Rio in the rain

Rio De Janeiro. The best I can do on the Portugese pronunciation is “He owe dezhan eye”.

Back in Recife, they told us that the rainy season in Rio ends just in time for Carnival. Maybe so. Carnival starts next week. It was cloudy and raining today. It wasn't too bad, but the views from the top of Sugarloaf and Corcovado were mostly of clouds. The picture of the day is us on the walkway to Sugarloaf, wearing plastic ponchos and looking sopping wet.

We got up at 5 AM to watch while the ship was coming into the harbor. It was a fairly scenic arrival in the morning twilight with the big rocks sticking up and the lights along the beaches.

That it was a little wet and rainy all day didn't stop the preparations for Carnival. The street pre-parade that we saw was reported on CNN. I saw it while watching TV a few minutes ago. It was a large college party with lots of beer, moving down the street with some in costume.

Rio is a pretty city and interesting. The mountain ridges and bay cuts it up into much smaller zones with lots of greenspace in between. The zones we saw were clean, modern, and well maintained, with parks and lakes and public areas. I am sure that there are other parts we didn't see. They say that the crime problem is “much better now”. They do not say there is little or no crime. The warnings about wearing jewelery and carrying valuables were restated frequently.

The tour went first to Sugarloaf. It takes two cable cars to get to the top. You get a great view of the whole area.

Then we went to the Sambadrome, the judging area for the carnival parade entrants. It seems to work like the Crewes of Mardi Gras in New Orleans: there are groups, called samba schools, that run different parts of it. Joining a samba school is neither cheap nor easy and there are about 1,200 members in each group. If I understood correctly, there are 174 samba schools. There is a theme and a story to each presentation. They are judged and there is a big money prize to the winning samba school.

Next was the modern cathedral. It is a fascinating structure that looks like a big flat topped octagonal pyramid. One person accurately described it as looking like an “upside down ice cream cone”. It is really not that impressive from the outside, but when you go inside, it is an “oh, wow” moment. To continue with the ice cream cone analogy, the pyramid is a huge hollow shell with four sides being louvered to allow ventilation and the other four sides are immense stained glass windows from floor to the horizontal clear glass ceiling. They are maybe 150 feet tall and 30 feet wide each. It is hard for pictures to do it justice.

We walked through the colonial district, looking at old buildings and statues. We saw Carmen Miranda's childhood home, where the family ran a restaurant, living on the third floor, the cooking area in the second floor, and customer tables on the first floor. After that there was a picturesque area with an old house like Neuschanstein castle in miniature and some really old street trolley cars still running on overhead electric wires. Quaint.

Corcovado mountain was next. We drove up to the parking lot, rode a park van up to the elevator level, rode the elevator up to the escalators that didn't work. From there it was 80 stair steps up to the overlook around the base of the huge statue of Christ. More rain and fog cutting the visibility. If you waited a few minutes, you could get a picture as a gap in the cloud came by. While waiting for our group to assemble, we had an abacaixe smoothie for R 4.50. Abacaixe is pineapple and is pronounced “Abba caizhee.” They are using a very white type of pineapple that is not very sweet.

At supper, I ordered abacaixe sherbert from our Brazilian waitress. Apparently I got it right.

Then we headed for Ipanema to see the “Girl From Ipanema” who is now about 100. Ipanema is not just the beach, but is the most expensive residential district in Rio. The tour guide said he would live in the Ipanema-Copacabana-Leblon area if he could afford it. Me too.

This was the area where we stopped to watch the pre-parade party and found several streets blocked off. These parties were breaking out all over town. There were streets officially blocked and others blocked by people and others blocked by traffic confused by the other blockages. Trying to get from A to B was getting really tricky.

It was now getting late. We stopped to buy souveniers and were supposed to continue on to the beach. Some of the group were worried about getting trapped in the parade traffic problems and missing the boat. That would have been a very big and expensive problem. Despite the risk, the other half were absolutely determined to go to the beach and get a caipirinha – just so they could say “been there, done that.” Libby says that the disagreement between the two groups was about to get really ugly. (Jack didn't see this; he was off shopping) Fortunately there were two vans, so the group split. We went with the Go Back bunch. We got on the ship just 15 minutes before final boarding time. The others got back 15 minutes later. If they actually got a drink on the beach, they chugged it.

Other tours did get trapped. One with about 80 passengers from Legendary Journeys – who have about one third of the passengers on the boat – got back 2 hours late. Normally, if you are not back on time, you get left behind. I think they might have held the boat for Legendary, but not for a small private group like ours.

However, a crew tour also got trapped. They also got back 2 hours late. Rumor has it that the captain was on that tour, so we couldn't leave without him.