Rio de Janeiro (Brasil)
26 Dec - 27 Dec 2011
26 Dec - 27 Dec 2011
Europeans first rolled into Rio on the 1st of January 1502. It just goes to show that even back then this place had the reputation of being the very epicentre of the 'good time and good vibe' world. I often think that as the Portuguese made their way up the Brasilian coastline on that New Years day, courting the inevitable mead related hangover, hushed and whispered tales of wild brotherly love surely would have bubbled to the surface from the subterranean depths of the ship, gaining vibrancy and clarity via a new day on the back of sun drenched decks. The leader of the expedition and captain of the vessel, Gaspar de Lemos, who more than likely would have been caught in several compromsing positions the evening before in what would have been a debaucherous night of revelry, excess and 'fast living', would have stood proud and tall on deck. Dehydrated and searching his ruck sack for Nurofen, his enigmatic pronouncement that they had encountered the mouth of a mighty river and that it should be now known as the River of January I'm sure would have been met with the equivalent Portuguese response of 'What a dumbarse!'. Seriously, that's your best captain? The River of January? What about those mountains we passed yesterday? I guess they're the Mountains of December, or that jungle the previous months, the jungle of November! You sir are an idiot! In all honesty the crew weren't all that far off the mark, the river was actually just a bay (Guanabara Bay), but, Rio de Janeiro just sounds so much cooler doesn't it?
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Our crew of three didn't exactly have the luxury of making our way into Rio via the rolling, karmic waters of the Atlantic. We had intelligently opted for the 7hr ride on terra firma from Sao Paulo. Something I was completely fine with as my desire to take to the skies in South America was going to be limited to Emirates flying me out. There's something about South American air crash statistics that don't quite instill me with absolute confidence, nor do I like the idea of lying out on a glacier somewhere calously calculating which of my friends I'd have to eat first (it would have been you Jet, FYI).
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Arriving at the main bus station in Rio several hours after our scheduled time of arrival we were greeted by our driver Jorge. This was a beaten man. His feeble attempts of conviviality however unravelled smartly like the contrived fantasies of a compulsive liar. His face weathered, eyes sunken, sullen by demeanour, this wasn't the warm samba style, free wheeling, free loving welcome I had anticipated! Of course, I think he had been waiting at a mind numbingly boring bus station without notice for three hours, perhaps all the while anticipating his arrival home hours earlier to a lovely wife who had probably prepared him a hearty dish of feijoada. Well, whatever Jorge, the drive into Copacabana was always going to be the end of out association.
But who cared!! There we were, in Rio de Janeiro man!! This is the place that I had anticipated on being in about a year earlier and perhaps would have been but for some light fingered bandits in La Paz, but ok, that story is old hat and the scenario that I found myself in right at this moment was by far the better option. I had JJ and Jetson with me and this place was going to get taken out, like a boss!
Copacabana Beach - Rio de Janeiro - Brasil
Copacabana Beach, overcast and with a 'hint' of rain. Unfortunatelty this was to become a familiar sight over the next few days
Home of the Olympics in 2016 - Welcome to Rio!
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I always feel that those few moments when you arrive in a new place are always filled with mystery and intrigue. Your senses are alert to everything going on around you and your mind, well mine at least, always tries to make sense of location and lock in a familiar landmark. This I found was somewhat easy to do in Rio. Sambadrome on the right, a minute or two later our first sighting of Cristo Redentor (on and oddly clear evening) then Sugarloaf (Pão de Açúcar) as we rounded the bay in Botafogo,through Tunnel Velho and finally spitting us out into Copacabana itself. The apartment that we were going to call home for the next 10 days was located on Avenida Prado Junior, just over one block from the beach. From memory we had arrived just as the sun was dropping out of sight and after what we had been 'assured' were going to be the last of the days of rain that Rio had scheduled (yeah, I'll get back to that one).
Sugarloaf (Pão de Açúcar) - Rio de Janeiro - Brasil
Copacabana - lesson 1
The Caipirinha - roughly translated to 'country bumpkin'
It's made in the following manner;
Ingredients
1 lime quartered
2 tsp fine sugar
2 oz cachaca (is a distilled spirit from Brazil that is in a class of it's own but it is often associated with rum)
Working it
1.Place the lime wedges and sugar into an old-fashioned glass
2.Muddle well to create a paste
3. Fill the glass with ice cubes
4. Pour in the cachaca
5. Stir well
Now I've been fortunate enough to have acquired some knowledge as to night one proceedings of holidays when travelling with friends, in fact, lets at this point reflect on a few of them for the sake of posterity [Beatles mania in Kuala Lumpur], [Lost Angles - Los Angeles], [KL Streetsmarts in Kuala Lumpur again], and after those classics you can now add to that infamous list, Delirium tremens with Taio Cruz. It was absolutely predestined, it was the rite of passage that needed to be had and the most befitting course of action by which we were to christen night one in Rio. And so it was, that as we exposed ourselves to a relatively balmy evening we took up residence at a small bar overlooking the beach in Copacabana, ordered a first round of caipirinha's and downed the sweet, syrupy, sugary goodness of what a beachside caipirinha is meant to be...but my God, where were the alcohol police when the cachaca was being dosed out so liberally? It reminded me of a few free pouring tequila nights in Mexico City where the simple objective on those evenings was to survive.
This is the point in time where the infamous carioca haze of feigned lucidity really did a number on my memory because the vagaries of what happened from drink one to waking up the next morning are punctuated only by snippets of residual images that I'm not quite sure are imagined. What I recall was this. We had many drinks on the beach. We ran into a kind fun loving kid whose 'amor' for the world was all encompassing, he really LOVED everyone, EXCEPT Cristo, why that was I couldn't quite decide but to quote him directly, his take on the all dominating protector of Rio was to say this, 'F**k Cristo, F**k him'. Alright bro, I think your friends should probably get you home huh?
I believe after this point we bunkered down at a restaurant for a few hours, ordering the national drink on what appeared to be an endless conveyerbelt of caipirinha service. In between that point and getting home at 4am it was actually Janelle who requested that we entertain ourselves for a few hours at a local strip joint!? What THE? Yup, that request makes as much sense to me now as it did on that night. I'm sure there was a comment thrown around about 'Just getting it out of our systems' , although for me in all honesty strip joints have always been kind of lame. I kind of struggle to remember anything that happened in there in any case other than the fact that it was practically across the road from where our apartment was............(fade out, night one)
.....then the morning comes
I woke up somewhere around 8am. My mouth was a little dry but yeah, I was ok. Janelle and Jet were still asleep but they had arrived safely and we had survived. I did the internal audit quite quickly and miracously felt quite reasonable. That self assessment was the only encouragement that I needed to jump up, get changed and hit Copa for a run! Crazy right!? I mean I think I was so pumped about doing this that in the days that followed we could only reason that it was the endorphin rush that had given me a 'delayed onset hangover', although in actual fact don't think it every truly arrived.
That first run on Copacabana was a true highlight for me. Hitting one of the most famous beaches in the world, the breakings waves of the Atlantic setting my rhythm, Cristo adorning the peak of Corcovado, breaking through the morning clouds ever so majestically, the magnificenc of Sugarloaf to the north of the beach , it was hard to imagine a more perfect setting to get out and get active? And IF you did need to resort to any type of additional inspiration then there was plenty of fodder in the form of fellow runners to provide that a spring in your step and an increased turn of speed.
...and if that run was spectacular then my return to the apartment was a lesson in what it is to be triumphant in continued drunken bliss. Assuming on my arrival that my fellow cohorts were merely tired and not in the throws of a monolithic hangover, I jumped up on the bed of one Janelle Jordan and gave a bullocking rendition of the Taio Cruz classic I got a hangover. It was only at the point that I'd completely devastated the chorus that I realised that young Jordan was in a world of cachaca induced anguish because her lack of appreciation for what I was laying down, and paralleling by jumping on the bed, was exactly mirrored by her lack of movement. Then my brain kicked in... 'Whoa, she really did have a hangover and she has been drinking TOO much for SURE' ..and as for Frichot, well that man had retired to the spirit world hours before and there was nothing that could be done at this stage to bring him back into the realm of the living, or perhaps my universe of stupidity
(...to be continued)
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| The view from Porto Bay - Copacabana Beach - Rio de Janeiro - Brasil |
Clouded and shrouded - Cristo on a typical day - Rio de Janeiro - Brasil
Check out this link from The Adventures of Jet Frichot - Copacabana Beach
I believe after this point we bunkered down at a restaurant for a few hours, ordering the national drink on what appeared to be an endless conveyerbelt of caipirinha service. In between that point and getting home at 4am it was actually Janelle who requested that we entertain ourselves for a few hours at a local strip joint!? What THE? Yup, that request makes as much sense to me now as it did on that night. I'm sure there was a comment thrown around about 'Just getting it out of our systems' , although for me in all honesty strip joints have always been kind of lame. I kind of struggle to remember anything that happened in there in any case other than the fact that it was practically across the road from where our apartment was............(fade out, night one)
.....then the morning comes
I woke up somewhere around 8am. My mouth was a little dry but yeah, I was ok. Janelle and Jet were still asleep but they had arrived safely and we had survived. I did the internal audit quite quickly and miracously felt quite reasonable. That self assessment was the only encouragement that I needed to jump up, get changed and hit Copa for a run! Crazy right!? I mean I think I was so pumped about doing this that in the days that followed we could only reason that it was the endorphin rush that had given me a 'delayed onset hangover', although in actual fact don't think it every truly arrived.
That first run on Copacabana was a true highlight for me. Hitting one of the most famous beaches in the world, the breakings waves of the Atlantic setting my rhythm, Cristo adorning the peak of Corcovado, breaking through the morning clouds ever so majestically, the magnificenc of Sugarloaf to the north of the beach , it was hard to imagine a more perfect setting to get out and get active? And IF you did need to resort to any type of additional inspiration then there was plenty of fodder in the form of fellow runners to provide that a spring in your step and an increased turn of speed.
...and if that run was spectacular then my return to the apartment was a lesson in what it is to be triumphant in continued drunken bliss. Assuming on my arrival that my fellow cohorts were merely tired and not in the throws of a monolithic hangover, I jumped up on the bed of one Janelle Jordan and gave a bullocking rendition of the Taio Cruz classic I got a hangover. It was only at the point that I'd completely devastated the chorus that I realised that young Jordan was in a world of cachaca induced anguish because her lack of appreciation for what I was laying down, and paralleling by jumping on the bed, was exactly mirrored by her lack of movement. Then my brain kicked in... 'Whoa, she really did have a hangover and she has been drinking TOO much for SURE' ..and as for Frichot, well that man had retired to the spirit world hours before and there was nothing that could be done at this stage to bring him back into the realm of the living, or perhaps my universe of stupidity
(...to be continued)
