Réveillon

Today we had no activities preplanned for us. We decided that this would be a good day to explore Rio’s historic center. And, had it been even a tiny bit cooler, that would have been a good plan. But more on that later.

I found what seemed to be a pretty good walking tour of center on National Geographic Traveler. I copied it to my phone and off we went. The eight block tour was to begin at the Palaçio Tiradentes. We explained in simple English where we wanted to go to the taxi cab driver and even pointed to its location on Google Maps. He nodded like he understood.

Apparently he did not. He drove about a half mile past the Palaçio and announced that, “Here is praça.” And we were indeed on your standard Latin American square with the obligatory equestrian statue.



It seemed useless to argue, and as we were not all that far and the neighborhood did not look unsafe, we figured we would walk.

One of the first things we saw as we left the square was the sight of the “Presbyterian Cathedral.” This gothic structure seemed almost comically out of place in tropical Rio.



The interior was as spare as the name might suggest.



But walking only a couple blocks away, we found that the sacred had not displaced the profane in downtown Rio.



We saw some of the oldest buildings in Rio, such as the monastery of São Francisco, right next to temples to banking and commerce.



We marveled at some of the detail on the older homes and businesses.



But it was starting to get pretty miserably hot and Google Maps kept giving us weird directions to get to the Tiradentes Palace and they kept changing every time we moved a few feet. I was getting frustrated and John, who has minimal tolerance for heat, was starting to get really cranky.
We stopped in a church that had once been the chapel royal. After independence from Portugal, Brazil, unlike most South American countries, did not immediately adopt a republican form of government. Instead, they had their own emperor for several decades.



We finally asked somebody where exactly the Tiradentes Palace was and he pointed us to a building that we had already passed at least two or three times.



By this time, it was pushing 100 degrees and John was just done with wandering around looking at old buildings. He stopped in a little snack shop in the train station and he drank a couple of big glasses of coconut water. That helped a bit, and I agreed that we should just head off somewhere and get a real lunch.

We decided that we would catch a cab to Rio’s trendy Santa Teresa neighborhood, and have lunch at the Santa Teresa Hotel. Both the hotel and its restaurant are on just about everybody’s list of the best places in Rio.

The Santa Teresa neighborhood is on a hill overlooking downtown and the port. It is nowhere close to a decent beach, but the guests have a great pool.



The meal there was probably the best we have had on the trip so far. The restaurant was filled with European tourists, and French seemed to be the dominant language I heard.

We had a walking tour of this area in one of our guidebooks, but John did not want to go far in the heat. So instead we just explored a few blocks around the hotel. It reminded me a great deal of San Telmo in Buenos Aires:  gritty but colorful, obviously fashionable yet still quite rough around the edges.









On the taxi ride back from the hotel, John kept telling me how hot it was. And, indeed from the dirty window of the taxi, he found proof.



For those of you who do not have a calculator handy, that translated to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s pretty hot when it is accompanied by near 100 percent humidity.

The rooftop pool was crammed, so we retreated to our air-conditioned room and napped to get ready for New Year’s Eve. Now, Rio is one of those famous places like New York or Sydney where New Year’s Eve is a big public celebration. Cariocas — that is, if I have not mentioned it before, the name for the residents of this city — hold a huge fireworks display on Copacabana Beach. The hours preceding midnight are filled with local and international musicians playing on two enormous stages on different ends of the long beach. And people traditionally dress all in white for the occasion and rush into the surf at the stroke of midnight. John definitely wanted us to go local.



We had read that it can be pretty insane on the holiday and that you should not bring money, jewelry, or cameras to the beach. We followed those directions, but decided that the warnings were completely overblown. It was crowded, but it was overall a pleasant family event. Just about everybody there had cell phones an were busy taking selfies and snapping pictures of their friends. People were drinking, but we saw nobody drunk or aggressive.

Many people had brought flowers with them, generally gladiolas. They walked into the sea and threw them in as a sign of letting go of the old year and asking for good luck in the new. I wish we had brought some, as I spent much of this part of the trip learning to let go of some pretty painful memories of my own. There were half a dozen cruise ships lined up to watch the fireworks. I rather doubt they were throwing glads into the waves.

At midnight, the fireworks began. And while I have seen better displays in the United States, it was a pretty good one. Oh, that I had brought along a camera to take some snapshots of it. But I did not. And when it was over, we walked the two miles back to our hotel.

Slumming

This morning John found this old picture postcard of Ipanema before all the massive and generally unfortunate development that has taken place over the last half century. Ipanema is between a large fresh water lake and the ocean. There is a small opening, as you can see in this picture, that drains the lake into the ocean. Unfortunately, that channel today is lined in cement and frankly smells pretty rank. Our hotel, the Praia Ipanema, is just to the left of the the channel.

Behind the lake, not visible in the postcard, are a ring of very high hills. These were deforested quite early, but the representatives of the Portuguese Crown, afraid of the loss of an adequate supply of fresh water, insisted on creating a nature reserve. Early in the last century, however, soldiers returning from service, lacking a place to live, began to squat on some of these public lands. They called them “favelas” after a scrubby tree from Bahia, one of the northern states of the country, where many of them had served. Over the course of the twentieth century, dozens of these settlement have been established. Some are still shanty towns, but others are now fairly substantial and permanent settlements.
When John first proposed the idea of taking a tour of a favela, I thought he was insane. Many of the favela neighborhoods are notoriously dangerous. And if it it was safe, wouldn’t it be really offensive to drive around one of these areas and gawk at people living in poverty. But I agreed to go anyhow. It’s hard turning down John. And I am glad I did.
Our tour was much smaller today. We were in the back of a modified jeep. There were eight of us plus our guide. She is the woman on the left.

Because the group was small, we did not spend ninety minutes picking everybody up. Instead, after a couple brief stops, we started climbing up into the hills. As we did, we had some stunning views of the city.

Things did not seem quite as beautiful when we arrived.

We glanced briefly at some handicrafts, and then we went into a small hostel. We climbed several flights to the roof. From there we could see how Rohcina — that is the name of this favela — seems to spill out of the mountains and down into the city below.

And I could see that although none of the development was planned, it all had a certain logic to it. Streets followed the natural curve of the land. From this height, it seemed a little more like an Italian hill town.

 We walked from the hostel down through the favela. As we did so, we noticed how bright and colorful the streets were.

And the narrow streets are clearly designed for pedestrians and small motorcycles, not for cars.


There is even a quite unplanned distinction between purely residential neighborhoods and those that are mixed use. There were no areas that appeared purely commercial.
Brazilians seem to both fear and love these neighborhoods. On one hand, they are some of the most violent in the country and drug dealing and gang violence are constant problems. Many wealthy Brazilians see them as a threat to the order and stability of the country. But on the other hand, they are not only some of the most vital areas of the city but much of modern Brazilian art and music finds its roots in the favelas.
One of the more recent expression of the artistic life of the favelas is capoeira. This is a kind of cross between martial arts and dancing. We were given a small demonstration of it in this area which is its birth place.



The young men who were performing tried to teach the graceful moves to awkward tourists with predictably humorous results.

And afterwards, everybody posed for group portraits.

Our last stop was in one of Rio’s most upscale neighborhoods, the beach community of São Conrado. As just about nothing in Portuguese seems to be pronounced the way you expect, the name is really something like “Sow Ko hah doh”. We sat on this lovely beach for a while and sampled açai.

The cliffs above us are famous for hang gliders, but there did not seem to be much action there.
Returning to the hotel, we rested for a bit up on the rooftop bar and then napped some more in our room. John wanted to go to a Brazilian night club and hear traditional Samba and Bossa Nova. A couple people had suggested a place near downtown called the Scenarium. It was a great recommendation.
The Scenarium is located in a neighborhood that was Rio’s red light district until a few years ago. Now the old homes and businesses in the neighborhood are among the trendiest in the city.
We had to wait in line about half an hour before we were allowed in.

Once inside, we noticed that it had a kind of Hamburger Mary’s decor:  lots of stuff that had been rescued from junk shops displayed sort of a found art.

The club had three floors and there were several rooms on each floor. In the main room of the first floor was a band playing come classic standards from the Brazil 66 era.


We had dinner, enjoyed the music, and then headed home in a taxi as it started to approach midnight. Tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve!

TOURture

We are usually lucky when we allow our travel agents to set up tours or other activities for us. Today our luck seemed to run out. We found ourselves in what can only be called Gray Line hell. No, Gray Line would have had a better bus with a sound system that worked.

Now John always tells me that stories about travel problems are boring, but spending an hour and a half going to every hotel in Ipanema and Copacabana to pick up people until over sixty were crammed into every seat on an open-air bus, begins to suggest what was going to follow. Our guide was named with Rachel. She somewhere on the other side of sixty with bottle-blond hair, a smoker’s voice, and an attitude normally associated with middle-school teachers two or three years before retirement. Despite all that, we liked her. She was the best thing about this miserable adventure.

We drove past some places where I would have like to have stopped — or at least learned a little more about. For example, we zoomed past the residence of the governor of Rio state



and we only briefly paused by the Sambodrome, the Oscar Niemeyer designed stadium for judging Carnival acts.



But we stopped the bus and had to get out at the football stadium



and for some reason this was a hit with many of the passengers on the bus.



It is worth noting here that the majority of the people on this tour spoke Spanish and that Rachel delivered more of her narration en español than in English. Unfortunately, the sound system was about as good as the AM radio on a 1962 Buick so I usually could not make out a single word in either language.

Our major stop for the morning was Mount Corcovado, the site of the famous statue of Cristo Redentor, or Christ the Redeemer. This statue was sculpted by Paul Landowski, a French artist, from a local design. It is 30 meters high and is made out of reinforced concrete covered with soapstone. You get to the top by taking a cog railway, the “Trem do Corcovado.” As we were waiting to get on the train, John posed in front of this photograph.



Probably the ONLY good thing about the tour was the fact that the tickets had been purchased in advance for a specific time and we could therefore shoot ahead of most of the people in line. Despite that, it was a longer than expected climb up the hill to the top. Once we left the train, we had to continue up several flights of stairs, each with its own gift store. Actually seeing the statue was a bit of a letdown, even if you weren’t expecting much. The Savior’s tunic is pleated like your grandmother’s drapes and if you look closely you will see a heart on the middle of his chest.



Not one of those disturbing-but-vaguely-realistic Sacred Heart images. No, this one looks like Jesus came out of the old Cathy cartoons.

Not surprisingly, most people seemed more interested in taking pictures of themselves with the Rio in the background. And for some odd reason they all thought it was amusing to imitate the statue. John had to get into the act here.



After we went down the hill, we were drive to … another gift shop! “Very, very, very cheap!” Rachel assured us. But most of the passengers decided to stay on the bus despite the alleged fire sale prices. I disembarked just so I could capture a picture of the TOURture instrument itself.



We were taken next to a churrasqueria, one of those places where they walk around with meat on a skewer and shave some off for you. Rachel grew somewhat exasperated with her charges as they tried to walk around to find a better place to sit in the small restaurant. “Sit down! Here! Now!” she yelled at us. We obeyed.

The food was pretty good, and we chatted up a couple of the people at the table. There was a couple from Australia. They had been traveling around South America for several weeks and had a number of destinations to go. We were somewhat curious about where they found the money for this as neither of them seemed exactly like they had a Stanford MBA. There were also two women, one from Puerto Rico and the other from Chile, who were apparently traveling together. They kept rushing outside to smoke. In between the nitrates and the nicotine, I was not sure how long these ladies had left.

We ditched the tour at this point. We were supposed to end the day by taking the aerial tram to the top of Sugarloaf, but it was a hazy day and we had enough pictures of Rio and its stunning natural setting. And we did not relish the idea of another hour or so of dropping everybody off at all those hotels. Instead, we took a cab back to our hotel.

We went up to the pool on the 16th floor rooftop. It had a great view of Leblon as you can see here. Behind us was Ipanema.



John was fascinated by the plants growing above the pool.



At least that’s why he told me he was taking this picture.

In the evening we walked over to Shopping Leblon, one of Rio’s malls, to look for a replacement for the camera we lost. We had read that prices for imported electronics were absurdly high in Brazil, but we will be heading off to the Amazon next and it seemed stupid to try to photograph wildlife with your iPhone. The selection was limited, but prices were not particularly inflated. I picked up a Canon T5, the entry-level DSLR for 1,500 reals, about the same price you would expect to pay for it at Best Buy. And really, since that included the tax, it might have even been cheaper.

On the way out, John posed for a picture.



Indeed, 2015 has been a tough year, so I am hoping 2016 will indeed be happy. And with that, we strolled back to our hotel and to bed.



Tomorrow we have a tour of one of a favela, one of Rio’s slum neighborhoods, I am not quite sure what that will be like.

Flying Down to Rio

We had one last morning in Ouro Preto. After breakfast, we packed up, took our bags to the desk, and took the shuttle into town. We had not particular itinerary:  we just wanted to walk about and see what we might have missed in the earlier days. And, sure enough, we found one right away. We found what seems to be the only antique story in Ouro Preto.



In an American town with historic attractions and many tourists, there would be many, many antique stores ranging from complete junk to authentic works of art. Ouro Preto has only this one shop, and it contains everything from old rusty hardware to actual pieces of colonial art. John was taken with this little statue. I am usually pretty good with religious iconography, but  I have no idea who this odd figure is supposed to be.



John was set to buy it until he discovered how much they were charging for it. We continued down Rua São Jose and then up towards the Rohsario church. Along the way we came across this remarkably little building.



As we continued down the road, we had a good view of Ouro Preto’s most famous rock formation. Some people called it the “witch’s nose” or “the old woman.”



Walking back to town, we found a passage up towards the Carmelite church.



The church had been closed when John, our tour guide, had been taking us around the city. But today it was open and as it is the most famous church in the city. As usual, inside the building we were not supposed to take pictures. But managed to snap this one of the ceiling of the nave with the iPhone’s front-facing camera while pretending to be just checking my texts.



We walked past the market near São Francisco



to a restaurant we had seen a couple days before. It was a tiny cottage that had once been an artist’s studio, and the dining room on the second floor was had windows only all sides with beautiful views of the city and the surrounding countryside.

At two o’clock our driver met us and drove us two hours to Belo Horizonte. Like all Americans, I had heard about Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo, but I had never heard of Brazil’s third largest city. We arrived with several hours to spare, but the airport in this city was somewhat more pleasant that GRU was.

The flight to Rio was hardly as romantic as it was in those films from the forties and fifties. Azul airlines is not a bad carrier, but it definitely like Jet Blue or Southwest and not those great PanAmerican flights of the past. We were met at the airport by an older guy named Carlos who spoke good English. Not only could he speak, but he never stopped talking as he drove us to our hotel on Ipanema beach.

We have a totally great room here. It is not as wonderful as the one Fred Astaire had on Copacabana Beach — yes I know that was a set on the RKO lot in Encino — but we do have a great view.



Tomorrow we have a city tour set up.