AFTER THE CIRCUS
No matter your disposition, it’s difficult not to fall for Rio de Janeiro’s soul, writes
Six unexpectedly enjoyable things about Rio
SOME cities, such as Paris or Munich, lend themselves to a certain overcast moodiness and reflection. Rio de Janeiro, however, isn’t one of them (except in one instance — see point 6). I arrived there on a Thursday evening, adrift in a thick black cyclothymic sludge, preparing myself for a trip during which things would only be half felt, if at all. But then — of all places, inside the airport’s foamy public toilet — two things began the lifting of the grey veil: the very-hard-toresist carnival music piped in over the sound of travellers’ piss; and the jaunty and rapid fricative-flooded speech of Portuguese.
This — that Rio is a challenging place for the visitor to retain any sort of quiet sadness — was the first thing I learnt during my too brief stay. There were six others, not all necessarily related to Rio but at least caused by me being there, viz:
1. Rio is likely to remind South Africans of South Africa
It’s not just the mountains and the sea and the beaches, or the old/new architecture, friendly people and congested highways. It’s also the warnings about crime and how you shouldn’t walk the streets at night or wear jewellery at any time and always make sure you keep all your valuables in your hotel safe, et cetera.
Just like South Africa, where tourists are alerted of rampant criminals and gun fights in the streets, spend a couple of days in Rio and you’ll discover that all the warnings/stories you might have read on the internet aren’t really true. Yes, if you prance around a favela wearing a Breitling while taking selfies with druglords on your iPhone 6, you’re probably going to get what you deserve; but stroll along the Copacabana during the day or go jogging or cycling along the many paths surrounding the city’s lakes and lagoons and you’ll see that, if you have even a tiny bit of street smarts, there’s nothing to worry about.
Whether it was because of the Olympics, I’m not sure, but there was an unsettling number of armed officers/soldiers wearing wraparound sunglasses and hanging about in busy public places — something you don’t see so much in South Africa — but there was this feeling that it was all quite unnecessary and just there to make visitors feel safer.
2. Beach volleyball is much harder to play than it looks
During the Olympics, you might have watched tanned pros spiking and squatting in various states of near-undress and formed the opinion that beach volleyball isn’t so much a sport as a way of upping TV ratings/an excuse to look at nice bottoms dusted with beach sand. The latter are probably sort of true, but it’s definitely a sport and a surprisingly difficult one to master.
Our hosts, Oakley, arranged a coaching session with a former Olympic gold medalist (a big Serbian dude) and a handful of Brazilian beach volleyball legends on Copacabana beach. I think for everyone involved it was a lesson in how poorly co-ordinated we are. “It’s all in the knees,” we kept being told as blue and yellow volleyballs shot all over the place and/or hit ice-cream-eating bystanders in the head/midriffs. It’s also deceptively tiring because beach sand is not exactly a level playing surface so you’re using weird new ankle muscles and the sand is hot so you’re reluctant to stand still for more than, like, three seconds lest the smooth bottoms of your middle-class feet catch fire.
After all patience was depleted in efforts to coach us, we were split into teams and played two sets under the sticky midmorning Brazilian sunshine, mountains on one side, the Atlantic crashing a few metres away on the other.
3. Hanging around Olympic athletes makes you feel/look like one
Post-volleyball, we were taken to the Oakley Safehouse, a building on the edge of a racecourse in town. It’s here that every Oakley-sponsored athlete at the Olympic Games (there were around 500 of them) was invited to escape the attentions and pressures of the games/Olympic village and chill out in hammocks and eat incredibly wholesome food and generally mix and flirt with other young, fit, lithe athletes, and get given free sunglasses.
We were briefed by equally young and attractive Oakley people about the wonderful technology that goes into the lenses of their new Prizm range, among other things correcting colour-blindness and enhancing terrain to a crisp HD quality so it’s like you’re watching BluRay footage of yourself doing stuff. And so anyway, after about a half hour at the Safehouse, walking about in the same sunglasses the Olympians were wearing, it was easy to convince ourselves that we were just as fit and muscular as they were and this silly thing would happen where we’d spot bona-fide athletes looking at us, trying to figure out who we were and which discipline we were involved in. It felt pretty good.
4. Rio is loud and bright but has its peaceful places too
Rio’s samba energy can get a little too much at times, especially for the more introverted. Actually, Rio is like the friend who makes you go to a party that you don’t really want to go to and you end up having a fantastic time but when you’re ready to leave they aren’t so you end up having to wait around and end up kind of impatient and irritated.
But there is a diversion in the form of a little town called Santa Teresa, located in the mountains of the Lapa district. I imagine that, up here, it’s about as quiet as it’s ever going to get in Rio.
Santa Teresa’s narrow streets and Portuguese/Italian/Moroccan influences and art deco houses (artists arrived in the 1970s and rejuvenated the town, which had become rundown and gang-ridden; residents came here to escape the heat and noise of Rio below) give the place an old European feel, especially the day we visited when a misty drizzle fell and everywhere smelt of damp tree bark.
A little further on, you can visit the Escadaria Selarón, a project started in 1990 by Chilean artist Jorge Selarón. It’s a 215step stairway covered in ceramic tiles that were either painted by Selarón or by anyone who sent the artist a hand-painted tile of their own. It’s a beautiful little space (if a little crowded by hawkers and selfiesnapping tourists) but it’s also stained with heartbreak. On his hand-written mission at the bottom of the steps, Selarón explains that he would only complete his “crazy original dream” on the last day of his life (he completed it in 2010) but the artist was found dead on the steps in 2013, aged 65. Who, or what, killed Selarón remains a mystery, though suicide is suspected as the artist was known to be depressive.
5. The whole Zika-virus-threat thing was completely overblown
Totally. I saw like one mosquito the whole time I was there, in our tour van, and instead of flying around menacingly trying to infect everybody inside, it was headbutting the windows, trying to get out.
6. Christ the Redeemer is one of the most beautiful things you’ll ever see
There’s good reason why this 38m-tall statue — created between 1922 and 1931 by French sculptor Paul Landowski — is listed as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.
Perched atop the 710m Corcovado mountain, it appears to look out over the whole of Rio and, pretty much wherever you are in the city, if you look you’ll most likely spot it. I was advised against summiting Corcovado to see it up close because its base is constantly over-crowded with annoying people with funny hats and selfie sticks but, anyway, whether you’re a believer or an atheist or ambivalent (agnostic) I think it’s somehow more apt to see it only from a distance, in your own space of peace.
Whether joyous or melancholic, you can look up anytime and see it standing there, bright and clear with sunlight or in a haze of cloud, its arms spread way, way open.