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I bet you can't guess what that says in the title - in fact, the Brazilian-Portugese accent is such that many letters are pronounced differently than in English - ´r´ is pronounced as ´h´, ´j´ is pronounced as the ´g´ in beige, ´d´is pronounced as the ´dge´in bridge and so on... So the title is how Cariocas (residents of Rio) say Rio de Janeiro. Anyway, ....
We finally made it to Rio after a marathon 52-hour trip from Christchurch - check out our flights - Christchurch-Auckland-Los Angeles-Chicago-Sao Paulo- Rio de Janerio. Due to the nature of our round-the-world ticket, they could not find any other way from New Zealand to Brazil... shameful! As you can imagine, we arrived in Rio pretty shattered... thankfully, we had a confirmed booking at the Ipanema Inn in Rio so we had a place to stay. Our carnaval experience and also meeting friends in Rio is described in the other blog on Rio.
Before describing what we did in Rio, let me just say a word about the culture of Rio. It is very laid back and a very beachie type of culture. Everybody is wearing the least amount of clothing possible. Everybody seems to be extraordinarily fit and trim. And they all speak a sing-song type of Portugese which sounds very nice!
The city of Rio de Janeiro is beautiful! It has huge mountains in the middle, similar to Cape Town, has lots of beautiful beaches (Ipanema, Copacabana, Barra de Tijuca, etc.) and lots of beautiful people! We had to do the tourist thing here so we visited various Sugarloaf mountain, the Botanical Gardens and Corcovado (with the statue of Jesus Christ). In the evening, we went for a relaxed walk around La Goa which is a lagoon right behind Ipanema & Leblon.
On our last evening there, I went off to a football game at Maracana stadium, the largest soccer stadium in the world (100,000 person capacity). The game was between Botafogo and Volta Redondo. Botafogo (the home team) won 2-1 so this was a relief. The crowd was pretty raucous - black & white are the Botafogo color and the fans too are very extreme - reminds me of the Oakland Raiders and their extreme fans and stadium.
After Buzios, we returned back to Rio for a day before heading off to Peru. Bernd´s brother, Jan, was very kind in taking us around Rio for a while, including visiting the Benedictine monastery and the Cathedral. We had lunch with him at Delight, which is a great idea - buffet style and charged by weight, rather than item by item. We also decided to splurge a little bit and went for dinner to the Copacabana Palace Hotel - wow, quite a place! Now, we have to go on an extremely low budget to make up for this splurge...
-Dev
Smruti and Dev,
Asha and I have been following your blog regularly and travelling with you! It is a wonderful trip and very nicely put together blog!
You could go for Brazilians as you look in the picture. Have people come up to you and talked to you in Portugese.
The picture of clouds with light beaming on Rio is beautiful. When you come back you have to put together a series of presenations for all of your fans!
Harshad Uncle
Posted by: Harshad Sheth | Monday, February 14, 2005 at 09:48 AM