Originally, our itinerary had us planning to go to the
Ipanema Hippie Fair on this morning.
However, after talking to our tour guide Alex, we learned that the fair
is open from 10a-6p, so we didn’t have enough time in the morning before our
planned activities to go and get back.
So we decided to wait and see if there was time when we were done with
our Tour of Rio.
Alex was our tour guide again, and picked us up in a van
provided by Be a Local. We started first
by driving up the hillside to Corcovado, the mountain that has Christ the
Redeemer at the top of it. After
ascending many steps, we were able to be directly in front of the statue that
we were able to see from our hotel window (drastically different in size,
though!). 
After leaving CTR, we drove through a few small sections of
the city, including a stop in Sta. Teresa village, where we were able to get
out of the van and visit a local art shop.
We walked a bit around Sta. Teresa and then got back onto the bus and
headed over to Escadaria Selaron, also known as “the steps” in Rio. Jo mentioned that the steps were featured on
an episode of The Amazing Race, but that’s not a show that I watch
regularly. These steps were formed by a
Chilean artist, Jorge Sealron, in the 1990s, when he started to repair the
steps outside of his house and covering them in colorful tiles, which ended up
coming from all over the globe. In
total, there are 250 steps with over 2000 tiles from over 60 different
countries. We even found a Maine tile!
After the steps, we headed over to Sugarloaf, which is
located on Guanabara Bay. Originally,
Sugarloaf was thus named by the Portuguese people who came upon Brazil by
ship. The mountain was white, because it
was covered in seagull poo. Today, the
mountain is regular dirt (brown) colored, as locals harvest and sell the
seagull poo as fertilizer. To get to the
top, you take two cable cars. The first
leg (1 KM) takes you to the top of Urca Mountain, which gave us a great view of
Copacabana and CTR. The next leg took us
to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain (396m tall) where we were greeted with
beautiful 360 degree views of the beaches of Rio. When we descended back to Urca, we were
greeted by a few monkeys in the staging equipment near a few of the
restaurants. Though the signs say
specifically NOT to feed the animals, our tour guide, Alex, was able to get a
few pieces of banana from a nearby smoothie stand and lure the monkeys out from
hiding. It was amazing to see the Mama
and baby try to reach (but not too far!) the fruit from his hand.
While a few of our group were dropped off at the Market
after our Sugarloaf tour, the rest of us went back to the hotel. We were ready for a shower and some
downtime. We met back in the hotel lobby
at 7pm to head over to La
Trattoria Rio, Copacabana (literally around the corner from
our hotel) to meet with Lenny Abbey, the head of the National Olympic and
Paralympic Committee Relations and Service for Rio 2016 and also met with an
Olympic-scholar and her son to hear about her work on the Transforma Program
within Brazil. It was interesting to
hear their two opposing viewpoints on the changes that had just been released
for the 2020 Olympics and beyond by the IOC.
No comments:
Post a Comment