Part 5: Rio de Janeiro — 5-11 October, 2023

Fabulous Rio -- the final stop on our tour of a small corner of this vast country. We have seen and done a lot, but feel we have only scratched the surface of this huge and multifaceted city. Here is a short list of places seen, food eaten, experiences and impressions:

• Our first day, after a bus journey down from the misty mountain town of Petrópolis, we walked along the famed promenade of Ipanema. We admired the surfers riding huge waves rolling in from the Atlantic, the variety of barely clothed body types and skin colors, the array of people peddling all kinds of food, drink, clothing, jewelry, sunglasses etc. At the end of the beach is a statue of Tom Jobim, composer of one of Brazil’s best known songs. “The girl from Ipanema”. (Weirdly, when we visited the statue a few days later it had been repainted with a different color of clothes)

Ipanema Beach

Tom Jobim

• We take the Metro everywhere we can. It is clean, safe, very frequent and FREE for people over 60. We easily qualify…
• Our local public garden has hosted two street markets while we are here. One for fruit, vegetables, and fish in amazing quantities and varieties. The other for crafts, clothing, jewelry and, of course, food. Every outdoor activity appears to involve live music. Most play cover versions of 70s and 80s American rock, though a few are more traditionally Brazilian.

Hot pepper stall

Flowers at local market

• We took the Metro to the center of Rio and walked up into the funky and very hilly neighborhood of Santa Teresa, where we climbed and admired the huge tiled staircase, the Escaderia Selaron. It is covered with thousands of colorful tiles collected by the artist from all over the world. At the end of the staircase after even more hot and humid climbing is the weird Parque das Ruínas, a ruined house in a small park that has been converted into a more or less safe art gallery and viewpoint.

The tiled Escadaria Selaron

The Parque das Ruínas Art Museum

• Our hotel, the Ipanema Inn, has a deal with one of the vendors on the beach to provide beach chairs and umbrellas, and we have spent several late afternoons sitting on the beach, watching the sun go down behind the hills, and marveling at the non-stop parade of entrepreneurs selling their wares.
• Carts with vats of boiling water for hot sweet corn. They strip off the kernels, douse them in butter and hot sauce, and serve in a small plastic bowl.
• People with tiny charcoal braziers that they use to grill cheese, shrimps, sausages, and skewers of meat and fish beside your beach chair.
• Sellers of sunglasses, towels, beach blankets, skimpy bikinis, hats, and colorful beach dresses.
• Drinks of every variety from highly alcoholic capirinhas, beer, sodas, mate tea, and multicolored fruit juices garnished with fruit slices.
• Many of the vendors are colorfully or eccentrically dressed and have elaborate sales pitches. They are all extremely good-natured and cheerful, though it looks like a hard way to earn a living. And they all take credit cards or cell phone touch and go payment!

Shrimps and sweet corn sellers

Sunglasses anyone?

• We had been warned and read about how dangerous Rio is with street crime, purse snatching etc, but we have seen very little evidence of this. There is a healthy police presence, and like in many big cities there are people sleeping on the street.
• One of the “must see” excursions in Rio is the cable car to the top of the Sugar Loaf mountain. On Saturday, we walked to the cable car station, and were dismayed to see the huge crowd of people waiting to buy tickets and an equally huge crowd waiting to board the cabins. We reckoned on a 2 hour wait at least. But again, our age came to our aid — we were whisked into the “priority” line, given personal guidance on buying our half price tickets, then hustled to the front of the queue for boarding. It was a magical ride up the mountain in two stages with clear, sunny views in all directions over the strange city of Rio with its fabulous clean beaches, precipitous mountains, tropical forests and every sort of housing imaginable from tumbling, poverty-ridden favelas to glistening tower block condominiums, and all these elements mixed in together.

Rio from the Sugarloaf Mountain

• On Sunday, we visited the ancient monastery of Sao Bento (Saint Benedict), where the monks and choir sing the service in Gregorian chant. The church is elegant and plain from the outside, but inside is a riot of Baroque carving and gold leaf. We managed to find two places to sit in the packed church and sat through the sung readings, the credo and other parts of the mass. The singing was very fine, though they could have used a few more tenors, and we were well sprinkled with holy water and anesthetized with smoke from the censers. However, when one of the four priests started a very long sermon in Portuguese about the evils of abortion, we decided to give up our seats to others and refill our lungs with fresh air outside.

Sao Bento’s plain exterior

Sunday Mass in Sao Bento, with incense

• We spent a couple of hours in the Museum of Tomorrow, an incredible modern structure beside the ocean that resembles a white spaceship preparing for takeoff. Using art and science, technology and imagination, it projects a message of sustainability for our doomed planet’s survival. The exhibits are interactive and fun for all ages, educational and creative. 

Museum of Tomorrow

• The ride on the funicular railway up to the famous Cristo Redentor statue on Monday was fun. We were lucky to have clear views, though drizzle started and nixed our plan to take the jungle trail back down to street level. We spotted capuchin monkeys from the train, and identified many of our favorite “houseplants” in the jungle.

Cristo Redentor

Rio from the top of Corcovado before the rain started

• The afternoon rain cleared for us to take a four-mile wind-blown ride along the promenade on bikes borrowed along with helmets from our hotel. The wild waves and looming storm had already chased many beach-goers away, and we watched big machines shoveling tons of new sand onto the beach.
• Today’s visit to the Botanic Garden made up for missing out on the jungle trail. We saw more capuchin monkeys, toucans, parrots, orchids, Amazonian water lilies, waterfalls, flowering trees and insects, including hives of non-stinging bees. Sandy counted 22 bird species.

• Our food experience in Rio has been varied and interesting. Our hotel serves an excellent breakfast which sets us up for the day. A late afternoon gelato in one of the innumerable ice cream shops, or a cup of puréed frozen açaí or mango keeps us going till dinner. We have not gone to any purely Brazilian restaurants which tend to be heavy on meat, and have had some great meals in Italian, Japanese, Lebanese and French leaning places.
• Brazilians, like so many others, are obsessed with their cell phones and use them for everything — calling a cab, making payments, maps, and selfies everywhere.

Tomorrow, we will squeeze in some more sightseeing before flying to São Paulo for the overnight flight from 75 degree F Brazil to 45 degree F Bala Cynwyd. We’ll miss this lovely country and its friendly people and hope to return soon. 

Link to Sandy's eBird Trip Report: https://ebird.org/tripreport/160259

Part 4: Ilha Grande — Petrópolis — Rio, October 1-5

 Unfortunately, after our wonderful first day in the tropical paradise of Praia Vermelha on Ilha Grande, the weather took a turn for the worse and we had downpours and dampness for several days. We still managed to do some exploring (and eating açaí gelato) between rain showers, however, though we did not make it into the sea to snorkel with the green turtles eating at the seaweed farm. Still there are worse ways to pass the time than sitting on a sheltered deck in the middle of nowhere watching the sea, and colorful birds flying by.

On Monday 2, we sadly left the Ilha Grande on the fast ferry to the mainland and found a somewhat reluctant Uber drive to take us to our next stop, the mountain city of Petropolis. 

The flex boat ferry between Ilha Grande and the mainland.

The last hour of this journey was somewhat hair-raising as the rain was pouring down and we were driving fast up a very twisty mountain road, rising 2,700 feet and often in the left hand lane with severely reduced visibility!! But we need not have worried. The Brazilians have an interesting solution to the problem of 2-lane mountain roads that become too busy. Rather than going to the vast expense of expanding the road to 4 lanes, they build a separate 2 lane highway up the mountain, and make the old road one-way up the mountain and the new road one-way down the mountain.

Petropolis is a modest sized city with an interesting history. During the short-lived Brazilian Empire (1822-1889) it was the summer capital, when the emperor and all is family and vast retinue of dukes, counts, barons and assorted hangers-on moved to the mountains to escape sweltering Rio. The center of the city is full of huge, crumbling, and impossible to maintain Victorian palaces. Our hotel was one such, the Solar do Imperio, with huge rooms, high ceilings, plaster friezes, murals, elegant marquetry, marble staircases, window frames that no longer fit, patched-over rotting wood, crumbling plaster — a nightmare of non-stop maintenance, but very grand. 

Our hotel in Petropolis

Lin in the portico. Huge vases of fresh flowers every day.

Hotel dining room

We spent our 3 days in Petropolis exploring the unusual city, laid out by a German architect along several small rivers, and with many Germanic features. The weather was mostly cool and unsettled, with occasional downpours and often a strange damp mist swirling round the buildings. 

We visited the fascinating porcelain museum — 1,800 china animals and figurines made mostly in Germany and France.

The porcelain museum

We enjoyed our self-guided tour of the amazing and interesting Bohemia Brewery, where we bought our senior discount tickets ($3) and were presented with a small beer glass, which was refilled at regular intervals. We learned a lot about the history and science of brewing and the importance of beer in world history. 

Bohemia Brewery Museum

We were delighted with the cute little house of Santos Dumont, one of the original pioneers of powered flight at the beginning of the 20th century. He was an eccentric character of diminutive size who invented a hot water shower system and dined at a 2-meter high table. 

2 meter high dining table with chairs to match

Santos Dumont “chalet” in typical Petropolis weather

The first indoor hot water shower

On our second day we visited the vast Imperial Palace where the Emperor Pedro II lived. It is an imposing museum full of ponderous Victorian furniture and innumerable paintings and sculptures of Pedro and his large family. The polished wooden floors are immaculate and visitors must wear uncomfortable felt flip-flops to avoid damaging them. 

Felt over-slippers that slip in every which direction

Imperial Palace, Petropolis

The city is very hilly and the rain forest on the surrounding mountains seems ready to take over at the slightest opportunity. There was evidence everywhere of landslides, and buildings that had disappeared. Some house owners have just sprayed their entire precipitous back gardens with 6 inches of concrete.

We came across one other interesting type of store we had never seen before — self-service ice cream. You take a plastic container and an ice cream scoop and help yourself from a huge range of flavors. When you have finished serving yourself, they weigh the container and charge accordingly. It was delicious ice cream in many wonderful flavors and very inexpensive…but is it hygienic? We suffered no ill effects.

Self Serve Ice Cream Store

 Today we checked out of our grand crumbling hotel after another delicious breakfast, and took the bus down the mountain from damp Petropolis to sunny Rio de Janeiro, where we checked into our hotel a few yards from Ipanema beach. We are looking forward to several days of exploring this fabulous city, using the hotel’s complimentary bikes, and Rio’s excellent subway system.

Confused electrician?

Part 3: Paraty — Ilha Grande, September 28 - October 1

Thursday was a gloomy day in Paraty, the beautiful colonial town with no cars and very rough streets. We spent the morning walking up a long gentle hill through tropical rain forest to a “fort” reconstructed in the early 19th century at the time of Brazil’s independence from Portugal. Interestingly, the cannons are still in place and in good condition. Several of them seemed to be of British army origin, with a GR and crown insignia and the British War Department “arrow” mark — no explanation of how they got there. When Brazil got its independence they formed the Brazilian Empire. Unlike the US, they wanted independence from Europe but still wanted a monarchy.

Forte Defensor Perpétua

King George insignia and War Department arrow mark

There was a small museum with a few artifacts from Paraty’s history. Until the 1970’s the town was only accessible by boat and forest trails. There was another reminder of the worldwide British influence, with 3 huge cast iron bowls used in sugar production, and made in Low Moor, near Bradford. You can still read the Low Moor insignia on the rim. As with nearly everywhere so far in Brazil, no information in any language other than Portuguese — we struggled with half-remembered Spanish, and Google Translate.

Iron sugar-making bowls from Bradford, Yorkshire

We spent the rest of the day exploring the town cultural center and its ice cream shops, until the full moon high tide flooded the streets.

Police car not following the rule to avoid driving into a flooded road.
They got stuck and had to push and reverse out.

Google Translate also gets a work-out in restaurants where again there is minimal non-Portuguese assistance on the menus. There are many items that don’t have English translations, or that have unfamiliar ingredients — cassava, tapioca, farofa, feijão, and many more. Still, so far we have been mostly lucky, and “salada” is always “salad”.

After our three nights in our beautiful Paraty hotel, we took an Uber north-east up the coast to Angra dos Reis, then a very bouncy small “flex boat” ferry for 50 people across the bay to Ilha Grande. 

The flex boat ferry

The island is a biological reserve, and all the villages are accessible only by boat. We are staying in Praia Vermelha (Red Beach) at the western and more sheltered end of the island. The ferry called in to the private dock of our hotel where we were met by the hotel owners. This place is the definition of “remote” with no cars or roads, all transport by taxi-boat, and muddy, steep trails through the rain forest from one tiny beach village to the next. Our hotel, run by a South African couple (!) provides dinner as well as breakfast, and there are a couple of bars on the beach. It is an idyllic spot and we are enjoying our stay, despite last night’s thunder and today’s bucketing rain. 

Our hotel - the Vila Pedra Mar

There are birds, butterflies, marmosets, and beautiful flowers. Sandy has added a dozen new species of birds to his “life list”. The locals are very friendly and very proud of their little village. The main occupations are fishing, seaweed farming, and running bars and restaurants for the small number of tourists. Much of the food we have eaten is locally grown or caught.

Friendly local fisherman proudly showing us a freshly caught dorado (mahi-mahi)

Yesterday we walked along the coastal path through the rain forest to another even smaller and emptier beach, where we had a refreshing swim. It was all such a contrast with our previous weekend in noisy, bustling São Paulo. 

Lin on jungle path, with jackfruit tree

Hummingbird feeding on wild pineapple

Our “private” beach

Sandy emerging from the sea

One of our favorite discoveries here is açaí gelato. It is made in the village from locally gathered fruit, and served with granola and cream — delicious.

Lin about to enjoy a bowlful of açaí gelato.

 

 

 

Part 2: São Paulo — Paraty, September 25-27.

After our exhausting 8-mile-walk Sunday in 90+ degree heat and the intense but vicarious excitement of São Paulo’s triumph in the Copa do Brasil, we took it slightly easier on Monday.

A morning walk through some less than beautiful streets brought us to the strange, hippy-alternative art world of “Batman Alley” - the Beco de Batman. Most of the streets of São Paulo are straight and right-angled, but this area is a maze of small alleys, with all the walls graffitied with huge and very skillful street art. Every surface including doorsteps, trash bins, and lamp posts are painted in weird and wonderful art.

In São Paulo and most other big cities, everyone uses a phone app called 99 to summon taxis. It is much cheaper than Uber, and most of the fare goes to the driver, so we made good use of it to get round the huge city of 12 million people. The drivers uniformly do not speak English, but are happy to try to communicate with us on many topics, but particularly how terrible the other drivers are and how bad the rush-hour traffic is.

The second half of the morning we spent in the Parque Ibarapuera — São Paulo’s equivalent of Central Park — with lovely flowering trees, lakes, interesting birds, and sadly many closed museums.  Monday is their day off (bad planning on our part).

São Paulo has reputedly some of the best Japanese restaurants outside of Japan, and there is certainly a huge population of Japanese origin. So, we found a lovely little restaurant with one counter seating about 20 people and 4 cooks working furiously in a tiny kitchen preparing delicious food. It looks quite dangerous with boiling oil, many sharp knives and opportunities for collisions. We had a delicious meal…

Yesterday, we left our little hotel in the Pinheiras district and taxied along the horrifyingly polluted Tiete river to the main bus station, where you can catch buses to almost anywhere in South America. We took a very comfortable bus for a 6 hour journey through the Central Valley east of SP, then over some hair-raising mountain roads to the Atlantic coast, eventually arriving in the extraordinarily quaint and tiny town of Paraty, built in colonial times and now a world heritage site. The old city is closed to all traffic by large chains across the streets. The “cobbled” streets themselves are extremely rough on pedestrians and wheeled suitcases, more easily navigated by horse-drawn buggies. They are “paved” with ballast stone from Portuguese ships in the 17th century, which filled up with gold mined in central Brazil for the return trip to Europe. The town itself is beautiful and picturesque, as is our hotel, which has high ceilings, antique furniture, beautiful wood floors, pan-tiled roofs and very helpful staff. We plan to spend a couple of days here taking it easy, using the hotel pool, exploring the churches, museums and alleys, and enjoying the restaurants, especially today which is Lin’s birthday. 

The only vehicles allowed in Paraty

Rough cobbled streets

The harbor is filled with colorful boats ready to take visitors to island beaches on daylong booze cruises, some looking distinctly less seaworthy than others. The weather is alternately hot and dry and overcast and humid.

Colorful boats, including the “Carota Linda”

Museum of dilapidated maritime machinery

Sadly, Paraty is seeing the effects of coastal erosion and rising sea levels. At high tide, the streets round our hotel are flooded for a couple of hours. The locals seem unconcerned as long as the tide goes out before the restaurants open for dinner.

High tide on Main Street