Carnaval in Rio!!

We arrived at the pilot station at Rio de Janeiro at about 6:20 on Monday morning. I was already outside on the balcony to watch proceedings as Rio is one of the world's most beautiful sail-ins. 

Arriving in the Rio area. It encompasses about 600 square
miles with 7 million residents

Sugarloaf Mountain

The pilot boat leaving after dropping off our
harbour pilot

Inside Guanabara Bay with Sugarloaf from the other side

It looks like we'd just had a thunderstorm because
the background was completely clouded in

                                      

Over the three days we will be in Rio, we have booked a tour to Corcovado to visit the huge Statue of Christ the Redeemer and an evening on Sugarloaf Mountain to see the sunset. After the fiascos of our previous tours, we cancelled the 6 hour Imperial Petropolis tour for Wednesday. As it turned out, some people we had met on a previous tour were booked on that one as well, and the itinerary had changed substantially because of heavy rain in the area beyond the Corcovado Mountain where the tour was going. An excellent call on our part.

We set out on the Corcovado tour at 8:30 in the morning, and the first thing we saw out of the port was the startup of a morning Carnaval party. Apparently these street parties, which are sanctioned by local authorities, will go on for 4 or 5 hours and then shut down, so the revelers move on to another party that starts up when the first one ends.

We also got to drive by the Carnaval float 'parking lot' on one of the main thoroughfares of the city. We had no idea how the whole parade thing worked until our guide explained it in great detail. There are 12 Samba 'schools' in the upper tier of the Carnaval competition. These are the ones that compete in the big parades at the Sambadrome. They work for 11 months each year to perfect a 70-minute performance in the parade, for which they are subjected to some very strict judging. Points are given for all aspects of the float and performance, including the design of the float, the costumes (I don't know if the points increase with the scantiness of the outfits), the singing, dance moves, and unison of both among all the performers, as well as their timing. The timing doesn't sound like a deal-breaker, as a team can be docked tenths of a point for going over or under their 70 minutes, but in the past few years, the difference between first and second place was just those tenths. So in the end, it may look like a lot of fun, but there is some serious business among these teams to deliver the perfect performance and gain bragging rights for the next year.

Here are photos of some of the floats we passed. This isn't even the full size of some of them. They need to have the tops taken down so they can be moved in and out of the Sambadrome.

Our drive up to the cog rail station at the base of Corcovado went well considering Carnaval was still in full swing. The tour company had things well in hand and being able to go through the group line all 32 of us managed to get on the same train. The ride is about 15 minutes long through part of the Tijuca National Park. A lot of the vegetation there was very familiar from Mom's winter garden, except, of course, her plants were very much smaller!

A view from the trip up

Our first full view of this famous monument. The
last time we were here it was having its
once per decade facelift and was covered
in wooden scaffolding.

And yes, we were both here!

The views from both sides of the viewing area are spectacular. Christ has his back to Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, which are on the ocean side of the city. Good thing, because the bay is still quite polluted and none of the beaches around it are used for swimming. I guess he just didn't want to see all of those skimpy bathing suits!

The long beach there is Copacabana

This last photo was taken from the ship with the excellent telephoto lens on my Canon camera. It is quite often the case that Christ the Redeemer is peeking out of the tops of the clouds. Corcovado Mountain is 710 metres (2,300 ft) high and the statue is another 38 metres (105 ft) high on top of that. When we arrived, it was so clouded over that we couldn't tell exactly where Corcovado even was, but by 8:30 when we met for our tour all the cloud had burned off. It started to build up again later in the afternoon.

But before that, we had to get back to the ship! And that was an adventure in itself. When we arrived back at the base of Corcovado, we had about 45 minutes of extra time for the tour, so the guide and driver thought they'd add a drive past Copacabana Beach to the tour so we'd have a chance to see it.

Copacabana Beach is 4 km long, and from the bus it looked
like one beach umbrella after another at least 10 deep
along every one of them

We don't know who is responsible for them, but there were even a few really interesting sand sculptures along the way:

As well as the ubiquitous 'I am here' sign. It doesn't look like there are any tourists around since nobody is posing on or in front of it. One of our guides told us that about 50% of Cariocas, that's residents of Rio, don't care for Carnaval, and those who can will get out of town for the weekend if possible. From what we saw, it looks like most of the partying is done by the younger crowd.

As we started back toward the port, we also started to run into the traffic caused by road closures and blockages. We passed some of the infamous favelas, or shantytowns, along the periphery of the downtown area. These are communities of immigrants from the rural areas of Brazil that were built up between the 1940s and the 1970s when they couldn't buy land or homes and became squatters in the hills. As a tourist, this is a place to steer clear of, as over time each community has developed its own social system, and the Rio police can't do much against the criminal activity that runs the favela economy.

As we slowed down in some traffic on a side street - we couldn't use the main street because of floats being moved for the evening's performance at the Sambadrome - we started to see some very interesting local costumes.

And after about half an hour of creeping along the street, we finally figured out why we weren't getting anywhere, and where all these costumes were going:

That was an unauthorized street party that took over a whole intersection, and the revelers blocked the road so the traffic had to inch its way through. Had it been authorized, there would have been police to make sure traffic could get by, and there would also have been sanitation and medical support available. There was neither one here, and it was obvious that the driver and guide had not known about this party, or they would have taken a completely different route.

A float being moved for one of the parades.

We finally got back to the ship about an hour and a half late and grabbed lunch at the Pool Grill. Then I went down to S.A.L.T. Lab for a cooking class. There are 9 cooking stations, and the chef instructs on simple dishes local to the area being visited. This time we made Vatapa, a shrimp stew that was created by West African slaves in the Bahia area.

The ingredients

The final product. It was delicious!

We were in our suite, preparing for the evening, when we started to hear a lot of noise and a heavy beat. We looked outside and found this:

A huge Carnaval party just outside the port buildings. There must have been 5,000 people along the streets and in the square. Our ship moved a little farther along the pier at 6:00 after another cruise ship left, so we were spared the noise later on when we tried to get to sleep. We have no idea how long the party went on.

On Tuesday we had no plans until the evening, when we were going up Sugarloaf for the Sunset, Cocktails and Appetizers. The bulk of the Carnaval celebrations were over, so there wasn't much traffic to impede our trip to the cablecar station.

The cablecars come from Germany and hold 65 passengers per lift. Our guide told us they do 1,800 full trips per day in high season at an average price of around $50US equivalent per ticket. So that's 1800 x 65 x $50, or gross revenue of over $5.8 Million per day!! Around 1910, one entrepreneurial family asked the state if they could put the cablecars up to the summit to create a tourist attraction for the city, and they were given a permanent concession to do so, as long as it remained in the family, which it has.

The trip is actually over two hills, the first is Urca, where there is a restaurant and some shops, and then the higher is Sugarloaf itself. The summit is 396 metres (1,100 ft) above the city, and offers amazing views over the city. It turned out to be a little too cloudy to get a good sunset, but it was a great experience nonetheless:

An MSC ship on its way out to sea

This is the view over the city at night from the terrace at Urca, the lower hill. As the sun went down we noticed some heat lightning flashing in the distance, and wondered if that meant a thunderstorm was coming. It did hold off until we were back on the ship, and then the rain was whipping around so much that it looked like snow.

Our tour also included cocktails and appetizers at the restaurant, and this is what was served along with Caiphiranias or whatever else we wanted to drink.

On the left, salt cod and mashed potato fritters, and
on the right, beef empanadas

Provoleta, the provolone cheese appetizer
we had made at S.A.L.T. Lab last week

This was a corned beef and mashed potato 'pie'
topped with cheese

We didn't need much of anything for dinner once we got back to the ship!

That was it for our tours in Rio. We spent Wednesday on the ship, and are leaving today, Thursday, at 1:00 p.m. after three and a half days here in port. It is a very hot and sticky day with a lot of haze around, so photos may be a bit of a challenge. I'm glad I got them on the way into port on Monday morning!`