Rio de Janeiro - The Marvellous City

2-5 April

Rio had a rocky start...

The other drama that had happened in Bolivia at the same time as the robarro saga was that one of our flights to Rio had been cancelled. To make matters worse its Easter weekend and nothing is open. Meredith managed to get on the phone to an English speaking rep at LAN airways to rearrange our crazy day of connections to get us from Santa Cruz to Rio, it ended up working out better with an earlier arrival time into Rio. Good thing that!! Because Mark had booked separately he was on completely different flights and got a sleep in in Santa Cruz.

We had booked into a hostel in Rio because accommodation was expensive (and everywhere is crazy expensive after two weeks in Bolivia which is super cheap!!) But...when we arrived in the middle of the most mad thunder storm the hostel had screwed up the booking and wasn't expecting us to arrive until next month!!! Bugger!! The dude at the desk (who was drinking beer) rang around a few places to try find us some place to stay. After we rejected the 4000 real a night must-have-been-very-flash hotel, another of the guests suggested a nice family run place down the road. Luckily they had space!! The rain was showing no sign of letting up so we braved it and walked three blocks. The lady at Maragaridas spoke no English but seemed to understand that these three very wet backpackers dripping on her doorstep were the ones that the other place had called about. We piled into the room and unpeeled all our wet gear and hung it all everywhere. Next challenge was to try to explain that actually our amigo was also coming later to so we needed another bed and towel etc! We had tried to explain the same to the hostel so they'd send Mark down when he arrived at 1 am. fingers crossed!
Meanwhile Mark had only just made it to Buenos Aires airport having been delayed for several hours due to crazy rain there so we managed to touch base on Facebook!! Yay for social media!
You'll remember I said Mark wasn't feeling well and he still wasn't so the next bit really sucked! When he got to the first hostel it was a different dude on the desk who obviously hadn't read the notes so he checked Mark in and got him a bed. a couple of hours later at about 4 am he woke Mark up and kicked him out into the street in the pouring rain to walk down to Margaridas. Fortunately they knew who he was and sent him up to us. When we woke up in the morning Mark had appeared and was dead to the world, still fully clothed, asleep on his bed!
Needless to say it was a slow start to the day.  We didn't really get going until mid afternoon!! The Ipanema area we're staying in is really nice, although the weather was still a bit rubbish we checked out the beach, had a really yummy lunch, and wandered along the board walk down to Copacabana.
The beach is amazing, there are kiosks all along selling drinks and food plus football pitches and heaps of other stuff. As dusk came all the lights came on along the beach - so pretty. We wandered back towards Ipanema and found somewhere for dinner, looked like a pub but the food was quite flash. Gem ordered a paella which came in a hot pan, much to her discomfort the waiter insisted on serving it onto her plate every time she ate the last serving. It became a bit of a game trying to sneakily serve myself!! A bit random but very yummy. Jeremy continued his trend of giant steaks!
As we hadn't yet seen the famous Cristo Redentor statue, we walked down to the lagoon to try see but it was covered by cloud, all we got was occasional glimpses of his robe.
Yummy gelato then time for bed.

Rio day 2
Best day in Rio ever today. We got up early to clear skies finally and headed up to see the Cristo Redentor, Christ the Redeemer statue. We got to catch a train up the hill through the 'florist' (forest as described by the lady at our hotel) to the top. The views are so spectacular all over the city. Looking down over Ipanema where we're staying all the tree lined streets divide up the suburb like green channels. The Christ looks down over the city blessing it with outstretched arms. He is huge! There were tonnes of tourists everywhere at the platform on top of the mountain all taking pictures with their arms out! There is also a small chapel at the base of the statue.
Jez took heaps of panorama pics of course then we headed down and since now the sun was properly shining, out to the beach. Yes!!

Mark and Meredith have been hanging out for acai berry smoothies since they are sold everywhere here so we had those for lunch with sandwiches tho they turned out to be sorbet. Super yum!
Ipanema beach was just so lovely, today we were able to see all the mountains around and look back at the Christo Redentor also. The sea was refreshing and had a very strong undertow do we didn't swim for too long but just relaxed on the golden sand which is just like brown sugar.
Jez and Meredith bought hats to match Mark's Cuban drug lord one! Looking good!!

After roasting ourselves for a while and checking out the locals in their speedos and tiny bikinis, the next outing was to the Pao de Acucar (sugarloaf) for sunset. This was an excellent plan, there were no crowds or queues and the view of the city as the sun set and the lights all came on was absolutely spectacular! Rio is so beautiful, its easy to see why they call it the Marvellous City. And all with Cristo Redentor lit up on the mountain in the background. So many mountains sticking up all over the city and the beaches along the side.  Plus there are two cable car/gondolas to take to get to the top which was cool in its self.

Dinner tonight resulted in all you can eat pizza, not just Pizza Hutt style tho, this was flash, they kept bringing new flavours to the table until we were fit to burst, then it was time for dessert pizzas too. Mark almost feel off his chair when he tasted the white chocolate and m&m one. Ohh. Yup it was good.
We scoped out the night markets along Copacabana and all got new Haviana jandals and a few souvenirs and postcards.

Another lazy morning for our final day since we were all in a bit of a pizza coma from last night. Tho, the breakfasts at Margaridas were amazing, fresh rolls with ham and cheese and scrambled eggs and fresh fruit and cake! Yup cake! Cake and/or cake bread are very popular breakfast foods in this part of the world!!
In the hour or so before our flight out Meredith and I went and got pedicures to have nice toes with our new jandals, and the boys went back to the beach and had more smoothies  :-)
Rio de Janeiro was amazing, such a super cool city. I'd love to come back and spend more time here.
Love Gem and Jez