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.
