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Seeing the sunset strewn Statue of Christ disappear behind buildings on the way back up to the airport, I came to a number of conclusions about this enigmatic city. There are three types of people in Rio: the extremely rich, the tourist and the extremely poor. You can therefore guess the order of things. Rio De Janeiro has a great deal of problems.
With a few hours to spare before our flight home, my Dad and I decided to quickly get a taxi to the Maracana for a stadium tour. Unfortunately though, the tour had already left. No worries – our old Mario Zagallo lookalike taxi driver offered to take us around instead. This unsurprisingly involved us visiting the changing rooms, museum and interior of the stadium itself.
On our third day in Rio, we saw it’s biggest Cathedral – an impressive conical shaped structure which is also massive inside. We then stopped at the finale spot of the annual Carnival parade and tried on some exotic headwear. Afterwards, it was off to somewhere made famous by its appearence in James Bond. Yes, Sugarloaf Mountain. And at the top is truly a view to behold.
We got a bus to the base of Corcovado Mountain and rode a train packed with tourists and a noisy samba band to its peak. With each climb in altitude, there is a phenomenal feeling of the city revealing itself from behind the jungle foliage. Then at the top, suddenly confronting you is a remarkable a 360 degree view of Rio with Christ the Redeemer perched mere metres behind.
After arriving back at our hotel at around 1 a.m. the previous night from Uruguay, we were up again 3 hours later to catch our morning flight to Rio De Janeiro. Varig had cleverly devoted a single check in counter to all of its departing flights, and so, despite being at the airport 3 hours beforehand, we ended up having a ridiculously close shave in actually making our departure!
