Salvador :: Brazil
Even the slums here are beautiful.
Places: Ilha Grande, Rio de Janeiro & Salvador.
Coolest thing I did: Not satisfied with just going up the Sugarloaf once by cable car I spent my birthday climbing up the back side of it instead.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: The guy who made the Lapa stairs (the ones covered in tiles in the Snoop Dog video shot in Brazil) is not only alive and kicking, but most days you can see him still cutting tiles and adding them to the steps.
Let's get it out of the way with: Rio is a stunningly beautiful city. Like all the other big Brazilian cities I've seen it's defined by a challenging geography to put an actual city into, in this case there being massive, pointy stone mountains sticking up all over the place. You get a glimpse of this when you're travelling around the place, but you only really appreciate it from up high. The two big name locations to look at it are probably also the only two Must Do things in Rio: The Sugar Loaf and the Corcovado, topped with an Art Deco wonder of the world: Cristo Redentor. From both you can see the city fighting it's way through the jungle mountains, with road tunnels cutting under the massive favelas (illegally constructed slums) instead of trying to go through them, and even those seem to add to the unrealness of the place. It's a quietening moment to look down over Copacabana & Ipanema in the hazy sunset, with the city abruptly stopping at beaches ended in pointy hills. Even Sydney seems a little less beautiful by comparison.
So my plan to come back to Rio got shifted around, with Ilha Grande being a nice place to go to the beach at but a terrible place to try and organise things over the internet from. I ended up spending a far less relaxing time than I thought (including a 9 hour boat cruise with all you can eat BBQ, and probably more importantly to the outcome, all you can drink Caipirinhas) but I did spend every alternate day hiking across the island to find more remote white sand beaches sticking out of the jungle. I'm glad I didn't stay in Rio past the end of carnival, but Ilha Grande was kind of like Paraty, but without the cultural relics to look at.
So my time in Rio was spent trying to get some serious tourism done, and man did I do some. It was interesting to see places like Lapa, with it's arches and the downtown theatres and old colonial buildings without them being surrounded by hurricane fences to keep revellers off them like they were during carnival. The highlight of that area being Escadaria Selaron, an in-progress outdoor work of art. Called The Great Madness, they started when the Chilean artist Jorge Selaron started tiling the steps outside his house in 1990. He's still going. It started out with some kind of rhyme and reason to it, but has since morphed into a monster, with a policy that people around the world can contribute a tile and he'll find a place for it. One Dutch girl at the hostel actually found a pattern so familiar that she asked about it and it turned out a friend of hers from home and contributed it 3 years ago, after seeing the steps. While I'd only seen it before on the way to a non-existent block party in Santa Theresa during carnival, it was nice to not only see it at leisure, but also to see the man himself cutting tiles and talking to the tourists. He claims he'll keep going until the day he dies.
You've seen the pictures, I know I had, but there's something magically about actually standing at the feet of The Cristo Redentor statue while all of Rio stretches out behind you. A tribute to the artist that it's possible to give a statue that gigantic such a serene expression that you feel instantly at peace looking up into his face: even surrounded by about 9 or 10 bus loads of people. The most popular poses for pictures are (of course) both arms stretched out, but just to show how inventive people are, there were a fair few angled in such a way to make it look like you're dancing with Jesus, giving him a high five or even (quite disturbingly) patting him on the crotch.
I'd already been up the Sugar Loaf by cable car before the carnival, but someone got it into my head that it's possible to actually climb up it and I made it a bit of a mission to find out how. That's how I ended up spending the afternoon of my 35th Birthday clearing a hangover by clambering up the much easier, back face of the Sugar Loaf. They do it in the afternoon so it's all in shadow, which is nice when it's 35+ degrees out. It's fairly steep, but there's only one section of about 30 or 40m where it's actually necessary to use ropes and climbing harnesses, so I went up with a guide and a 40 year old Korean guy who basically had to translate everything between the non-English speaking guide and the non-Portuguese speaking me. Even the bits the guide was describing a "trekking" involved using both your hands a lot of the time so you really do feel like you've earned it when you finally get to the top, and feel superior to everyone who took the cable car up. The looks on everyone's face when you emerge from the jungle, covered in sweat and dirt and climb the back fence to the viewing platform are worth the price of admission alone.
Things have been changing in Rio with the lead up to hosting the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, and once priority of the government is that the police should actually have control of all of the city by then. Up until three months or four months ago the favelas, the large illegal slums that have gone up all over Brazil but are most prominent in Rio for being visible on the mountain sides where no-one else would build, had been totally under the control of drug gangs for decades, with the police never being able to enter them. The government has decided enough is enough so the police and various military units were sent in to secure the larger favelas. You've been able to do tours of Rocinha, the largest in Brazil for years, but it somehow feels a lot safer when you're not doing it that the behest of a local druglord.
The favelas are the result of poor people from regional Brazil coming to the big cities to find work and having nowhere to live simply starting building houses one against the other, usually in concrete or with whatever they could get. Plumbing and other such amenities are totally unplanned and it shows. In Rocinha this has resulted in something that looks almost like a Greek village or Moroccan medina, spilling down the hill with winding footpaths and the occasional road carved out of it. That adds to the spectacle of getting up the hill the same way as the locals: by paying a bloke 2 reals, riding pillion on his motorbike as he tears up the winding road with little fear of passing between buses, trucks and military vehicles along the way. That was probably the best part of the tour, and I'd have happily paid another 2 to see what it's like going downhill the same way.
Rocinha was one of the first favelas cleared by the army and the presence of tactical police units and special forces are felt as they are still trying to find drug labs and traffickers hiding out in the jungle above the slums. The tour guide seemed ambivalent about which would be worse, as the police in Brazil aren't exactly corruption free, or predictable. Despite the rule of drug barons being as capricious as you'd probably expect, people had gotten used to it and the place is a bit of a state of flux. However, they seem quite comfortable with small groups of gringos walking down the laneways and taking pictures of life threatening wiring. I wonder what the first one of these tours was like: I'd say there would have been a certain disbelief at seeing gringos walking the streets of somewhere the police are scared to enter. Now of course, it's proper tourism. You go and visit overpriced art galleries, people's shops and are press ganged into paying local buskers to a point where you know tourism has arrived. The locals are probably more comfortable with tourists putting a bit of money directly in their pocket. I was a bit disappointed they don't take you to a meth lab or crack den though. Maybe that's coming later.
I think what I'll take with me most, however, on my second visit to Rio was just how manic it actually was during carnival. I walked the streets to Ipanema on Monday nigt to an all you can eat BBQ place (Brazil does love it's meat) and was the only person on the street. Compare that to carnival where there would be about half a million people on the same street (and probably a standing lake of urine in the street by lunchtime) it was hard to get your head around. To be able to find somewhere to put your towel down on Copacabana was something I'd never experienced before, and despite some good efforts the nightlife seems to be post-carnival retreat at the moment. I guess what I was seeing was a collective hangover on a massive scale, which isn't hard to get your head around when you've spent a week drinking with millions of people. That has to come to a pretty nasty end at some point.
So I've just flown into Salvador in the north after making the non-decision of taking a 2 hour flight rather than a 28 bus trip. I've done very little, having slept 2 hours last night but I did pass some very nice looking beaches and heaps of old churches and whatnot are right outside my door so I'll be basing myself around here for the last week or so of my time in Brazil, if all goes to plan I'll be flying to Colombia and the cheaper side of Sudamerica in a week or so.