South America Travel Diary: Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

This travelogue is continued from the previous post

 

Rio is definitely one of the most popular travel destinations these days. So we would not go all the way to South America and not spend time in Rio! I especially wanted to visit this city after I watched the animated movie "Rio" where it was shown so beautifully! Little did we know that it would turn out to be insanely expensive and not live up to our expectations.. Heck.. I didn't even know that it is pronouced as 'Rio de haneiro' and not 'Janeiro' till I went there!  That's some intro to Portuguese for you :)

 

After spending 3 days in rainy Santiago de Chile, we were happy to catch the flight to Rio. It was a long flight (considering the countries are adjacent) to Rio...about 8 hours with a short stop over in Sao Paulo. I was already getting claustrophobic getting anywhere close to an airplane, with flying almost once every 3 days...South America is one gigantic continent! It will probably take you 3 full months to visit just the main cities all over the continent..

 

We spent 4 nights in Rio and I felt that was good enough to see the main attractions. There isn't much to do there if you go in the non-carnival season. If you are there for the carnival then its a different story!

 

Where to stay?

I had heard and read about Rio being a very high crime rate city and that it isn't very safe for tourists and locals equally. So we were very apprehensive of booking just any hotel. We were warned of staying in Copacabana as its supposed to be not too safe in the nights. So we restricted our stay in the upmarket areas like Ipanema/Leblon/Lagoa though they are friggin expensive. The cheapest hotel you may find in non peak season will cost 200USD for a Double bedroom. Anyway we chose the Ipanema Inn which was a block away from the Ipanema beach. Was happy with the service but the hotel was too old and rustic with very basic amenities and we were paying through our nose!

 

 

Things to do

Of course you would not miss 'Christ the Redeemer' whether or not it is worth seeing! It is definitely over-hyped and when I went all the way up and stood near the statue, I was dumbstruck as I was trying to figure out one reason why it was chosen as a new wonder of the world!! Personally, I feel there is nothing great about the statue (no offense meant, to anyone!). The view from the top of the Corcovado mountain (which is where the Redeemer statue is) is absolutely breathtaking. You reach there in a cogwheel train through the Tijuaca Rainforest, where you can choose to trek as well. You definitely have to go there for the view and not to see the statue. So have your expectations set right else you will be disappointed like I was..

 

 

 

Sugar Loaf mountain is another thing you might want to see. Take a cable car to reach on top of the mountain from where you get a lovely view of the copacabana beach and the city of Rio. You can also see the Christ on top of Corcovado, from this mountain top.

 

Sugar Loaf Mountain

 

 

We booked  a day tour through Viator and did Sugar Loaf + Corcovada on the same day as we did not want to venture out alone for safety sake. At the end of the day we realized that the total time spent at the venue was just about 1.5 to 2 hours and remaining 5hrs was wasted in picking up & dropping people and having lunch and what not! So I highly recommend doing it by yourself, and not wasting time & money on any travel companies...Wish someone was there to tell us that 'before' we went! Lessons learnt through experience!

 

 

View of Copacabana beach from top of sugar loaf

 

 

We also did the Sepatipa Bay cruise for another full day to celebrate our 2nd wedding anniversary! It was a nice chilled out, lazy day on the cruise with not much activity. It's good if you love the waters and wanna lie down at the beach and get some sun. Well, we did that at the Ipanema beach as well, the next day :)

 

Sunset from top of Corcovado mountain

 

 

Samba Dance is another attraction. The most popular one is the Plataforma Samba show which happens in the night 9pm to midnight and is combined with dinner. It's crazy but you should definitely watch it for entertainment!

 

Plataforma Samba Show

Food

Be prepared to spend a lot on food as restaurants are very expensive too. If you are a non-vegetarian then you have no problems in finding some amazing cuisines out there but if you are a veggie, like me then your options are *very* limited. Survive on pizzas/pastas/salads as long as you are there! But we did find a lovely Thai Restaurant called "Nam Thai" in Leblon, which surprisingly was EXTREMELY GOOD! I highly recommend it.

 

Drink

And while you are in Brazil, try their national alcoholic drink Cachaca (pronounced as Ka-sha-sa), which is a cocktail made from fresh sugarcane juice (not molasses) distilled & fermented. Contains about 38% to 48% alcohol. And Brazil's national cocktail is Caipirinha which is made from Cachaca and Lime. Extremely strong and it goes straight into your head with the first sip! You cannot go there and not try this :) And make sure you buy some at the duty free as well to carry back home ;-)

 

Shopping:

I cannot complete this travelogue without talking about shopping! Rio is a shopper's paradise, especially for a woman, as you will find amazing jewellery, accessories, clothes etc at throw away prices...and very unique designs! It's also a crystal lover's paradise. Huge raw crystal clusters, geodes, caves are available on the road side market for dead cheap prices! Just carrying it back home is a problem due to the weight. Else I would have bought lots more. You should definitely visit the Sunday Hippie Fair at Ipanema and also the daily night market at Copacabana if you love to shop... 

 

 

 

 

And last but not the least, learn some basic portuguese or carry a dictionary or a phrase book to translate the basic words so that you can get around, if you are on your own. Even airports do not announce any instructions in English. So best advice - follow the crowd ;)

 

 

 Disclaimer: Do not reproduce this post or the photos without giving due credits or linking back to this post

 

South America Travel Diary: Sao Paulo (Brazil)

South America had always been on our to-do list for a long time, mainly to visit Machu Pichu, one of the new wonders of the world. Since we would anyway travel half way around the world for it, we thought we might as well include other places and make it a longer vacation! So after a lot of research and changing minds off and on, dropping plans off and on, we finally decided up on this itinerary for May 2012. And this is how it looked!

Singapore - Doha- Sao Paulo - Lima - Cusco - MachuPichu

MachuPichu - Cusco - Lima- Santiago de Chile - Rio De Janeioro - Iguazu - Sao Paulo - Doha - Singapore

 

17 days, 3 countries and 7 cities...that was the best we could fit in, with a packed travel schedule. There were more that I would have loved to do like the Fernando de Norona Island and the Amazonas and up north of Brazil as well as Argentina but that would mean a month long of travel and being home sick! So I was quite happy with this short and sweet and interesting itinerary :-)

 

Being in the far east, there were very few options with the flights to SA. None of the flights seemed to go via Pacific direct to SA. Either fly through United States or go all the way through Africa/Middle East/Europe. If you fly through Johannesburg, you can save about 3/4 hours but you have to change the airlines, check out, check in and go through all the hassle. So we chose Qatar Airways and transitted through Doha, with a total of 22 hours flight + 2 hours transit. It was the cheapest option available and our first time with Qatar airlines. They are known for their 5 star service but they did manage to screw up our vegetarian meal request, which was placed a month back! It was my first time in a long haul flight and though I was mentally prepared for it, no amount of preparation helped especially in the 2nd leg which was 14.5hrs. It seemed as though time was not moving and I was just waiting to jump out of the plane! Finally it landed in Sao Paulo in the late afternoon. What an awesome feeling of relief it was!

 

Sao Paulo is a business district of Brazil. There is nothing touristy out there, though they have tried to "create" some tourist attractions but trust me, it is worth a skip. We had to include it in our trip as Qatar flew only to Sao Paulo and not Rio. We stayed close to the Providencia which is the heart of the CBD area and the hotel was close to restaurants, pubs, malls, MRT etc. The choice was more for convenience as we did not have much plans in that city. We just had 2 days of rest and were eagerly looking forward to fly to Peru.

 

It didn't take us long to realize that language is a MAJOR problem in Brazil, even in a very touristy place like Rio or a business district like Sao Paulo!! If you are travelling alone and not with a tourist group or package tours, you cannot manage by speaking English, 'coz English is an alien language there. People expect you to speak Portuguese and if you cannot, then most of them don't even care to make an effort to understand or speak English. Well, I had spent 6 months to learn basic Spanish and was prepared to survive in Peru & Chile and was hoping to manage even in Brazil thinking it would sound similar or people would speak some Spanish at least. Well, I was wrong! So we picked up a Portuguese dictionary and started finding our way around and managing to convey at restaurants as to what we want to eat. It's especially difficult if you are a quirky vegetarian, like yours truly! :-) It was the first time I realized what "feeling lost" truly means!

So my 2 cents - if you are planning in advance, do learn some basic conversational portuguese if you wanna survive there during your travel! And definitely learn Spanish if you are visiting the other countries in SA!!

Stay/Getting Around:

The hotels in Sao Paulo in the central area are quite expensive and an average hotel can range between $100 to $150 (USD) per night. We did not prefer staying in hostels this time mainly becoz of the long, tiring flight. You can use the metro to get around easily, so it is a good idea to stay close to a metro station. If you want to take cabs, then good luck with explaining to the cabbie in Portuguese on where you wanna go. The names of the places/roads dont sound anything like what they are spelt....it's a weird language! :-/

Food:

I am not the right person to give details on Food, coz I am limited to the Veggie stuff. But we did find some nice Italian restaurants, coffee bars for breakfast and even an Indian restaurant (Tandoor) in Providencia. Definitely recommend Tandoor, so you can see how Indian food has been adapted to suit the Brazilian palate ;-) Gopala Madhava is another restaurant (only the name sounds Indian) but it has vegetarian Brazilian cuisine! It is owned by a guy who is a devotee of ISKCON and hence the name. Try it!

Things to do:

1. If you are a lover of history/art, you can visit some museums in this city.

2. Party around and go pub hopping.

3. Take the open top bus city tour

4. Visit hotel Unique or Edificio Italia which are skyscrapers to get a full view of the city..

5. See Ibirapuera Park

We didn't do any of the above :-) Just chilled and roamed around as it was our pit stop!

More coming up in the next post...!

Adieus!

Pratima