What a place to start our travels and start 2015, Rio was amazing. It was hot, busy and crowded.
We began our stay with a tour to get oriented with Rio, or try to anyway. Our guide, Franck, split our full day tour into two mornings so that we could miss the worst of the queues and crowds. We did the normal tourist things of Christ the Redeemer, Sugar Loaf Mountain and Escadaria Selarón. Even being early to Christ the Redeemer, the crowds were massive and it was quite hilarious watching everyone with their ‘selfie’ sticks’ jockeying for space and the right angles.
Sugar Loaf Mountain provided a spectacular view of the Rio harbour with it’s small entrance and many inlets and bays, explaining why it was first thought to be a river. The small entrance also showed why there is such an issue with cleaning it up for the Olympics, and as Franck said, they probably never will manage to and just say it wasn’t possible and they don’t have enough time.
On the way down from Christ the Redeemer we stopped for a coffee in a great cafe, Rustico, in Santa Teresa before heading to Escadaria Selarón. Franck had the right idea by dropping us at the top of the stairs and then walking down, walking up them all would have been hot work, we just had to remember to turn around every so often to actually see all the mosaic work.
It’s a good thing that the beaches are so massive otherwise all of the people wouldn’t fit in. The water was a lovely way to cool down from the Rio heat. You can understand why the beaches are so popular because the water gets deep quickly and they have the perfect rolling waves, that once in a while would break and threaten to reach some of the beach goers. Everything was available on the beach with all sorts of vendors wandering around selling drinks, snacks, ice-cream, prawns, sarongs, sunglasses, hats and bikinis, pretty much everything you could want and more. Renting beach chairs and an umbrella was a great way to relax and enjoy the beach life of Rio. Most stands appeared to have run out of umbrellas, but it was only about 10m to the next stand, so you could keep wandering until you found one with an umbrella.
Our hotel, Casa Mosquito, was a renovated villa at the bottom of Pavão favela on a windy cobbled street. They had just finished an extension that went up the back finishing with a terrace pool & bar area that provided a view right through to Copacabana and the fireworks barges anchored off the shore ready for New Year’s Eve. This year was their first opportunity to host Reveillon up there and we decided it would suit us fine. I know that to really experience Reveillon in Rio you have to go down to Copacabana beach, but dealing with the crush of 1.5 million people would probably have been too much for us, so a chilled out party on Casa Mosquito’s roof terrace enabled us to see in the new year relaxed & happy. We could also watch the line up of cruise ships coming in for the fireworks.
Since we were staying at the bottom of a favela, it was comforting to know that many of the favelas have been pacified, particularly the ones around Copacabana & Ipanema, with the police stations being built in the favelas so that police go into them at the beginning and end of their shifts, giving a greater police presence. The favelas around Casa Mosquito appear to be quite safe, which was a bonus for us since we managed to end up walking through Cantagelo favela at night trying to find a short cut back to our hotel. The favela walk was successful, i.e. we didn’t get mugged, but we never found the shortcut. We discovered while we were waiting for our transfer to the airport that there is actually a street art tour through the favelas around Casa Mosquito, a bit late for this trip so maybe it is an excuse to return.
On our last night we joined the throngs of tourists at the end of Ipanema beach to watch the sunset, we certainly weren’t disappointed and it was a great way to finish our stay in Rio.
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