After fifteen and a half hours in the air and three plane changes, we finally arrived in Rio de Janeiro at 22:30.
Other than a long walk through the terminal, arrival formalities were pretty straightforward. The immigration officer had no interest in seeing proof of the (refundable) flight to Quito we'd booked to satisfy the Air New Zealand staff in Wellington that we'd be allowed to enter the country legally.
Getting an Uber to our hostel in the Leblon neighborhood was simple (though we later realized that the driver had left the meter running for his trip back to the airport. Grr). On arriving we were straight to bed so that we could make the most of our limited time in Rio. (Also, we were bloody exhausted).
Our first day started with sorting out the usual administration stuff. Getting some Brazilian cash, buying and activating a Brazilian SIM card, etc.
After this we got our first taste of Brazilian public transportation when we took the bus out towards one of Rio's most famous sights: Pao de Açucar (Sugarloaf). We decided to forgo the pricey cable car up to the summit and hike up to the top of Morro de Urca, the slightly lower, rounder hill next to it.
The trail through the tropical forest was fairly well maintained and quite busy (we saw maybe 50 people on our journey up and down). But that was nothing on how busy it was up top, where passengers headed to Pao de Açucar the easy way changed cable cars.



After a while admiring the beautiful views we tromped back down and walked along the shore trail at the base, where we saw lots of lizards and birds. The brilliant red Brazilian tanager was very pretty and hard to miss.
A metro ride back to Leblon and a dinner at one of Brazil's many Kilo restaurants finished off the evening. At a kilo restaurant you pay by the weight of what you eat, so they're great for vegetarians or pescetarians like Sarah. And if you avoid the Brazilian staples of beans and rice they can be great value too.
The next day we set out for probably the most Rio activity of all: a day at the beach.
We were actually staying only a couple of hundred metres from pretty and (relatively) quiet Leblon beach, but decided to check out some of its more famous brethren before settling down.
We began by walking the length of the busy shopping streets a couple of blocks in from the beach. Sarah had a coffee that made Brazil an exception to her rule that places that grow coffee MAKE terrible coffee. And we stumbled across a produce market selling fish, cheese, vegetables and lots of fruit. One vendor in particular kept feeding us sample after sample, including mango, melon, custard apple and some of the best, sweetest strawberries I've ever had.
We turned right and joined the beach about halfway along Copacabana. It wasn't nearly as busy as the beaches Sarah remembered from her previous Brazil trip in 2001, where you often couldn't see the water for the people, but there was still lots going on. Cariocas (residents of Rio) do everything on the beach. Swimming, jogging, playing volleyball or Futvollei (like volleyball, but without using your hands), dating, sunbathing. Even doing business. Quite a lot of it actually. People were renting out beach chairs and serving drinks from their tent/beach kiosks, selling sarongs, and (of course) selling bikinis from umbrella-like racks that moved up and down the beach. And of course food. Ice cream, corn on the cob from a wheeled steamer that must have been murder to pull down the sand, and cheese cooked over little charcoal grills that vendors carried up and down the beach.
We walked almost 5km back to Leblon, all but one short section on beautiful wide, soft golden sand. I loved the fact that Cariocas have so jealousy guarded their public access to the beach and kept the fancy hotels on the far side of the road that parallels the seashore.
We also popped back inland to the market to pick up some picnic foods: bread cheese, green peppers, tomatoes, snow peas, passionfruit. This was only slightly spoiled when we were charged almost $12 for 500g of the aforementioned strawberries, which I later realized were only so sweet because they had an invisible layer of sugar/artificial sweetener coating their outside. They were over half the price of our entire 2.5 meal picnic! But I got over it (or maybe not, given that I'm complaining about it here...)
Back in Leblon we briefly returned to the hostel to pick up a towel and some books, and set to relaxing at the beach (which is actually the same beach as better known Ipanema). Plus of course two more key activities: eating some of that beach-grilled-cheese (rather like halloumi, salty, squeaky, crispy and occasionally charred outside, gooey melty middle, and drinking our first caipirinha. The national drink of Brazil, it's made with cachaça (Brazilian sugar cane based, rum-like spirit), sugar syrup, fresh squeezed limes and lots of ice. The ice keeps it cold and makes it less potent as you drink, which is no bad to thing, as they're usually pretty powerful to start out!
Our final day in Rio we set out to explore the centre of the city. First stop was the Metropolitan Cathedral. Rio is packed with churches (we saw lots more throughout the day), and the large majority of them are in the baroque style, which I'm really not a fan of. The cathedral was another beast entirely. It was constructed in the 60s and 70s. From the outside its looks verge on ugly, but the inside is amazing. The entire truncated cone forms one huge open space, so capacious it brought to mind Aya Sofia in Istanbul. The sense of space is enhanced by four floor to ceiling stained glass windows at the cardinal points and the fact that the clever design leaves the whole structure open to airflow, making it beautifully cool and breezy inside.
Back outside the cathedral we took to Rio's shopping district. Parts of it were surprisingly quiet, but others were buzzing with activity, music piped through the market from speakers hanging a above the narrow streets in between the fluttering Brazilian flags. We also popped into the park where Brazil's independence was declared by Dom Pedro I (I hadn't realized before that Brazil began its independent existence as a monarchy!)
The buzz of the market extended into the adjacent business district that we passed through on our way to the docks. For the afternoon we were headed out of Rio entirely to its much smaller sister city, Niteroi, on the far side of the Guanabara harbour.
The commuter ferry over wasn't quite Hong Kong's Star Ferry, or the Bosporus Ferry in Istanbul, but it was still a lovely ride with wind in your hair and great views of the city and towering domes of rock that surround the bay.
We'd thought about heading straight back to the city, but as we had some time, walked up over a low hill to the Niteroi Art Museum. Designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (you'll hear more about h in the next entry) the museum is known as the UFO because of its otherworldly shape and spectacular location.
We continued our walk back around the shore past much less imposing, but still charming old homes, many of which had been tidied up and turned into characterful little buildings with great views back across the bay.
The best views of all should have come from a little church on an island separated from the mainland by a causeway, but as with all the other spots with the best views (on top of Morro de Urca, at the Niteroi Art Museum) it was closed for renovations.
We rode the ferry back to town, then the metro back to our hostel.
For slightly complicated reasons related to us waiting too long to book a flight to northern Brazil, we were to depart Rio that night. So at 21:30 we took an Uber to Rio's Rodoviaria (bus terminal) and bought tickets for a 00:25 trip to Sao Paulo. The journey was 6.5 hours long, so after a blissful jet-lag aided sleep we arrived at SP's Rodoviaria Tiete just before 7 o'clock.
While Rio and Sao Paulo are both in south-ish eastern Brazil, SP is almost due west of Rio, which I reckon is close enough to allow me to reuse the title of the final China entry for the first Brazil one.
We hadn't planned to visit Sao Paulo at all. It has a reputation (or at least I thought it did) of being grittier and more dangerous than Rio (not that Rio ever felt dangerous, only walking around in wealthy neighbourhoods and/or daylight hours as we did.) This was probably true, but Sao Paulo more than made up for it with its vibrant, cosmopolitan character. While Rio had a beautiful setting and its own inimitable character that pervaded the city, that seemed to be about all it had. Sao Paulo had such depth that even in two short days we grew to love it. Perhaps a bit of explanation of what we got up to while there will help explain why we liked it so much l.
Fifteen metro stops and five minutes walk brought us to our hostel in the posh Vila Madalena neighborhood. After some morning juice (papaya with lime) and coffee and administrative stuff we set out to explore the city. As in Rio our first stop was the Metropolitan Cathedral. Like Rio, its architecture was quite different from the typical Brazilian baroque. But it was also very different from Rio's brutalist concrete, being pretty much pure neo-gothic, a style that I quite like.
The charming process of buying tickets to see the crypts involved sitting waiting in the secretariat until the seemingly harried administrator carefully took our money, wrote our nationalities in her book and carefully tore two tickets out of the small book.
Down below the cathedral were the remains of all Sao Paulo's archbishops and cardinals save one (who was lost at sea), along with three priests and one Amerindian chief (who were all significant figures in the history of Catholicism in Sao Paulo).
The palm lined square in front of the cathedral was filled with lots of Sao Paulo's many impoverished and homeless. The rough impression was added to when, as we left the square we saw several police officers and a crowd of civilians surrounding one of these unfortunates who very much appeared to be dead.
From there we carried on into Sao Paulo's commercial heart. The pedestrian malls surrounded by office blocks and the merchant streets lined with older, lower buildings were, even more than in Rio, thronging with people. In many sections you were surrounded by a roar not unlike that in a stadium or large concert hall before patrons have settled down to watch the event.
Meandering through the streets led us to the Mercado Municipal, which bore a striking resemblance to Toronto's St. Lawrence Market. Except here instead of peameal bacon, the feature sandwich was a Mortadella. I had one of these for lunch, and so thickly was it piled with meat and melted cheese that I could scarcely help Sarah with her hefty salad that was full of root vegetables quail eggs and cheese.
The neighbourhood around the market was a bit rough around the edges, but it had nothing on the area near the train station. This was probably the most unsafe I've ever felt in an urban area in daylight hours. We didn't really feel like we were in immediate danger with lots of traffic passing by on the major road beside us. But if it were after dark, it felt like it would have taken us about ten seconds to be robbed at knife or gunpoint.
This was in stark contrast to the manicured gardens and whitewashed colonial buildings of the Museum of Sacred Art, which we stepped into minutes later.
I hadn't known what to expect from the museum, but Wow! The Neapolitan nativity scene with its hundreds of scale figures was amazing. We spent half an hour poring over its ~20m of intricate details and could easily have spent more. The permanent collection in the main building was impressive. But (leaving aside feelings for the poor elephants) the special exhibition of Catholic ivory carvings was amazing! I think I've only ever seen a couple of Christian artworks in ivory, and here were dozens. Many from Goa, which makes sense, but plenty more from all over the world.
From a museum of sacred art we headed to a museum of almost un-sacred art. Batman Alley and its surrounding neighbourhood were just covered in street art in a vast variety of styles. Indeed, I think Sao Paulo is the best city I've ever visited for street art, topping previous favourites like Melbourne, Vienna and Medellin (and, come to think of it, Wellington).
With not long until sunset, it was prime time to check out Sao Paulo's burgeoning beer scene. We made it to two brewpubs, the city's oldest and a newer, über cool venue. Delightfully the beers were all fault free (I've been to way too many places with newish beer cultures where the small breweries make terrible beer). They ranged from Iteresting-if-not-exactly-good (cacao göse) to Oh-my-god-I'm-so-ripping-this-off-when-we-get-back-to-NZ (I'm not telling... The easier to rip it off ;-) )
We were back in affluent Vila Madalena, and felt entirely safe walking home in the dark at 21:00. When we were almost there we found one last bar that was absolutely heaving. By day it was a record/film shop. By night they put futbol on big screens and served 600ml bottles of icy cold (if slightly oxidized) pilsner and deep fried savoury pastries (called pastels) to the crowds at the tables and the dozens more who spilled out onto the street in front. We couldn't NOT go in.
Sarah and I were lucky enough to get a table and spent a good hour or two chatting with our neighbours (two English speaking Brazilians from Rio, one who lived in SP and one who was just visiting) about... Well, the sorts of things one talks about at the end of an evening of beer drinking.
Our second and final day in SP began in the Liberdade neighbourhood, which is home to the largest concentration of Japanese diasporans in the world. There were Japanese grocery stores and gyoza and sushi restaurants, but obviously a fair bit of assimilation had gone on as well, as evidenced by the Lanchonete Nagoya, which sold pure Brazilian food.
From there we moved on to Bela Vista (supposedly the Italian neighbourhood, though we saw little sign of it except the Lanchonete Napoli, virtually identical to the Nagoya). And then on to Avenida Paulista the home of big business in SP.
There weren't any super huge skyscrapers, but the wide boulevard was lined on both sides by a concrete and glass canyon that extended for several kilometres.
At the end of Paulista, amongst a series of road over and under-passes things got a bit seedier. To the point that I felt somewhat uncomfortable walking through the huge (it spans more than a full metro stop) and deathly (Ha!) quiet Ceméterio do Araçá.
We did get to pop back in later near the main entrance, which was good as it was an amazing place. It wasn't quite as labyrinthine as Buenos Aires'Recoleta, but the family mausoleums were just as ornate, and the sheer length of the avenues of tombs made it feel like a real city of the dead.
We walked all the way back to our hostel (passing a number of really impressive self supporting steel lattice broadcast towers on the way... Sao Paulo has some great ones).
As dark fell we found time for one final outing to the beer van. Each evening, a local craft brewery parks their tap-laden van just off Av. Pompeia and sells brown ale, APA and other beers to Sao Paulo's hipster crowd. I'm pleased to say that it was a lot of fun and that the beers were once again, good ones.
Sarah stayed up at the hostel for one or two more beers but for me it was straight to bed. We had an EARLY start the next day.
How early? Early enough that we took almost full advantage of the fact that the SP metro starts running at 04:40.
We caught an 06:00 bus from Tiete to Viracopos airport (it's one of those airports that are in an entirely different city from the one they claim to primarily serve), so it was a 90 minute trip there. But we arrived in plenty of time for our 08:50 flight north.
Thus concludes our love letter to Sao Paulo. The contrasts of wealth and poverty in various areas were so pronounced that it was sometimes hard to believe they were the same city. And there were some truly dodgy neighbourhoods (not even favelas, just in the city centre). And there weren't many obvious tourist attractions. But like many of my favourite cities (Toronto, Busan, Istanbul) it was truly a city for living.
No comments:
Post a Comment