Rio de Janeiro

Pain de Sucre (Sugarloaf), Ipanema Beach, Tijuca National Park, Botanic Garden, Recreo des Banderantes Beach, Barra da Tijuca

Quick Tips:

Copacabana was great, but if I had to do it again, I would stay in Ipanema. Copacabana has gone donehill somewhat, while Ipanema is tres chic. Still, it's interesting to walk around the back streets of Copacabana to get to see all the different flavors of Rio people, and to imagine what it would be like to actually live there. The people are mostly all quite attractive in various ways, and the steamy weather really brings it out.

One thing to note is that I couldn't get any of my ATM cards to work in the local bank machines; in the end, I got a cash advance on my credit card from Citibank in Ipanema, although my hotel would probably have done the same thing.

Best Way To Get Around:

I walked around a lot and took the bus. After a few days, I figured out how to get almost anywhere on the public bus system. It's like fifty cents a ride, or a dollar for a long one, so bopping around on the bus costs next to nothing. Plus you get to see an interesting section of the population on the bus, and there's a nice breeze without having to deal with the hassles of driving and parking.

Most of the people who take buses in Rio are young people without cars. If I had stayed longer, I would have liked to have gotten to some of the surrounding towns and out into the countryside from the central bus station. The bus trip to Barra de Tijuca is a long but interesting one. It goes through a tunnel after Leblon, then past Sao Conrado, where they hang glide from the cliffs, and finally out into the great suburban traffic.

I thought the Debret was nice. It's right on the beach in Copacabana, and it was only about fifty dollars a night for the room, although I didn't have a beach view. The air conditioner was sort of old, but it kept the room comfortably cool after I figured out how to work it. The room had a shower and cable tv.

There were a lot of MTV type shows with blond carioca hosts and German last names, and dubbed American movies. Brazil has quite an interesting history of immigration from various parts of Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, which explains the mix of people. It was fun turning on the closed captioning on the cable tv, following along the subtitles, and figuring out Portuguese slang words.

There's a great, free all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet on the rooftop restaurant of the Debret, and filling up on this could keep me going for most of the day. There was an all-you-can-eat buffet dinner up there in the evening, which was also good and only about five dollars. Brazilian beef tasted really excellent for some reason, maybe it's all free range. Overall, I thought the service was good at the Debret, and the prices were quite inexpensive for what you got.

The buses run along the commercial streets behind the Debret, where there are also supermarkets and restaurants. I would generally get a bottle of water at one of the supermarkets, and carry it around in my backpack. There are buffets in the food courts of the shopping malls which are also quite good.

Here are some pictures from the cable car ride up to Pao de Acucar. You can't walk there from Copacabana because it's through a tunnel. You can take a bus to Urca, which is a beach right near the cable car (I'm generally one who likes to avoid the tour bus crowd). Right after you go through the tunnel, there's a huge indoor shopping center that's about a mile from Pao de Acucar.

I also spent a part of one day walking the path along the water that you see in the first picture. There are some very nice neighborhoods around that part of Rio. Another day, I took the metro into the center of the city, the business district. Boy, was it crowded at lunch time, just like Manhattan.

After a few days, I figured out how to get out to Recreio des Bandeirantes, a beach in the Barra da Tijuca. My objective was to find the beach where they made the movie Blame It On Rio. The Barra da Tijuca is the new part of Rio, where all the real people live, and Recreio des Bandeirantes is the beach where they go on the weekend. The beaches are as nice as Ipanema.

There are also several huge air conditioned shopping centers in the Barra da Tijuca, and you can go there to escape the heat. There's a lot of real estate development going on in the Barra da Tijuca, and it would seem like a nice place to live if I ever decided to move to Rio.

Tijuca National Park is somewhere to the west and north of Rio, and a bit hard to figure out how to get to, initially. I remember taking the metro, and then taking a bus, but on the way back I found out there's a bus that goes there from the Barra da Tijuca, which is also quite a nice trip. The guidebook said there would be a lot of animals in the park, but I didn't really see any. However, the trees were absolutely huge. They must have been a hundred feet high. You can see in one of the pictures how big the trees are by comparing them to the two people walking.

I also visited the Botanic Gardens, which are somewhere northwest close to Ipanema.

On the weekends, the road in front of Ipanema Beach is closed to cars, and the street is filled with lots of people. Ipanema is the nice part of Rio, and many of the apartment buildings look like something you would find in the South of France.