Our flight into Rio wasn't exactly plain sailing, pardon the pun. Our flight was to go from Lima to São Paulo where we would go through customs then catch a domestic flight into Rio. That plan almost worked, we were coming into land at São Paulo, wheels were down and the run way was just underneath us. I could see the planes lined up waiting to take off but I could also see lightning coming out of the clouds and heavy rain on the window. Due to watching multiple eposides of air crash investigation I was feeling more than a little nervous as a few crashs have been caused by thunderstorms. I was beginning to feel a little better when we were seconds to landing when suddenly the whine of the engines changed to a roar and instead of landing we were in a steep ascent. Well I nearly wet myself, especially when we hit a couple of violent air pockets and the plane dropped several feet. I thought my days had come to an end so I declared my love to Jon and sat with my eyes closed ready to met my maker. Bear in mind that Colombia had just had a major air crash which killed the entire football team all because they had run out of fuel. Luckily it wasn't as dramatic after that and after circling around São Paulo several times the pilot declared we were off to Rio as the weather conditions were too dangerous at São Paulo. Yay we thought, no having to change planes and we were to land at our end destination. We did land safely and I was ready to kiss the ground except they decided they wouldn't let us off and the plane was going to fly back to São Paulo again. Well, the passengers that wanted to be in Rio kicked up a bit of a stink so it was finally decided to let the passengers off whose final destination was Rio and th Esther's stayed on to be flown back. Good decision we thought.
So here we were in Rio, my life long dream to come here and why I spent a year learning Spanish 30 years ago (no one told me at the time that Brazil was the only country in South America that spoke Portuguese) and finally I made it.
Unfortunately it is rainy season in Rio so our first two days was heavy cloud and lots of rain which was a pity but the last day was beautiful. Very hot and sunny so at least we had one fine day and at any rate it was very warm, much warmer than where we had come from, I could finally wear my summer gear. We were picked up the next morning by Cathy, our guide for the day who was a very out there type of person but she was great. First stop was Corcovado, the highest peak in Rio, and there are quite a few of them, at which sits on top is of course the great JC or Christ the Redeemer as he is better known in this case. We were the first to get there and had to wait until the ticket office opened at 8am. The drive up there was lovely, going through a part of the Tijuana forest (the worlds largest urban national park) as we slowly climbed up the mountain. At the top is a large building which use to be a 5 star hotel until it went broke and is now a restaurant, sovournei??? Shop and ticket office. From there you catch a small bus which goes further up the mountain and drops you off outside an elevator. You go up the elevator then take a further ride on an escalator until arriving at the feet of the man himself, well at least to the large block that his feet stands on.
The weather at this point was quite windy and threatening to rain but the view was still absolutely magnificent. You can see Rio laid out before you in all her glory. I never realised just how beautiful Rio was with lots of white sand beaches, mountain peaks all around and blue sparkling sea, just stunning, even on a dull day. We could see the Olympic stadium, sugarloaf Mt and the biggest favela, Rocinha, in Rio. A favela is another word for slum and is so named after the favela bush that grows on the sides of the hills where the slums are but more on that in a minute.
After taking the usual selfies and drinking in the view we headed for Sugarloaf Mt just as the rain started to come down. Lucky it had cleared a little bit when we got to the cable car to take us up there. This is the same cable car that featured in the James Bond film Moonraker, must watch that again. Up here there were even more stunning views set in a tropical jungle or maybe it was a botanic garden but it had nice walks around what looked like a rain forest, if you were lucky you can see monkeys swinging thru the trees, unfortunately we were not. It also had a great view of the small domestic airport with its short runway with the sea at each end, a bit like Wellington and we could see the planes swinging over the city to come into land over the sea.
Cathy also took us to two very different from each other churches. One was baroque with a ton of gold and took 300 years to build starting in 1590. The other was built in the 70s and although I thought it was very ugly it certainly was different. It could hold over 20,000 worshippers and was built a bit like a pyramid. It was a big concrete structure with led light windows going up in narrow strips on each of the 4 walls which rose to a peak high above. The cross was suspended over the alter.
We chose not to go to the maracana stadium, not being mad football fans, so instead she took us to a brightly tiled street. This was the brainchild of a Chilean artist who came to live in Rio and wanted to jazz up his neighbourhood. It got so successful that people from all over the world wanted a tile from their country there so he started to collect more and made a mosaic of them all. He would change it around every now and then and was in the process of creating something special when he was murdered in 2013. They think the drug lords killed him as he was campaigning to stop drug deals going on in his area because of the tourists around looking at his art work. One night they doused him in petrol and set him alight. No more tiling.
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