Day 4 - The temperature's rising...

15:30
The AC unit in our room is noisy, and has two settings - on (COLD) and off (room rapidly warms). It’s too cold and noisy to sleep with it on all night, but too hot not to have it turned on at all. Largely as a result of this, I’ve had a slightly sketchy night’s sleep. It’s fine - I can nap later. Vicki is awake at 07:00, and anyone who knows her will understand how disconcerting this is. We grab an early breakfast, and are out the door not long after 09:00.

The drive up to Christ the Redeemer is slow. We’ve caught the end of what we assume is rush-hour, but honestly - the traffic around Rio is pretty bad whatever time of day it is. Still - our car is cool, and we enjoy adding to our knowledge of the city’s geography along the way.

We take a 20 minute train / funicular to the top of the mountain. At one point we stop for about 5 minutes to allow a descending train to pass us. When the train’s not moving, it’s sweltering. The temp today is due to hit around 35C. Happily, there’s not a ton of heat index to add to that, but it’s still hot by our standards. The views from the top of the mountain are staggering. We have a 360 degree view of Rio, and can appreciate the size and scale of this mega-city that is home to some 13 million people. We can see the Copacabana and Ipanema beaches that we’ll check out tomorrow, the phallic Sugar Loaf mountain, the world famous Maracana stadium… There’s also a statue of Jesus up here, but that’s not really our thing.

What we also see in abundance are people of Instagram, influencers in the wild. The number of people taking posed selfies and pictures is mind-blowing. They’ll spend literal minutes trying to get the right angle, light, pose, facial expression. We definitely do NOT get in their way on purpose.

We head back down the mountain by train, and again get stuck for 5 minutes waiting for a train to pass us. The temperature’s definitely rising, and this afternoon is set to be a melter. We jump in a cab over to Urca, and grab tickets for the Sugar Loaf cable car. There are actually two cable cars - the first to a mid-point on Urca Hill, around 200m up, and another up to the peak of Sugar Loaf, another 200m up. The cable cars were made famous by the fight scene between Bond and Jaws in Moonraker. Again, the views are breathtaking. We’re near the smaller, city-centre airport here, and we see a couple of planes coming in to land which are actually below us. We grab an uber-cold drink or two, and some snacks, and spend a very happy hour people watching. We make a vague plan to head out for dinner in Santa Theresa later, and decide a few hours rest and recuperation is deserved…

22:00
I fall into a deep, dream fuelled sleep. I’m more than a little discombobulated when I wake up, but feel better for a nap. We have a bit of a snafu, when an Uber car arrives, claiming it’s for us, but is the wrong make, model, plate etc etc. We *think* we’ve just been subject to our first attempt to rob us. We cancel the ride, and then the correct car turns up a minute later. Rebooked, we’re on our way quickly enough, and take a fairly short, very uphill, and incredibly pretty drive up the hill to Santa Theresa. It’s a boutique, bouji and Bohemian neighbourhood, on the hill above Lapa. It’s only a mile or thereabouts from our hotel, but most of that is up a vertiginous incline. Quite apart from our policy of making sure we take cabs after dark, I think we’d also have struggled to walk up here in the heat, which is still stifling.

We arrive at Bar Explorer, which is a very cool and pretty little restaurant with a garden of stone and vines, under which we sit. The menu is full of intriguing dishes. We share some Arancini type rice balls, and some deep fried tapioca Dadinhos to start. Vicks and Tam have a banging tilapia dish for their main, and I have a fusion sounding seafood pasta dish. All the food is good - the standouts being the arancini and the tilapia dish. Vicks has a brilliant virgin cocktail, and Tamsin and I add to our repertoire of Caipis. This one is properly sharp, but all the better for it. It’s starting to cool now, which is a blessed relief. It’s more of the same tomorrow - perhaps even hotter, so we’ll be mindful of sunscreen, shade, hats and water requirements. For now, it’s past 20:00, and we’re all flagging. Jet-lag correction is happening, but slowly. We’ve an early start tomorrow for our favela tour, so an early night is a must. At least, that’s the excuse we tell ourselves…Leia mais