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I can´t quite put into words how Pat and I felt the morning after our first big night out in Lapa, a Rio hotspot. Due to the kilo of white sugar and bottle of Cachaça from too many Caipirinhas we had consumed the night before, we were not in the best of spirits when we woke to an alarm at 9am. We had made the mistake of booking a tour for early Saturday morning, in which we would get to see all of the big highlights of Rio rolled into a 6hr guided tour (although it felt much much longer). However, we managed to drag ourselves out of bed, have a quick bite of breakfast, and were whisked away by a far-too cheery gentleman with an incredibly loud voice.
Our tour took us first to Tijuca Forest, the largest urban forest in the world and right in the heart of Rio de Janeiro. We bumped around in the back of a van, making our way up and through the forest to get some pretty fabulous views of the city below. I´d try to relay a little more of the history lesson we received during the tour, but neither Pat nor I were paying all that much attention to what our guide was telling us. We were grateful that even though it was cloudy it wasn´t raining, and that due to the slight breeze the clouds would part every once in a while to reveal the city below. This was all very good news because we were headed to see the gigantic Cristo next!
The Saturday morning before Carnaval is not exactly prime visiting hours for one of the continents most popular monuments. We fought against the hordes of people to get to the top of Corcovado mountain upon which is perched the 130 foot tall, 700 ton statue of Jesus Christ himself. For purely touristic reasons, this was quite an amazing sight. The clouds would part long enough for us to get some great photos (and a few sacriligious ones as well). The view from Corcovado was almost panoramic, and if you could block out the hundreds of other people it was a pretty spectacular scene. After a few minutes of goofing around with the camera and discussing our views of organized religion, Pat and I were ready to get out of there.
We waited for the rest of out tour group to convene at the van and from there we drove through Santa Theresa, a very arsty and historic neighbourhood in Rio. Lunch was the only thing on our minds at this point, and we were not alone (8 of the 10 people in our tour group were hungover as well!). The driver took us to his favourite per kilo restaurant where we ate far too much and felt far worse than we did before we started (some people never learn!). Our tour then travelled through Lapa, bringing a flood of memories (some slightly hazy) from the night before. We ended up at a famous stairway being constructed by a crazy old man named Selaron. He has been working on this one staircase for years and says that it will be finished on the last day of his life :) The stairs are a tribute to Brazil and the people that live here, and is a collection of tiles from around the world. We managed to find one of the Canadian tiles depicting the Atlantic provinces. It was a beautifully strange undertaking by an even stranger individual, and a sight that wrapped up our tour of Rio quite nicely.
The rest of the day was spent in recovery, resting up, and cooking dinner. We cooked most of our own meals in Rio because it was so incredibly costly to eat out. So Pat and I had a good time experimenting in the kitchen and it was nice to have a little choice in what we were eating for once. The next day was the first day we didn´t have much of anything planned so we decided to make an attempt at hitting the beach. Yet again, it was cloudy :( But not raining and still 28 degrees, so we spent a few hours reading and people-watching. That evening we decided to take part in a Favela Funk Party. I wasn´t quite sure what we were getting ourselves into, but there were a lot of people taking part so we figured it might be an interesting experience. Like the sheep we are, the tour guides came to herd us all up at about 10pm. A few hundred gringos in flashy white vans traveling to a favela makes for a pretty obvious target, so after quite some time en route I began to wonder if we were really going to a party at all. The drivers then made a pit-stop and we found ourselves in the parking lot of a gas station just outside the favela. Our guides told us to use the washrooms (who knew what the condition of the ones in the club would be) and to relax for a while. Pretty soon every single person in the parking lot had atleast one beer in hand, and we stood around waiting for whatever happened next, all the while becoming increasingly aware of how ridiculous we must have appeared.
We finally got herded back into the vans and off to the club we went! Well this was like no club we had ever seen, but unfortunately the evening was not documented (a camera in this club was as good as gone just walking through the door). It was a sketchy location in a sleazy wharehouse-like building and there was easily more than 2000 people, bumpin and grinding to the loudest music we´d ever heard. We had a VIP area on the upper level, which put us in good position to watch the sea of people below. Words cannot describe the scene below, but in typical Brazilian style it blew my mind. The dancing makes Christina Aguilera´s video for ¨Dirty¨ look like churchon Sunday, and may have been one of the most entertaining things we had ever seen. It didn´t take long for us to feel like we were in the wrong location and not getting the most out of our night, so we made our way down to the dance floor and joined the party. After a few solid hours of being right in the thick of things, and no longer able to handle the terrible music that is `Favela Funk´, we headed outside for some street food and to wait for our flashy vans to come which were picking us up at 4am. It was quite the night and not one to be forgotten very easily!
There was only one thing we had hoped to do in Rio that had yet to be done -hangliding off Pedra Bonita! We took advantage of our final free morning and headed to Pedra Bonita with our instructors. There was only one slightly disappointing part to the whole situation - our instructor was on his cell phone the entire time, making us feel a little cheated and like we didn´t quite get our money´s worth. However, the view from the mountain was still breathtaking and the flight itself was amazing. It seemed surreal from so far up (Pedra Bonita is as high as the CN Tower) but when you looked down and saw the birds flying a long ways below it put the height in perspective. There was no fear whatsoever (me being slightly crazy and Pat having already been skydiving and bungee-jumping) and it was a pretty cool way to wrap up our time in Rio. The rest of the day was cloudy and drizzling, making us all the less sad to be leaving for the sunshine we were almost guaranteed to find in Salvador. Our flight left early the next morning, we were headed to Carnavaaaaaal!!!
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