March 2nd - March 6th
Being in Rio for the first time in our
lives, Helen and I had to, of course, do some of the obligatory
tourist activities. We consequently
chilled on Ipanema beach, struggled to relax on Copacabana's what
with vendors walking by constantly shouting “agua,
cerveja” in our faces, had a
couple of nights out dancing, looked down on Rio alongside Christ the
Redeemer from the top of Corcovado one morning and watched the sun
set over the restless city from Sugarloaf Mountain the same evening.
When we got down from Sugarloaf, we actually discovered we didn't
have any money left for a bus back to our hostel (things were a
little more expensive than we thought). It was dark, we were probably
about a 2 hour's walk away from our area of the city and instinct
told us it wouldn't be wise walking (not to mention our lack of
motivation at facing either the hill that stood between us and our
destination or the tunnel full of traffic which cut through it). In
the end, we managed to trade a couple of cigarettes for the 1 Real we
were missing and felt so relieved that we could ride home on a bus.
Perhaps more unconventionally, we also hang-glided off Pedra Bonita
onto Praia de Pepino (a beach in São
Conrado) and visited the favela (shantytown)
Rocinha. These two experiences were unforgettable and I'll write
about them in a separate story.
We had
a look at a couple of markets but our bargaining skills left a lot to
be desired. At one, I ended up buying a pear for about a pound (I
felt too guilty about the free samples of fruit I had eaten to start
negotiating – ie. I was a complete sucker) and Helen tried to
haggle on a bag at the beach but the man walked away and we had to
call him back and pay the asking price. Another morning we got a
number of hot and cramped buses to the Feira Nordestina (a 658 stall
market) in São
Cristóvã
only to arrive and find only about 3 stalls open. These were all bars
so it wasn't a completely wasteful 2 hour journey there – Helen got
to taste her first caipirinha (filled
to about three quarters of the glass with the sugarcane spirit
cachaça)
for the bargain price
of 3 Reais (about
£1).
What made a nice
week in Rio into a fun and memorable one was the people we met at the
hostel. Over breakfast on our first morning we got to know Gianluca
(Italain) and Marijam (Swedish). We convinced them to come
hang-gliding with us and after that experience and a couple of good
nights out with them, it felt like we had known them for years. We
also became friends with our Chilean dorm mates and on our last
afternoon in Rio, we all sat on the beach together drinking
caipirinhas whilst the sun went down. It was a perfect end to Helen
and I's first few days together in Brazil. Later that evening, we
said our goodbyes and bounded a night bus to Ouro Preto, some 7 hours
north of Rio in the mountains, where our principal objective would be
to recuperate from the mad 5 days we had had in the “River of
January”.
