The girls in Rio De Janeiro don’t wear makeup and the mountains slide straight into the waiting ocean. As if by magic, I had a 30-hour Rio adventure that stirred my soul and restored a sense of childlike wonderment that had been flagging.
Sao Paulo is gargantuan, overwhelming and nondescript. Its packed subway cars, high prices and air pollution have lately been causing me to wonder aloud if I left New York at all. Rio de Janeiro is one of the world’s few special places; passionate and delectable, known for it’s raucous Carnival, iconic beaches and gorgeous people. It is simply unique, a gem in Brazil’s crown.
The hostel where I was staying threw a delightful dance party and afterwards, I went to Lapa with an Australian named Dave. Lapa is a strip of bars just outside downtown Rio bisected by a Roman aqueduct that acts as a bridge for the overhead trolley tracks. By the time we arrived, at half past 4 in the morning, the Lapa crowd, which was in the upper hundreds, or even thousands, was disintegrating into a drunken melee. At home, in the States, these bars would be closing in a matter of minutes, but it’s quite possible patrons here continued to samba and sing on the street until the sun came up after 6.
The long bus into town and the subsequent week of late nights left me content heading home as 5 approached. There’s something about Rio though, with it’s sticky climate, soaring hills and the energy of 6 million souls that could have made me push through the exhaustion to find another thrill.
I have been told that Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town, South Africa were once joined when Africa and South America were a single land mass. The geology of the two areas, Cape Town’s Table Mountain, besides Pao de Açucar in Rio, makes me think that this could be true. But while Rio is unlike any city I’ve visited, it somehow conjures the best: The lawlessness and hedonism of New Orleans, the architecture of Buenos Aires, as well as New York’s addictive cocktail of grit, hustle and filth that one only has to smell to understand.
I was jubilant when I awoke at 1 the next afternoon, having finagled much of a good night’s rest from the tiny single bed, in spite of how late I went to sleep. Peering through the bay windows, it was appeared as though our hostel was built in the middle of a pristine tropical jungle. In fact, at the top of a very steep hill overlooking Copacabana, the lodge was actually at the base of a national park in the middle of the city. I took my computer downstairs to check emails and appreciate the surroundings and I was greeted by a Englishman who was Skype chatting his boyfriend in China, casually discussing the purchase of a new Apple computers, iPhones and Mercedes-Benz cars as though they were changes of clothes.
The caretaker for the hostel was a quiet young man named Rafael, who grew up an hour outside Mexico City. As we gabbed about the year and a half he had spent in Brazil, the two Canadians I had met the night before came loping up the hill beneath us. Both had gone to bed before midnight, a result of having partied themselves into oblivion on Friday. Nick and Christian, who had been friends in Toronto, showed me a plate with their picture taken at the top of Pao de Açucar (Sugar Loaf Mountain), across the bay from our current location.
When I rolled into Rio I knew not a soul, simply where I would stay and how much it cost. I assumed that a hostel would be full of interesting young travelers, and I was very fortunate to meet these two right off the bat. Nick was a medical volunteer in Rio who had recently completed a master’s degree at the London School of Economics. Christian was a graffiti writer and former banker who had been on a five-month graffiti tour of South America’s biggest cities such as Santiago, La Paz and Porto Alegre in Brazil’s extreme South. Without Nick and Christian, my experience would have been solitary, relaxed and reflective, instead, the day was a non-stop thrill ride.
Although I didn’t think to bring a bathing suit (winter and all), I accompanied to the two to Copacabana as they swam in the crashing surf. Our next stop was the Corcorado, where an enormous statue of Jesus watches over the city with outstretched arms. Like the Hollywood sign that keeps a constant vigil over Los Angeles, the Corcorado was much further away and much higher than we imagined. At first we took a bus 40 minutes to the line, only to discover we were still quite far away with the sun setting fast. We hired a taxi who took us to a base camp where we purchased tickets for a van ride to the top, just as the suns final rays disappeared. Fortunately for us, when reached the summit, there was a snack hut selling delicious beer and fried treats which we took to the top with us.
No words can describe the view we had, and because night had fallen we had the monument almost entire to ourselves. In spite of the darkness, it was just passed 6 PM and my flight back to Sao Paulo was not scheduled to depart until 4 in the morning. There was only one thing we could do, drink beer more beers and eat steak!
All along the descent were well-preserved colonial houses and breathtaking graffiti from a global coterie or artists such as Loomit and Nunca, whose work I had just seen on gallery walls in Sao Paulo and New York the previous week. Our cabby ran out of gas, but somehow manged to get us far enough down the hill where we could easily walk to Santa Teresa, a neighborhood of students and middle class artists, according to Nick who had lived there for a month. An antique wooden streetcar still operates in Santa Teresa, and we hopped aboard for a 50-foot journey, arriving in front of a packed bar where musicians were already warming the place up. Our party of three was escorted to a small marble table in the antechamber, and soon arrived a plate of steaming yuca fries, with chopped steak, grilled onions and thousand island dressing, a long with a steady succession of beers in giant, frosty bottles.
As we launched an all-out assault on the victuals before us, the crowd of mostly young women bounced and sang to the rhythms of traditional samba and Carioka folk tunes. Beer and Caipirinhas flowed freely and the room swelled with more and more gorgeous bodies as 9PM approached. It was Nick who pointed out that none of the girls wore makeup and as I mentally prepared for my flight, I also wondered if anyone here had a job to go to on Monday morning.
As the hall filled, the assembled crowd began drifting into the streets where. Perhaps as many as one hundred people milled about, sipping beers, smoking joints, flirting and carrying. Occasional cars and buses would pass, parting the huddle momentarily, but by sheer for of numbers, the street and the night was ours.
Somewhere in the distance was a plane waiting to take me back to Sao Paulo, but a part of me knew that I was never going to leave Rio de Janeiro. Had I already found a city to take the place of New York? Could any other place be as seductive on Sunday night as the one I had just found? Thoughts of cancelling my flight and returning on Tuesday raced through my head. No one was telling me to be anywhere until next week, when I had a flight booked for New York. Even then, I didn’t need to be in Bangalore until August. I could just stay in Rio, couldn’t I?
As if temptation were not screaming loudly enough in my ear, we planned to hit up a funk party elsewhere before circling back to the airport. How was such a night possible? Better not to ask, I reckoned, but logic eventually won out. A bus wiggled through the mass of bodies blocking the street and as it scooted away, we boarded with beers in hand. The driver didn’t charge us anything and neither did he tell us to toss our beers. Why couldn’t life be like this everywhere? It was a Sunday night in the middle winter and I couldn’t think of better moment I had had in all my life. All barely 24 hours after arriving in town on the bus.
Mustering will power that was in short supply around most parts of Rio, we agreed to go back to to our hostels and discuss the merits of checking out, or bumping a flight. For me there was no option even though my one-way ticket was only $35. The prospect of interviews meant I would be heading back to Sao Paulo on flight that arrived that the remote international airport at 5 AM.
