For many years I have dreamed of going to "The Marvelous City" of Rio de Janeiro, I should've known that something would happen to dampen my experience.  Once again for those of you who are awaiting wild tales of muggings and other such typical stories of tourism in Brazil, you will be disappointed.  The only criminal in this account of Rio is my old friend I know so well from England - the rain.  Although to be fair, it was not all bad, and for those few hours where the sun was shining and the continual hammering took a break, Rio delivered everything to meet my high expectations.

To get from Salvador to Rio either takes a 27 hour bus journey, or a short flight which can cost pretty much the same.  So, together with Luciano who also wanted to venture to Rio I chose the sensible option and bought my first flight of the trip.  I had adopted Luciano as my temporary pretend boyfriend as he was the perfect candidate... tall, dark, handsome, loves to cook, has a panoramic camera function and is fluent in Portuguese - what more could I wish for in a man?  Although this did make me incredibly lazy as I am too shy to talk Portuguese in front of someone who is fluent in English too!  So after swapping Maaike for Luciano, and Salvador for Rio I set off on a new adventure.

We arrived in Rio full of excitement and desperate to get to the hostel that we had booked, however once we arrived the disappointments started.  I always say that the place you stay has a real effect on your impression of a place even though it is only somewhere to sleep.  The hostel that we had chosen was not very nice... three tier bunk beds, dirty sheets and a bathroom that made you feel dirtier just from looking at it.  So, needless to say we set out looking for a new place to stay.  After checking out a few places nearby that seemed ok, Luciano called a Capoeira instructor (Meio Quilo) that he knows to find out where he could do some training in Rio.  After a short conversation the pay phone cut out and we walked away, about 100m down the road I could hear the phone ringing so we ran back to answer it... lucikly this time it was for us.  Meio Quilo lives in a place called Morro Agudo in the North East outskirts of Rio state and said that he should go and stay at his place as it is 30km out of Rio city.  Luciano explained that he was "com uma loura gosta" and Meio Quilo told him to bring me along.  As I always say in situations like this: "why not"... so off we went, with no idea whether we were heading into the depths of the favelas or the middle of beautiful countryside with only the following directions for assistance: 

Get to Central, find a bus/van to Morro Agudo, get off after the bridge and then ask someone for the house of Tito.  Simple, right?

So, we get to central on a really sweaty bus driven by a maniac, and we ask (well, Luciano asks) a woman where the bus to Morro Agudo leaves from.  She was conveniently waiting to go to the same place, but advised we might want to take a van there instead of the bus.  After not finding a van that would go there we went back to the same bus stop.  This bus station was rather authentic and not as nice as the bus terminals I've been used to for my long distance buses.  Despite our blatent touristyness with our backpacks, we both got asked for directions on different occasions... needless to say Luciano coped a little better with explaining he was not from round there, but I think it was quite obvious very quickly that I wasn't either!  Eventually the bus arrived and we got on.  After asking around a little we learned that there was rather more than one bridge in Morro Agudo,  but we found a girl who seemed to know where the house of Tito might be and settled in for a couple of hours' ride on a bus accompanied by music such as "Lady In Red" and "Don't Dream It's Over" so I didn't even need to get my iPod out.



Eventually we arrived at the house of Meio Quilo's sister and took a much needed shower.  His niece Vagalume is the cutest little thing I've seen for a long time and has the most amazing hair, she also seemed to find me quite interesting.  For most of the evening I played with her and tried to learn some Portuguese from her books whilst also trying on various Easter and Christmas accessories as Luciano helped to install a ceiling fan in our room.  Her excitement was infectious and by the end of the night I felt like I had drunk a whole bottle of cachaça, but in fact I had not touched a drop!  The rain had been dripping on and off all day, but then that night it absolutely hammered it down all night so the next day it was incredibly wet.



In the morning we went along to the gym with Meio Quilo and his 18 year-old nephew.  Here I got to try capoeira myself for the first time, and apparently I am not too bad.  With previous experience of dancing and muay thai I was in a good position, and impressed the boys with my flexibility ;-)  So much so that after finding out that I was not actually Luciano's girlfriend, the 18 year-old nephew made his move the moment Luciano popped out to collect his friend Peter who was joining us that day.  Tempting as it was to have a new 18 year-old boyfriend who can do the splits, I politely declined!  After lunch we explored the local area a little more in the rain.  People were looking at us very strangely, I am not sure whether it was because we were the only ones without umbrellas or it was our strange European appearance.  That night Luciano prepared carbonara for everyone before we headed back to the city the next day.  We were accompanied to the bus by a sweet little 16 year old boy... well, at least that's that I thought he was.  He told me that I should come back and visit without Luciano, and that him being 16 is no problem... at this age they are old enough to do anything.  It's probably a good job I left before I started thinking that I was a teenager again!

The bus back to Rio took pretty much the whole day, and it was raining constantly.  The buses in Brazil all have turnstiles that you have to go through once you've paid.  Up until now I have always taken off my backpack and got someone to give me a hand with lifting it over.  I've now adopted the method of trying to lift it as high as possible whilst on my back and squeezing through the turnstile with it.  I think that this method provides the locals with much more entertainment as I resemble Donkey from Shrek in the scene where he has to manouvre himself through a turnstile in a similar fashion!  We made a decision to try a hostel in a different area which looked really nice from the pictures on the internet.  Luckily this worked out very well and it was a really nice place even if it was full of very "arty" guys who were all keen to be-friend Luciano!

When it is raining in Rio there is a lot less to do; some of the activities that we undertook when the weather was not so good included a visit to the Metropolitan Cathedral, the Escala de Selaron, walking the streets of Lapa, checking out job offers that had been made to Luciano, meeting up with Jules who I know from Sheffield to go to a hippy market and generally hanging out whilst waiting for the rain to stop.  The Escala de Selaron are really beautiful and a great splash of colour in a small backstreet, and as we went when it was raining it meant there were not too many people there which was a bonus.  In the surrounding area of Lapa there is a lot of street art and it is a really great place to wander around and admire it all.  The cathedral there is also quite interesting as it is not like any other I've seen before with its conical shape, plus they even have a radio station which I have not yet had chance to check out, and a souvenir shop with some hideous memorabilia - amazing.  At the market we saw a dog with a raincoat on which said "it's raining cats and dogs", which entertained me rather too much!

However, when the sun is shining there is plenty to do in Rio and I was not going to hang about for a second when the chance came to get out and make the most of it.  The moment the sky looked clear and the sun was out we headed off to visit Christ atop his mountain.  We went for the option of minibus to the top rather than taking the train as we could also stop off for a fantastic view of Rio including both sugarloaf and Christ.  Although there was a bit of waiting around in a queue I didn't mind too much as the weather was nice and it remained that way.  When we got to the top there was a little cloud which obstructed the view of the city from time to time, but I had gone up there to see Jesus and so it was all good.  A few good touristy photos later and we headed back down.  The driver of the bus had advised us that there was a good place to go swimming just up the road, so off we went on foot.  Over a mile later all we had found was a "natural shower" and after asking a local taxi driver we found that the swimming place was rather too much further than we fancied walking, so we settled for a shower instead.  There was a man and his daughter already dipping in and out of the ice cold mega powerful water, so we figured it must be ok to get in.  The water from this was so ridiculously strong that it ripped down my bikini bottoms, luckily I managed to save them and Luciano was too slow with the camera for too much damage to be done.  Once we had finished "showering"/testing our endurance capabilities we got a lift back down to quaint Santa Teresa with the man from the shower and had a delicious lunch.


I also managed to squeeze in a visit to a couple of the beaches in Rio when the sun escaped from the clouds.  A morning on Copacabana even left me with a little bit of sunburn which I was not expecting to get in Rio!  All along the beach there are little workout stations where the guys all keep in shape... I saw no women exercising and the physiques of the locals really represent this split.  No wonder the gay population of Rio is so high!  People watching at Copacobana really is a fantastic attraction of Rio and I am very pleased that I amanged to experience this.  The local beach to my hostel was Flamengo beach which is very close to the small domestic airport in Rio... this meant that every now and then a peaceful day at the beach would be interrupted by a low flying plane coming in to land, very strange.

Other good-weather activities include scaling sugarloaf mountain.  After walking there from our hostel we felt that we were too tired to climb the first mountain and feared we may miss the sunset, so grudgingly we paid the extra to take both cable cars up to the top.  The view from here was fantastic, but there was also a lot of tourists to obscure it.  We managed to get a seat on a bench facing the sunset and although it was a little cloudy, it was good to be able to get up there to see it.

Although I leave Rio a little disappointed with my time there due to weather, at least I managed to do most of the things that I wanted to.  I had a fantastic time with my temporary pretend boyfriend, and managed to go on a couple of adventures that I would not have experienced had I been there alone.  Unfortunately though the time came for me to move on and leave him behind as I head south in search of some sunshine and clear skies.