The Rio place to be for après Olympics action
In Rio, it’s the place to be for après-Olympic action
From where I stand, high above Rio, the city of six million spreads out in a patchwork of red-roofed, hilltop favelas, grids of urban streets, and 90 kilometres. of white-sand beaches along Guanabara Bay and the open Atlantic. Looming directly above me is the huge Art Deco statue of Christ the Redeemer, whose outstretched left arm gestures toward the Maracanã Stadium, home to major events in Rio’s impending Summer Olympics (Aug. 5-21). The statue’s right arm gestures toward the city’s Ipanema district, famed for its beach, its bronzed, tanga-clad women, and its cultural and culinary pleasures. It is the in-place to be based for any exploration of South America’s most famous city.
A lot has changed since 1962 when Heloisa Pinto, then 17, passed Veloso Bar-Café on her way to Rio’s Ipanema Beach and was observed by the aging poet, Vinícius de Moraes, who’d often watched the blond teenager pass. Her vitality and youth made him sad — for he understood her attractive qualities would, in time, fade. Just as his already had. So he wrote the celebrated song: The Girl from Ipanema. Knowing this backstory, it seemed fitting I begin my Ipanema travels by pursuing the legend of the old poet and beautiful girl. Sitting at the same sidewalk café where Moraes once sat, the restaurant sign above my head now reads Garota de Ipanema (Girl from Ipanema) and the adjacent street sign reads Rua Vinícius de Moreas — commemorating the creator of one of the world’s most famous songs.
The cobblestone sidewalks of Ipanema carry an ever-changing story. Today, there are beach-bound, tanned and tattooed men with surfboards; women in stilettos and diaphanous, scarf-like kangas tied over bikinis; and vendors lugging their fried chicken or kites — all moving with a loose-limbed Latin insouciance, as if nothing matters more than a day parading and playing in the sun.
For those in the know, the beach is divided into numbered lifeguard posts. So the Posto 9 area, located at the end of Rua Moraes, is for the most toned and least clad, and where the city’s gay contingent hangs out. Not far away are unofficial zones for marijuana smokers — it’s illegal — and surfers (Posto 8); and sports-loving, foot-volleyballplayers( P os to 10). And add hundreds of roller blade rs and cyclists on beachside Avenida Vieira Souto — closed on Sundays to vehicular traffic — and one gets a sense, as I did while riding a rented bicycle, of the extraordinary variety of Brazilian skin colours, revealing apparel, and musical busking that Cariocas — the name for residents of Rio — display.
It felt as if I were pedalling through a human kaleidoscope, accompanied by a hip-hop-tinged, bossa nova backbeat.
On the northern flank of Ipanema lies Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, a quiet urban lagoon that provides an antidote to the preening and athleticism of the district’s 2-kmlong ocean beach. One can rent bicycles and four-wheeled, dual-pedalled quadricycles for a seven kilometre circuit of the tree-lined lake. Or rent pedal-boats — shaped like oversized bathtub ducks — and be, with a couple of powerful fermented sugarcane/lime caipirinhas drinks in the picnic basket, captain of the lagoon.
The statue’s right arm gestures toward the city’s Ipanema district, famed for its beach, its bronzed, tanga-clad women, and its cultural and culinary pleasures.
Or one could, as I did, head to the nearby heliport and attain an aerial vantage point upon Rio: banking above various Olympic sites; waving at passengers on the Sugarloaf Mountain gondolas; cruising above Ipanema Beach and its pointillist carpet of miniature umbrellas and people; and ending up head-high to Christ the Redeemer with a ghostly late afternoon moon rising to the north over Guanabara Bay.
It’s a short walk from the lagoon to Jardim Botânico, Rio’s 137-hectare (340 acre) botanical garden which holds, with its 9,000 species, one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of plants. Cicadas drill in the park’s 1,000 species of trees. An octagonal Orchidarium houses thousands of aromatic orchids. And with a hummingbird garden, a medicinal plant garden, a classical Japanese garden, and a pond dotted with bizarre, metrewide lily pads, the park provides a green refuge against Rio’s hubbub and heat.
In a city renown for its hedonistic lifestyle, every Brazilian gathering brings together a triple miscegenation: indigenous South American roots infused with centuries of gregarious Portuguese and African cultures. Everywhere in Rio — in art, in food, in music, in attitudes — this blending is on display, and means the city runs on boisterous, Afro-Latin energy. Each Sunday, for example, thousands descend on the Ipanema’s Praça General Osório and its famous, park-filling Hippie Fair. Begun in the time of ’60s hippies, and now the best place to acquire Brazilian mementos and handicrafts, I wandered for a couple of hours amid the cacophony of percussion instrument makers, artist hawking their paintings, leather artisans, gemstone vendors, and turbaned Bahian women labouring over their steaming regional dishes — with accompanying spicy aromas — from Brazil’s northeast region.
Footsore from walking, I left the coconut/chili smells of Bahia behind, crossed the street, and settled into a sidewalk seat for a mid-afternoon of people-watching and lunch at Ipanema’s popular Restaurante Belmonte. I knew from an earlier meal at Rio’s belle-époque, mirrorlined Confeitaria Columbo that lethal consequences might result after any further effort on my part to consume Rio’s famous stuffed savory croquets, not to mention the jewel-like, glazed pastries topped with chocolate and strawberries. All delightful. All calorically dangerous.
Just as visitors to Paris ascend the Eiffel Tower, so Rio travellers ascend the Trem do Corcovado cog tramway to the famous mountaintop statue of Christ the Redeemer. The little train climbs slowly and steeply through jungly Tijuca National Park, its verdant slopes covered with blooming hibiscus, bird of paradise, and impatiens, and stops near Corcovado’s 710 metre summit.
Far below, morning mist is rising around the city’s peaks, gradually revealing a panorama of densely packed cityscape, an island-dotted bay, and curving slivers of beach lining the Atlantic Ocean. Crows ride the cliff-edge thermals. The city hums with distant traffic. And, one can be sure that far below a man sits at a sidewalk café and turns his head momentarily as a beautiful girl passes on her way to the beach at Ipanema.