Rio de Janeiro, Day 2 and journey home

18 March. Woke about 6am. Had to pinch myself to realise that I was awake and not in one of those bizarre teetering-on-a-cliff-edge nightmares. 25 floors up with "pterodactyls" coming at you .... Anyway, it's a beautiful morning and the views along Copacabana beach - with the joggers out already - along with the tractors out making it pristine again for the sunbathers, volleyballers and, of course, footballers of Rio. Another cruise liner is coming into the bay with another few thousand passengers training their binoculars on Christo el Redentor - then me - in my boxers!

30th floor breakfast by the pool. When do those scraggy wheeling, frigate birds ever eat? Maybe they’re – like us – just enjoying the view! On the one side, there’s the breathtaking view of the Copacabana beach and beyond to Ipanema. On the other, there’s the mountainside and the favela creeping ever further up it with every ravine filled with the trash from them. No roads, no water mains, no drains, no legal electricity! In Santiago, it was the rich who keep on moving up the hill leaving the poor to take over the atmosphere of exhaust fumes in the centre of the city. In Rio, it’s the poor who look down upon the rich! And Christ looks down on them all from Corcorvado – “the hunchback” – an amazingly steep 2300 feet climb from the sea-level city. Our visit to this most famous of statues is the reason we’re up again so early.

Our “Italtur” bus this morning arrives – unlike yesterday – on time. But, this time messes up on who should be going on which tour and, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, we have to all switch buses. So we lose our female guide who has not yet spoken a word of commentary and looks about to have a nervous breakdown and gain Sergio – a blonde she-male (fresh from Mardi Gras) who is a real barrel of laughs. He’s working hard towards the full sex change – pity about the baritone voice and lack of waist – but everything else there – or not – as the case may be! Wonder if the complete job will put paid to his football hooligan vocabulary every time he passes a soccer stadium – of which, in Rio, there are many. You have to take your hat off to ol’ Sergita, though, in the time it took for the coach to flash past the Governor’s Mansion – the Guanabana Palace – he’d given us the spiel in Portuguese, Spanish and English (and he reckoned he could have got in Italian and French too if we’d had any on board!)

When we reached the World Cup stadium, we obviously had to disembark and prostrate ourselves before the statue of the 1962 Jules Rimmet-winning Brazilian captain.

All the favelas (about 400 of them up the various hills of the city) have their own “Sunday Schools” dedicated (mainly) to practising to become the top dog for outrageous self exhibitionism in next year’s Mardi Gras Carnaval. Some of these Sunday Schools are 4 to 5 thousand strong and the city has a huge strip – like a football stadium elongated over a mile or so – on which the whole thing takes place and which they can use every Sunday for practice.
One should mention here “La Cultura de las Nalgas” in South America as whole and in Brazil, in particular. Here, if a lady asks you “Does my bum look big in this?” The wise answer is very much in the affirmative – like “Absolutely humungous, darling!”