the top of Uca, and then the next Sugarloaf. It's a great view from up there, again, providing the weather cooperates.......
Copacabana beach.
Corcovado.
And then the clouds moved in and all you could see was white.
This is from Uca looking up. From the top it was just white.
We did see one of these little guys scavenging for crumbs.
But unlike the film it didn't sing or dance. Yet again, I have been lied to by Hollywood.
And finally the beach, but with the weather the way it was there weren't many people out and about.
All in all Rio was pretty nice, it would have been good to see the sun at least once but never mind. I ended up with my last night in an area called Lapa with a Brazilian girl, Regiane, who I'd met in Ushuaia and was kind enough to agree to show me some of the life in the city. It's a nice bar area but she was telling me that with the rain it was pretty quiet compared to how it would normally be on a Saturday. Very quickly about Regiane, she's from a city near the Amazon and she spent a good chunk of the time feeding my nightmares by talking about spiders that jump at you if you try to hit them with a broom or swimming in the river where there are piranhas - apparently they only attack if you have an open cut somewhere. Thankfully there were some really good drinks and food at the bar so it wasn't that difficult to sleep 😄
One thing I will comment on, after spending a month muddling around in Spanish and just about getting to a point where I could handle a restaurant and some simple greetings and thank yous I got to Rio and ran face first into Portuguese which sounds nothing like what I'd been used to. I got by with pointing and such like but it was tough. Next stop is Cape Town where I'd like to say the language will be easier but I know better than to make such assumptions.
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