When My Baby Smiles At Me, I Freak Out In Rio

23/7/05

Ole Cariocas

Well, we are currently in Foz Do Iguazu in Southern Brazil after spending the last 3 days in Rio De Janeiro, and I must say that Rio completely FREAKED US OUT, DUDES…!!! …Well not so much Rio itself but all the horrible expectations that come from reading too much scary stuff about a place before you arrive.

Before we left home, we spent a bit of time on internet chat rooms and also reading guide books about Rio and Brazil in general, and the basic idea we got was that the place was overrun with street kids overflowing from the Favelas (slum areas), and that these kids basically all hang out at Copacobana Beach and will steal everything from you…

…and then we read that if you go out after dark on Copacobana Beach, that you definitely be mugged or drugged, and going anywhere near the Favelas means that you will probably go home deader than a dead thing, after being stabbed and shot a zillion times by street kids and drug lords…

…so of course, when we ended up arriving on the only flight late at night, we were completely FREAKED OUT when most of the services in the eerily quiet airport were closed and we couldn’t even get any money. We then organised a trip to our hostel with an old man who FREAKED US OUT even more when he was driving at 110km/hr down the freeway with no headlights on and checking his text messages at the same time…

…and THEN he decides to drive us through the before-mentioned Favelas to show us the carnival stadium Sambadrome and there is a massive bonfire in the middle of the street with street kids throwing burning things at each other like in Lord of The Flies… TOTALLY FREAKY…

…so by the time he drives us to our hostel down a dark little alleyway, and we see that there are no other foreign tourists there, we were so totally FREAK-A-ROONIED that we were ready to leave…

… which was so weird since we have been all over the world and never felt FREAKED OUT before!!!

And the crazy thing is that Rio is actually TOTALLY FANTASTIC!!! We loved it!!! The beaches are beautiful and similar to home with great surf and the local Cariocas are all smiles and really friendly. The guys are all HOT, brown and ripped and could have given Avril a Brazilian anytime!!! The girls were pretty good too, and although there wasn’t as many dental floss G-strings as we had heard, those Brazilian girls can still wedge a bikini fair up their crack…

And although Rio is a bit grubby up close, from a distance, Rio is honestly the most beautiful city that we have seen… especially with the bigarsed Christ the Redeemer statue leaning over it!!!

We never once felt in danger and this was despite taking a tram around the Favela areas and also bumming around on the streets well after midnight.

So we were a bit pissed that we let ourselves get freaked out by hype alone…

Which is why we then decided to REALLY FREAK ourselves out and rockclimb up the Sugar Loaf mountain Pão de Açúcar!!!

The Sugar Loaf is the massive 396m high granite pillar that shoots up from the Rio Bay and basically it is about 7-8 pitches to get to the top so that you can take a cable car back down again.(A pitch is as far as the rope goes before you have to start again).

Basically we were climbing on an exposed rock face in the middle of the bay with dozens of big sea eagles buzzing us and a bigarsed cable car running over our heads. But the view over Rio, Ipanema and Copacabana beaches with the big Jesus statue in the background was one of the most amazing experiences we have ever had!!! We were totally PSYCHED!!!

The guide was totally ripped and HOT and this probably made Avril weak at the knees since she only made one pitch before giving up and having to abseil back down… and yes, just for Dom and Darlene we got pictures of him with his shirt off so you can check the pics out.

However, I managed to make 4 pitches (about 2/3’s up) before it got dark and I even managed to do my first ever lead climb (climbing with no rope above you), which was totally crazy since the conditions were less than safe and there were other climbers literally climbing over me.

…and things then got really FREAKY!!! Half way down the cliff I dropped my abseil device and it was so dark that i couldn’t see the ropes properly, and of course we forgot to pack torches… I totally shat myself…

But somehow we managed to get down only then to be deliberately locked in an elevator lobby of an apartment building by a really mean local who thought we were robbing the place… it’s too bizarre to even write about… and we still have no idea what it was all about… FREAKY AND BIZARRE… but Avril managed to use her superpowers to circumvent the Brazilian security system and get us and the guide out…

In anycase, Rio ROCKED and we’ll definitely be back sometime probably for Carnivale…

Tomorrow we are heading out to see Iguassu Falls, some impressive waterfalls straddling Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, which are much bigger than the Niagra Falls and should totally be interesting since running water always makes me want to pee… and then it’s off to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands so you’ll hear from us again in a couple of weeks.