Rio at last!
Sorry, this is going to be a long one.
I spent a couple of days getting to know my way around, doing laundry, all that stuff. They have a metro system here which makes me feel like I´m in London. I got on in rush hour one day and rushed along at top speed like everyone else, not quite sure why. I visited the famous Copacabana beach, where the Stones played only a week ago. It´s vast and lined with a mixture of posh and ugly hotels behind which stand sugar loaf mountain and Christ the Redeemer. It was overwhelming to stand there in the heat, staring at the huge waves and seeing all those famous Rio landmarks. Then Bev arrived, yay! I haven´t seen Bev since I left London, she´s been travelling through Central America for 3 months and flew down to Rio for carnival. We didn´t do much on her first day here but ended up in an Irish bar (they´re bloody everywhere) until the early hours.
Friday 24th February
Officially the first day of the carnival. Beautiful Rio is surrounded by 300 favelas (slums), one of which was the subject of the film City of God. The slums are a mess of concrete structures like badly fitted together tetris blocks climbing up the sides of the mountains. Some are dangerous but some aren´t and we decided to take a tour into one of the safest - Rocinha. Before I continue, this is not dangerous. 20 odd tourists go in each day. The locals are used to it, they know the guide and it brings them money. The dealers have no interest in shooting up tourists. So, we drove to what seemed like a perfectly normal area at the bottom of the mountain which the favela clings to. From there we each hopped on to the back of a motorbike and sped up the hill, that was pretty cool, although a bit hairy at times with the traffic. When we hopped off at the top it seemed just like any poor neighbourhood in a South American city. I must admit from the film I´d expected the kind of slums you might see in South Africa or India. This was the business centre of it though, it got worse. 300,000 people live here. No-one pays tax or rent because you buy a piece of land (or someones rooftop as there´s no space left) and build. The property is yours and there´s nothing to tax you on. They don´t pay water rates because they knick it from the forest. The electricity poles have hundreds of cables coming out because they attach their own and steal the electric. This area is run by the ADA group of drug dealers. ADA stands for Friends of Friends (in Portuguese of course). With only one group managing the area there isn´t much fighting. Last October though the main guy was killed by the police. 9 of his main guys were then all killed within the favela, I guess as part of the power struggle. There is a photo of a little boy who´s dad was one of those men under the my photos link. Now things are stable and a new guy is set to take over. It´s generally a safe place to live because the guys who run it don´t want bad things to happen. If they do the police come and that´s bad for them. As we walked, our guide told us not to take pictures of certain things. One was a big black tank type thing, apparently the police. Another was a guy with a gun down his trousers! Seeing how they live was really interesting but it did feel a bit voyeuristic. Especially visiting the community centre with the kids, that felt like a zoo. But everyone was very friendly and it certainly changed my idea of what a favela is like.
That night we headed to a bloc party. These are unofficial parades organised by the locals. 6 of us walked there from the hostel, all uphill. By the time we got there I was awash with sweat. Actually, I´m always awash with sweat here, it´s boiling. We hit a wall of people and culture shock. There wasn´t really any music and the parade was just one truck with some guys on top singing the same song over and over. We couldn´t move, it was really claustrophobic and men grab you and try to kiss you. On top of all this we were tired and not in a drinking mood, the carnival spirit evaded us that night.
Saturday 25th February
Well, nice to wake up without a hangover at least. I should say something about the food here. Everywhere you turn cafes sell beer and salgados. They´re like little snacks, pasties and balls of stodgy potato type stuff filled with chicken or beef. They´re absolutely delicious and I´ve eaten nothing else. I don´t know how everyone isn´t obese here.
Today we did something I wouldn´t dream of doing in England, went to a football match! A local derby between Flamengo and Botafogo, neighbouring districts. The astmosphere was great. Some of the chants I recognised but most of them are more like samba music, complete with drums. The drums start, they sing a couple of lines, then they all jump around and dance. It seems less agro than English matches, they even sell beer. The match was great, I got much more into it than I´d expected to. I even shouted ¨hoof it¨ at one point and I nearly wet myself whenever they scored. We were sitting in the Flamengo side so obviously we supported them, they won 3-2.
Our night out was much more successful, maybe something to do with the alcohol we drank before leaving the hostel. Some local brew that tasted like (and had the effect of) prune juice. We headed to a gorgeous area called Santa Teresa and this time the carnival was in full swing. We danced with some locals to live music from the stage. The people here are unbelievably friendly, more so than anywhere else I´ve been. When I told the lady we couldn´t speak Portuguese she had her little girl translate into Spanish for us. In another area we stopped to dance with an impromptu samba band. Great fun but slightly ruined by the unbelievable stench of wee. No-one bothers to stop partying long enough to find a toilet. I saw some real sights here, one lady/man wearing a sequin thong and nothing else who had the most amazing boobs kind of sticks in my mind! We followed the sound of drums again, this time into a warehouse. Another band were playing and beautiful girls shook parts of their bodies in total isolation to the rest of them. We just watched in awe. A great night.
Sunday 26th February
After a lie in we headed to Copacabana beach for a couple of hours of sun. It was definitely enough to turn me quite pink on one side. Beaches at the weekends are full of locals. They set up bars all the way along and play beach volleyball in speedos and tiny bikinis. Such an amazing culture here, these people really love life. I´ve slightly fallen in love with their language too. I don´t know about Portuguese in Portugal but here it´s gorgeous. I like speaking Spanish but I much prefer the sound of Portuguese, wish I could speak that too.
In the afternoon we were booked to go hang-gliding. I was so excited and nervous that when the call came to cancel due to weather conditions I was gutted. All that adrenalin for nothing. We were re-booked for Tuesday though. Instead we went up to Christ the Redeemer, the statue of Jesus with his arms out standing high above the city. The view is unbelievable, the city seems to have squeezed itself inbetween the mountains and the sea with a man made lake in the middle which is apparently meant to be in the shape of a heart. The statue is amazing too, he looks very serene standing there with his arms outstretched. I hope pigeons don´t land on him. We saw sunset from Ipanema beach, by far the most beautiful one, and went home for a night in. Tomorrow night is the big one, the all night parade so we needed some kip.
Monday 27th February
I tried to do some official things today, not realising that everything shuts for carnival. With no-one getting any sleep I suppose they don´t bother going to work in the morning, fair enough. In the afternoon we headed to Sugar Loaf mountain. Because of it´s shape it was named after the ceramic mould that was used in the process of sugar refining back in the day. Anyway, it´s pretty cool looking and you can get a cable car up to the top for another fantastic view over Rio. This time we did it for sunset, great to be up there while the sun goes down and the lights start to come on. I must admit the cable car freaked me out a little bit though, it´s as big as a pod on the London eye and it sways around a bit too much, I started to have doubts about hang-gliding at this point!
During carnival there are the un-official parties going on everywhere which I´ve already talked about. The stuff you see on TV is the big parade in the purpose built sambadrome. The samba schools parade for about 45 minutes each, with all the floats and amazing costumes, it´s a competition with first and second division schools and they take it very seriously. Most schools have around 5,000 people in the parade! We´d booked tickets months ago back in England and managed to get fantastic seats right near the front. The sambadrome is like a grandstand which goes up really high, kind of reminds me of a quidditch match. The parade runs from 9pm to 7am, watching all those sequins for that amount of time is impossible so we showed up at 11pm and saw it through to the end, very surreal to be there while the sun comes up. The parade was absolutely spectacular, some of the floats are unbelievable. There´s all the traditional stuff with the bikini clad girls and all the feathers and glitz on totally over the top floats but there´s also some really clever stuff with the way they use the floats too. One of them had a giant UFO which came in to land and dancers dressed as aliens poured out of it. Another one had a stage with curtains on all 4 sides. The curtains would open to reveal 20 Elvis Presleys dancing away, then close and open again to reveal 20 Michael Jacksons or 20 James Browns, very clever. It was an amazing night that I´ll never forget.
Tuesday 28th February
After rolling in at 8am in the morning, we weren´t up to much during the day. Just sitting around getting more and more nervous about hang-gliding! Oh my god, this was absolutely mind blowing. We actually ended up para-gliding rather than hang-gliding because there were so many people flying that day we would´ve had to wait ages. Hang-gliding is when you lie down and hang on to a triangular metal frame with the wings attached to the top. Para-gliding is sitting down attached to a parashoot. It actually worked out for the best as you get more time para-gliding. There was a lot of waiting around while they got everything ready for us, that didn´t help the nerves. We drove up to the top of a cliff which overlooks mountains, a beach and the favela we´d visited earlier. Bev was to go first, she got strapped into the harness and walked to the edge of the ramp to be attached to our instructor, obviously it´s a tandem flight! The ramp is actually angled down instead of up so you literally feel like you´re walking off the edge of a cliff, which is infact exactly what you have to do. I watched Bev as she took off, screaming, and whizzed off into the air, terrifying. When it came to my turn the sun was starting to set and I was pretty much the last one to go. I stood on the edge of the ramp, feeling seriously uncomfortable and unsafe in the harness and walked two steps forward waiting for the shoot to yank us off the ground. Unfortunately the wind was too strong at first and we had 3 missed attemps at take off. I´ve never been more scared, it would kind of pull us but then not so I´d end up sitting on my bum on the edge of this cliff not knowing if we were going to be dragged forward or up or what. I almost couldn´t go through with it, but you don´t have much choice by that point. Eventually we got away, wow, what an amazing feeling. You just seem to float in mid-air, hundreds of metres above the city, looking out over the sea at the sunset. I could´ve cried. We stayed up for about 20 minutes, it felt like a lot longer. We twisted and turned and did some spirals, that thing where the pilot flys in circles and seems to be spiraling out of control towards the ground, wasn´t so keen on that bit. Then he let me drive it for a bit, very strange to be holding these two bits of string knowing that if you let go you´ll be plummeting to the ground. We landed right next to the beach, landing is much nicer than taking off, you just kind of stand up and start running as you reach the ground. I think my legs started peddling quite a way before that though!
After such an adrenalin rush I was ready for a big night out. It was the last night of carnival so everyone in the hostel was up for a party. We went to Lapa, an area of Rio where there is always a big party going on. I had a great time, dancing around, drinking capirihnas, soaking up the carnival atmosphere. I even had an hour long conversation with a local who had absolutely no English. I don´t know how we managed it with the language barrier but I feel like I know her pretty well! As the sun came up and our hostel started to serve breakfast, we trudged home. A really great end to carnival.
Now I´ve got another day or two here (I don´t want to leave, might throw a tantrum) before heading down to Iguazu falls, a massive set of waterfalls on the Argentinian and Brazilian borders. Then I´ll be spending my last week in Buenos Aires learning tango, I hope I´m better at that than I am at samba!
There´s loads of new photos of the carnival and Rio, I´m afraid my camera couldn´t cope with the parade too well but there are some good ones.
See you all in a couple of weeks!
Tags: Brazil
