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| Hipódromo da Gávea, a horse racing course, from Christ the Redeemer. |
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| Café area overlooking the city. |
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| Outdoor escalator. Look, I associate escalators with tube stations so seeing them in daylight is unnatural. |
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| Lapa Steps. |
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| Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Sebastian. |
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| You can just about make out Big Jesus from outside the cathedral. |
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| The mist was descending again on our last day at Copacabana. |
We have reached the end of the road. This is the final reel from my trip and the last blog entry documenting it. We finished with a whirlwind tour of Rio's sights, which was arranged by our travel agency. We had our own guide for the day, and he had an air-conditioned car to ferry us around in. It was a final taste of luxury before the long economy class flight home.
The first port of call was the most famous of Rio's landmarks, Big Jesus. Getting to Christ the Redeemer was a fun experience in itself. There is a rack railway that winds its way up the mountain and I enjoyed looking out of the window on the way up. The mountainside was densely wooded and buildings which may or may not have been abandoned came and went. The final ascent after the train was by escalator, which felt a little bizarre. With the big man himself looming above us, I was reminded of the Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death.
It was pretty busy at the top, but not as bad as I'd feared it would be. This is mostly down to the foresight of our guide, who got us there early, before the tourist peak. The views were of course spectacular. Our guide insisted on taking our photo with Jesus (I think it was part of the package) from an unflattering low angle, but the resulting photo was actually okay. I guess he knew what he's doing. It was of course insanely hot up there, so when we headed back down I was very much looking forward to the car's AC.
Next we went to the Lapa Steps, which are covered with colourful tiles. This is the handiwork of one man, Jorge Selarón, who lived in a house on the steps and began tiling them in 1990. As the project drew more attention he began to receive donated tiles from around the world, and the resulting eclectic mix of artwork was really fun to explore. Poor Jorge was found dead on the steps in 2013, but his project continues to be rightfully very popular.
After that we visited the Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Sebastian. Now, I like a good modernist church and this is one of the best. Opened in 1979, it's a huge conical concrete frame inset with beautiful pieces of stained glass. I became a little obsessed with photographing the glass. I don't have much time for religion but it has inspired some truly exceptional architecture. I highly recommend a visit.
We had worked up quite an appetite by this point, so we were dismayed that lunch wasn't next on the itinerary. In fact lunch wasn't on our guide's itinerary at all. I showed him our voucher which did say lunch was included. He contacted his office, and the situation was swiftly resolved. Lunch was now happening! Pleasingly for me we were going to a traditional Brazilian rodizio. This was less exciting for Liz, as she's vegetarian, but happily the salad bar was both vast and excellent in selection. The rodizio experience was best described as very filling. Waiters patrolled the restaurant with little trolleys offering a variety of freshly grilled meats. They were of course all delicious, but there was only so much I could eat before indicating that I was done. At that point a trolley came out with some meat I hadn't yet sampled, and miraculously I found a little more room for it. This happened twice.
Happily sated, we were off to our final stop for the day, Sugarloaf Mountain. Like Big Jesus, this also involved taking an interesting mode of transport, in this case a cable car. While we had been eating, the weather had changed, and Sugarloaf Mountain was lost in a thick mist. A cable car emerged from it eerily while we waited to board. This did not bode well for the view. Our guide arranged a meeting place at the top and said we could take our time. We may have tried his patience by the end but if so he didn't show it.
The view was comical. It was a whiteout. It was like being inside a cloud. I suppose we actually were inside a cloud. We wandered around the various walkways that made up the tourist complex on the mountain. They would usually afford spectacular views of the city. For the time being we only caught glimpses as the mist parted here and there. It was nearing sunset, and I still didn't have a photo of the setting sun. A schoolboy error the previous evening had me expecting to see it from Copacabana, when there was in fact a hill in the way there. My chances didn't look good. I did manage to take a photo of the sun, a feeble ghost of itself that looked more like the moon. We waited in the hope that the sky would clear, although we knew it probably wouldn't. I didn't really mind. It was pretty funny really. We'd already had some terrific views of the city from Big Jesus. Would the view from Sugarloaf Mountain really be that different? Well, I'll probably never know because to nobody's surprise, the mist persisted. It did clear a little after sunset, affording some twilight glimpses of the shore, and from what I could see, the city looked pretty at night. We eventually decided enough was enough and found our guide at our meeting place. He drove us back to hotel and we tipped him generously. He'd definitely earned it.
We had some time to ourselves the next day before heading to the airport. We stuck to the area around the hotel as there wasn't enough time to have any transport misadventures. This was essentially an extended walk around the neighbourhood in the stifling humidity. We visited a weird little park that I thought was next to a cemetery, but our attempt to find it took us up a hill and away from the shops. A car honked its horn at us as it passed and I wondered whether we were walking in a wise direction. Uphill in the heat was also not a great idea, so we abandoned the route and went for a walk along the beach instead.
There was the typical inconvenient gap between checking out of the hotel and going to the airport, so we hung out in the hotel's restaurant for a while and had a light lunch. We also took the opportunity to sample some Guaraná Antarctica, which is unofficially Brazil's national fizzy drink. That it has Antarctica in its name was not lost on me. Now, an ice-cold drink is always going to be well-received after a morning schlepping around in the soupy Rio air, but it really was delicious. It had a genuinely distinct flavour too. Maybe a little Dr Peppery? I couldn't put my finger on it. When I got home I was amazed to find I could buy it in my corner shop. It didn't taste quite the same in the damp London weather however. That said my flat gets stupidly hot in the summer and a steady supply passed through my fridge. There are a couple of cans in there as I type.
And then it was all ending. As our last treat we were ferried to the airport. We boarded a plane that was on the same route we'd taken to Buenos Aires at the start of the adventure. As such there were already passengers on board and some of them had roamed into empty seats. I suppose that when planes behave like buses, their passengers treat them like buses too. I was in no mood for shenanigans and claimed the window seat I'd booked from its occupant. I settled in for the long flight home. Above me, in the luggage bin, was my rucksack, which again contained all my camera equipment. I had removed the fluorescent orange drawstring from the otherwise unused techno trousers and used it to tie a luggage tag to the bag. On the tag I wrote, in large unfriendly letters, 'THIS IS NOT YOUR BAG'.
The flight was uneventful. We arrived at Heathrow, where Liz headed home via Paddington and I got the ever-reliable Piccadilly line all the way to North London. I always enjoy that part of returning home, when all I have to do is sit there and not fall asleep. What an incredible experience it had been! It was early morning, and as the tube rattled on towards the familiar central London stops it all seemed increasingly bizarre. Antarctica, that remote and wonderful place that I'd dreamed of going to for so long was now a memory.
That was the important part, the memory. But at the same time, I really hoped the photos would come out well.
PS I shot 9 rolls of film in total. When I got them back from the lab, it was clear that the mechanical fault had affected the last two. The ninth roll was almost entirely ruined by overexposure. I put another roll through it when home to try and diagnose the issue further, but found the shutter staying open at the end of the winding cycle was happening randomly no matter how carefully the camera was wound. I have since replaced it with not one but two working View-Master cameras because why solve a problem once when you can solve it twice? I still have the defective one. It's been on some adventures with me and has earned its place in my collection.
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