Rio Deal

I was pretty sure that within a few seconds of stepping
off the bus that I would be robbed, shot, kidnapped
and sold into the white slave trade or
worse—made to drink warm beer.

Philip Blazdell

I don't really need to write anymore because you already know everything there is to know about the city. I could just leave a few pages blank and then close with a witty anecdote, preferably about beer, and everyone would be happy. Or I could drag out all the old clichés about the marvelous city, the favelas and the beautiful women and fill several pages in this way before closing with the same witty anecdote. It seems that everyone knows Rio whilst Rio remains known to so few.

For my own personal travels I had tended to shy away from Rio, as I believed that any place that so many people consistently raved about would have nothing of interest to me—far too fake and touristy I thought. I was also sick of people in Europe thinking that Brazil was Rio (and conversely Rio was Brazil) and I didn't want to propagate these ideas further. But after a year in Brazil and constant advice from my colleagues in the Northeast not to go there and after reading sufficient Machado de Assis, I decided that enough was enough and bought a bus ticket there for the two-day trip from Fortaleza to Rio. If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing the hard way.

In the year of 1502 André Gonçalves slipped out of Portugal on a very secret mission. His ultimate aim was to confirm the existence of the fabled land that Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed he had discovered (reportedly by accident, as he'd been sent on an expedition to India) a few years earlier. Gonçalves found, perhaps by chance, the bay today known as Guanabara, which he mistook for the mouth of a mighty river. River being Rio, in Portuguese and the month being January (Janeiro) he brightly concluded: Rio de Janeiro! The name stuck and today perhaps it is one of the most evocative and famous cities in the world.

Some historians claim that the first building in Rio de Janeiro was built in an area known today as Flamengo. Nothing much came out of it though, and the Portuguese, typically, did not give much importance to their finding for a while. This changed when the French decided to set their cloven foot there in 1555 with Admiral Villegaignon who landed to found the superbly named Antarctic France, a colony of French Calvinists.

The Portuguese were not very happy with this idea, and thus sent Mem de Sá, who, according to legend, managed to expel the French in a mere two days. He left Rio and sailed back home, quite sure he had taught everybody a lesson. He should have known better, though. The tropical beaches and welcoming climate had left too much of a good impression on the French, as they have on many modern day visitors, and they soon came back for more. In 1564, Estácio de Sá (a nephew of Mem de Sá) was dispatched from Portugal. It took him a full two years, and much blood shed, to finally get the area back to the Portuguese' hands.

Rio only started to grow faster in 1690, with the discovery of gold in neighboring state of Minas Gerais. As the state was landlocked, Rio became the destination port of the expeditions, and suddenly started to attract unprecedented attention. The French attacked Rio in 1710, and again 1711, this time with a large fleet. Their endearing idea was to sack the city, and extract a ransom. Both times they were repelled—as should always be done with the French and the city began to grow in importance and wealth.

Rio eventually became the second capital of Brazil, after Salvador in Bahia and when, in the early nineteenth century, Europe was being ravaged by Napoleon, Dom João VI, the Portuguese monarch, packed up and fled with his wife and the whole court to Rio. This increased the city population from 50 to 65 thousand in one year, and 70 thousand by the next. Although the Portuguese royalty was not exactly a model of sophistication, they did bring with them civilized habits, like using silverware and lavish count entertainment. Other habits, like taking regular baths, were still regarded as something that only the Indians would do. Locals did their best to please the sovereign, and taking advantage of this, Dom João VI often paid his debts by giving nobility titles or awards. These were heady times, which Machado de Assis captured so well.

However, Dom João never really took to life in the tropics and as soon as things quieted down he moved back to Portugal leaving his son Pedro in charge of things. This same Pedro would later declare the country independent and cause his father considerably pains when he declared himself Emperor. Aside from a few obvious flaws he was a good emperor, but quite a ladies man. His extra-marital affairs were common knowledge (Marquesa de Santos, became almost as famous as his wife, Austrian-born Empress Leopoldina). He brought about major improvements to the city with access to gaslights, plumbing, a sewage system, telephone, telegraph and a railway linking the city to the state of Minas Gerais.

The first Republic was born with a military coup in 1889 led by Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca and Rio remained the capital of Brazil until the year of 1960, when President Juscelino Kubitschek (JK to his friends) inaugurated what was his dream vision of a model capital (I'd hate to think what his nightmares were like). The federal district was then transferred to Brasília, a city oddly shaped like an airplane. Today, however, Rio remains the cultural capital of the country and, perhaps, of South America itself.

I arrived in Rio's busy central bus station late Thursday night. I had been traveling a long time and was feeling travel sore and extremely apprehensive. After all the reams of text I had read on Rio over the years, and the huge amount of anecdotal information that I had picked up from other travelers I was pretty sure that within a few seconds of stepping off the bus that I would be robbed, shot, kidnapped and sold into the white slave trade or worse—made to drink warm beer.

There is no other city to my mind that has such an anecdotal reputation as Rio and it is hard not to get sucked in sometimes and believe the stories; perhaps this is part of the city's allure—the better than even chance of something terrible happening to you on which you can dine out for the rest of your days: `Did I tell you about the time I got attacked by a posse of mad machete wielding maniacs in Rio?'

I took a deep breath, stepped off the bus, adjusted my sunglasses and went to look for my bag. By the time I had made my way through the crowds to the side of the bus (after having to fight past three dozen tearful families who were standing around hugging long lost offspring—I wasn't sure if they were happy or sad that their children had returned—it was all terribly emotional in the way that only Brazilians can achieve) the wiry baggage handler already had my backpack in his arms and was looking for its rightful owner. He lifted it onto my back with a groan and told me I was setting myself up for a very uncomfortable old age if I insisted in walking around with three tons on my back. `Enjoy Rio,' he called after me as I pushed through the crowds. So far, so good.

I was feeling quite good till I realized that I hadn't got a single real to my name and had to go to a cash point. `I am definitely going to be mugged now,' I thought as I wandered around rather aimlessly looking for an ATM. Great! I found a friendly policeman (a common sight in Rio's bus terminals) who was all gun and knobbly looking baton and I asked him where the nearest ATM was. He smiled and laughed, `I am bored standing here looking at all these beautiful girls, let me show you'.

On the way he gave me a potted history of Rio, a rundown on the local football results and a guide to Western philosophy, which was both concise and different in its outlook. Cash safely tucked away he led me to the taxi rank and told me it was going to be the perfect night for a cold beer. Everything in Rio eventually leads to a cold beer, and if the statistics are to be believed women make up the bulk of the drinking-classes. It was, after all, going to be my kind of city.

Taxis have always been a problem for me and I seem to attract deranged taxi drivers like moths to a flame. I thought: I am bound to be kidnapped now, taken on a cruise round the city to bump up the cost, taken to a favela or at least robbed and made to listen to crap cheesy Brazilian pop, it's bound to happen, it might as well be now—let's get it over with. My driver took my bags and locked them in the trunk of his battered taxi. I showed him the address and he nodded, slipped the car into gear and took off so fast I almost got whiplash (Cariocas seem unable to drive at anything less than breakneck speed—it is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Rio).

As we rushed dangerously from lane to lane the driver asked if it was my first time in Rio. `Yes', I replied nervously with one hand covering my eyes, `was I in a hurry? If not we could take a cruise round the long way and see a few of the sights on the way. The price would be the same whatever,' the driver reassured me whilst performing a turn against the rush hour traffic with only one hand on the wheel and the other making an obscene gesture to a passing girl of heartbreaking loveliness.

He was good to his word, but I saw nothing of the sights he pointed out as my eyes were firmly closed in fear of an impending crash as we carved up bus after bus. The tour complete, he eased his car across four lanes of oncoming traffic, hand brake turned into a side street and checked again the address I had given him. `Its near Pão de Açúcar' I told him trying to sound vaguely confidant as we screeched up in front of a beautifully modern glass fronted building. `Here we are', he smiled, `enjoyed the ride?' I smiled, waited a few moments for my stomach to catch up.

`I don't think this is the right place, my friend told me it was in front of Pão de Açúcar and I don't see the supermarket anywhere'. The taxi driver took a long hard look at me and burst out laughing. He lent out of the window and pointed with a chubby finger to the great craggy mountain opposite. `Know what that is?' he asked almost choking with laughter. I blushed, `That's Pão de Açúcar? The real one. I thought I was looking for the supermarket of the same name'. This, the driver told me, was the funniest thing he had ever heard and he almost let me have the ride for free. Almost….

Being a Carioca

Dauro was thrilled to see me and dragged me immediately off to his house. Getting into his house was no mean feat and even Tom Cruise would have thought twice about it. Dauro had a bunch of keys about the size of my backpack and worked them in the various locks with a degree of proficiency that I was never to achieve. Within two minutes we were sitting in his apartment admiring the view—the quickest I ever managed with the keys was something closer to a few hours. `How was the trip, long?, you must be tired, oh well, never mind, let's go out now on the town; we have wasted far too much valuable drinking time already'.

Although Dauro is not a carioca (according to linguists, the term carioca, as locals call themselves, is not derived from the word Rio, as in carioca. It is actually a Tupi Indian term (kara'i oca), roughly meaning, "white house", or "house of whites" That's how the Indians called the houses built by the Portuguese. For some reason, eventually the Portuguese started thinking of themselves as cariocas), he shares their almost devotional love of beer, which to me seems a perfectly rational attitude to adopt especially if you are forced to travel by taxi in Rio (I have a similar view of life in Argentina, but beer is never strong enough after a rush hour taxi drive in downtown Buenos Aires).

Forty five minutes later we bounced off a bus in the wildly dangerous looking and decadent neighborhood of Arco do Teles. It was a maze of winding cobbled streets packed with bars, music and strobing lights. It was not that there was an inherent tension in the air just that there was just a great potential for something to happen. We dodged around beefy doormen and signs which read: entrance R$ 8 (US$ 3.40), consumption R$ 20 (US$ 8.50)—special price for women and Happy Hour every night.

It was like Covent Garden for adults, everyone had a hustle and if you didn't then somewhere along the line you had gone badly wrong. Even the ubiquitous street kids were in on the act and had boxes wrapped in Christmas paper which they were shaking for change, `Hey, mister Gringo, want to be my Santa Claus?' One particularly dirty little girl, who looked like she had stepped straight out of Dickens took a shine to my shaved head and followed me through the streets rubbing greasy fingers over my head till Dauro shooed her away with a kindly word. Drunk men in designer suits swaggered around eyeing the mini skirted girls whilst transvestites in sheer see through dresses played the crowd with humor, if not grace.

We eventually found a table and a willing waiter, cold beers started to appear with frightening regularity. Some friends arrived. I was now feeling exhausted, hungry and more than anything wanted to go home. To go to the toilet I had to explain to an over developed bouncer in my desperately poor Portuguese that I didn't really want to enter the club, just use the bathroom. He made me repeat myself several times; I could see in his eyes that he found my pleadings amusing.

The club was packed from wall to wall with hot sweaty beautiful people all grinding their hips to Madonna, drinking beer and living the fabled hedonistic carioca lifestyle—I was too exhausted to care. Rio is famous for its frantic pace of life—each day feels like the end of the world with everyone trying to squeeze extra minutes out of an already stretched day. I just felt tired. We cruised from bar to restaurant to bar to snack bar till it all became one alcoholic fueled binge and events began to blur into one long party.

Very early the next day, with only a small hangover, we rushed to the airport to meet my girlfriend. The sun was just beginning to make its way towards the peak of Pão de Açúcar as we rushed to find the bus stop and pick up a bunch of flowers. The mountain backlit by the first rays of the sun looked like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and I kept expecting alien space ships to wiz past us—stranger things have happened in Rio I am told and we were so busy gawping at the magnificent view that we nearly missed the bus—which would have been a disaster as Saskia had already predicted that we would forget to meet her, and had to chase the bus for two blocks before we finally got it to stop and let us climb on board.

The ride out to the ultra modern airport was lovely, we screamed by (at typical carioca velocity) past great architectural triumphs of buildings, which would have not looked out of place in Paris or Vienna, a huge derelict warehouse earmarked for the site of the new Guggenheim museum, and even a naval shipyard where we could just make out the black hulls of submarines glistening in the early morning tropical sun. It was paradise personified for me—all the bustle of the city within a palm fronded framework of hedonism. You could imagine this as being the preferred holiday resort of immortals.

We arrived with plenty of time to kill and sat complacently eating pão de queijo and drinking coffee waiting for the flight to arrive. Of course we were in the wrong terminal and when we arrived, breathless from running the length of the surprisingly long airport to the other terminal, Saskia was already sitting there wearing an `I told you so look on her face'. The birthday flowers cheered her up and once we were in a taxi and heading across town all was forgiven. It's difficult to be anything but scared in a Rio taxi.

Cristo Redentor

Later that day we took a bus across town to one of Rio's most enduring landmarks. Brazil may not be Rio and Rio may not be Brazil but the statue of Christ the Redeemer, which looks like it's about to bungee jump down onto the city from the summit of Corcovado, is most definitely Rio and essential to everyone who visits the city. Some people say that Christ has a melancholic expression on his face as he looks down on to the city that typifies both the epitome and decay of the urban dream, but, personally, I feel the look is one of awe and I challenge anyone not to feel similarly as they stand high above the city and look down on its heaving, sun baked streets.

The antique, and endearingly creaky cog railway, which wound its way through the calm greenness of Tijuca forest—the world's largest suburban forest which was entirely replanted at the time of Dom Pedro II—dropped us 122 steps from the top and we joined the throngs of sun burnt tourists in the hot and sticky climb to the top. I complained constantly all the way up—about the heat, about the tourists and about the tacky tourist shops that lined our route.

But, standing on top of the Corcovado Mountain, under the outstretched arms of the statue of Christ the Redeemer, I realized that I was in one of the most wonderful places in the world. I looked down on Rio, spread out in all its double-edged beauty. Part of the city was edged by the white sand of Copacabana, Ipanema and other less famous beaches whilst elsewhere there were mountains and slums. The First and Third Worlds come together here, and the result is extravagant and undeniable. The only sound we heard was the constant `click click click' of cameras.

We watched line after line of tourists ape the pose of the thoughtful Christ and after having had their picture taken then rush over to marvel at the sublime view down to Guanabara bay—a view, which no matter how cynical you are, is indeed one of the most thrilling and compelling views in the world. It is a view that redefines superlatives and defies comparison. It almost makes you cry.

Below me, lost in a heat haze was the marvelous city. A city with 6 million inhabitants where, in 1998, police killed more than 700 people. Compare this to New York, which has a population of 19 million, where police killed less than 30. A city whose fabled football stadium holds close to 200,000 fanatical devotees of the beautiful game; a city which has just opened a university in the largest favela and where rumor has it that legs, arms and feet are regularly washed up on the trendy beaches of Leblon and Ipanema. A city whose beaches, you are lead to believe by well meaning journalists who never leave the bar of their 5 star hotels, resemble Hamburger Hill on a particularly bad day. But as a tourist, and a pretty hapless one at that, it seemed unlikely that I would ever come across more trouble then a bad case of sun burn and the odd hangover. Rio may be a lot of things to a lot of people, but it certainly didn't feel dangerous or ferocious. In fact, most of the time, it felt quite quaint and homely.

On Sunday, Dauro took us to `pray at the Church of the Cariocas', more commonly known as Ipanema beach. A beach, which a recent article in London's Guardian called `the ultimate in see-and-be-seen beaches' and then continued with `the boys and girls of Ipanema beach are visions of bronzed loveliness in the tiniest swimwear known to man.' A few days later under the grabbing headline of `Rio turning into a giant toilet bowel' the paper proclaimed that `the sea near Copacabana and Ipanema has been regularly marked with red streaks of algae, caused by high levels of feces in the water', and that, `on the beaches there were "black tongues"—dark stains in the sand from various types of pollution'. Which lead me to worry for the health of the bronzed lovelies we hoped to meet and the consistency of the Guardian's journalism.

In actual fact there was some truth in the article as far as the pollution is concerned, the beaches are generally considered polluted and unsuitable for swimming and the only people we saw brave the waters were pale foreigners with lurid beach shorts and pealing noses. I was put off by the large oilrig like construction that was lurching menacingly offshore and had something to do with major subway repairs.

The beach itself, and this I am sure is heresy, was more than a little disappointing—in this case don't believe the media hype. The pale sand that stretched some distance along the coast was packed, almost cheek to cheek with cariocas—families, young girls eyeing the young guys, guys eyeing girls, old ladies well past their prime eyeing the young bloods and children with bucket and spades under the watchful care of empregadas (servants).

There was no shade, no bars on the beach and not really enough room to stretch out and take in the scene. It was the antithesis of a lovely beach and Saskia and I kept sneaking glances at each other as if to say—is this it? The biggest shock was that apart from Dauro, Saskia and I the beach was free of tanned gods and goddesses and there wasn't a single tiny bikini on show (I know—I walked most of the length of the beach looking for one).

In fact, most looked dispiritingly modest and wouldn't have even made my grandmother blush. Another popular media myth crumbled to dust in front of us. It was all very disheartening and felt like Blackpool with sun and not the paradise I had been lead to believe. Paradise, quite clearly, is in the Northeast.

We soon fell into the rhythm of the city spending our mornings walking the tourist route (Rio must have one of the world's highest densities of LP guide books in the world), having a fruit juice and a pastel for lunch from a road side bar and then the afternoon lazing around with the papers before a few bottles of wine with friends. This naturally was followed by a long serious discussion of literature and politics with Dauro and then heading off into the night to a decadent bar in Lapa to dance the night away to Samba or to sit in a beach side bar with friends from the local university and talk about our collective hopes and dreams over lavishly fried fish until the sun came up and the frantic activity began again. The days, short and hedonistic as they were, were the halcyon days of my time in Brazil.

On our last day in Rio we took the cable car up to the summit of the craggy looking Pão de Açúcar to look down once again on the marvelous city, which had done its best to befriend us over the last few months. On this particular day the city was lost in a haze of wispy white cloud. For all our patience we were rewarded with only faint glimpses of the city below. Rio remained enigmatic to the last and that is perhaps the real fascination of the marvelous city that will drag me back for many years to come.

Philip Blazdell is English by birth, a scientist by training and a traveler by nature. He has traveled extensively in Brazil and is a regular contributor to numerous magazines and Web pages. He can be contacted at pblazdell@scigen.co.uk or nihon_news@yahoo.com

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