Rio: a sensory trigger
Brazilian city will fill up your senses, in good ways and bad
Right after you get off the plane, sweat beads will start to gather on your forehead. That’s just Rio de Janeiro’s everpresent humidity saying “hello.”
Look around and you will be enveloped by shades of green — lush tropical forests jammed between buildings of all sizes — and tones of blue along the miles of inviting coastlines.
Towering over the 2016 Summer Olympics host city is the Christ the Redeemer statue. After a few days, you might chuckle when a hotel brochure or tour guide tries to sell you something by saying it “includes” a view of the statue.
Jesus is everywhere here, as is plenty of temptation and sin.
In Brazil, prostitution is legal, though that doesn’t mean that you will see women and men hawking their bodies all over the city. In fact, walking around, you are more likely to come upon churches, especially of growing evangelical denominations like Pentecostals.
Up in the hills, you can see small dwellings that look like stone huts jammed one after the other, in red and green and pink and orange and many other colours of the rainbow. The slums of Rio, known as favelas, are the most colourful places in the city, culturally vibrant and filled with interesting people. They are also the city’s poorest areas, often controlled by drug traffickers and plagued by violence.
No matter where you are in Rio, you might hear gunfire. It could be drug dealers battling it out for turf, or military police conducting an operation. Firefights mostly happen in favelas, but sometimes spill out into the “zona sul,” or southern part of the city, home to more wellheeled Brazilians and where tourists flock.
While you might be tempted to capture all the vibrancy of Rio on your smartphone, take a good look around before pulling it out. The “Cidade Maravilhosa” has long been plagued by violent muggings and robberies that can happen at any time of day and in any neighbourhood.
A walk along the famed beach in Copacabana reveals both luxury and seediness: Rio’s iconic area of yesteryear still shines but also has its share of hobos, panhandlers and hard-luck cases.
Keep walking farther west to get to Ipanema beaches. And if you are in the mood to see and be seen and spend more money, go a little farther to get to Leblon, Rio’s most expensive neighbourhood.
It’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere, the equivalent of February up north. But the beaches still have plenty of people, both local and foreign, taking dips. And with good reason: temperatures are frequently around 30 C and sometimes higher.
Here you will see some of Rio’s stereotypes in real life: dental-floss bikinis for women, tight speedos for men and bodies that ooze fitness and sensuality. But the beaches have so much more than that. There are pickup soccer and volleyball games and capoeira martial arts. The beats of the drum circles will make you feel like you’re in a movie.
Speaking of rhythms, in cafés, food stands and bars, it’s common to hear the soothing sounds of Caetano Veloso or Gilberto Gil, just two of the country’s talented musicians known worldwide. The classics are embraced but there is so much more for the ears: pop, funk and everything in between, especially in any of the thousands of yellow cabs.
At the beach or anywhere close to a waterway, you could smell something rank. Your sniffer is not off: most likely that’s sewage. How strong it is depends on where you are, how recently it rained and many other factors. Currently Rio only treats about 60 per cent of its sewage, which means the waste from millions of residents finds its way into the water. Olympic athletes competing on that water are taking a host of preventive measures to avoid getting sick.
If all this made you tired, just about any corner on the city offers the perfect pick-me-up: fruits. It would be impossible to exaggerate the variety or all-around scrumptiousness of what you are about to eat or drink.
If you don’t speak Portuguese (and most Rio people don’t speak English), just point at the reddish mangos, the green guavas (with pink insides) or fruits you may have never heard of like Jabuticaba, which look like oversized grapes.
Sit back and enjoy.