Rio de Janeiro, Part 1: Beautiful views from Sugarloaf Mountain, crowded Copacabana and other touristy places

We were both excited and a bit nervous entering Rio de Janeiro. Well, Markus not very nervous. Everyone had been telling us that Rio is a very beautiful and interesting city, but also very dangerous and that one needs to be careful all the time because there are so many thieves and people who have nothing to lose. Well, our (especially Edda’s) image of Rio changed during our 9-night stay in Rio. 😊 Even though the city is big, the touristic area is easy to comprehend and we felt also rather safe.

This is the Sugarloaf Mountain. More text and pictures will follow!

We stayed first two nights in Botafogo. It is apparently a more residential area and a military area is close by, so everyone told us that it will be safe to walk around, even at dark. Edda had received a tip from her friend, Noora, to use an app (Be Veg) for finding vegetarian food in Brazil. For some reason, we had forgotten about the app before Rio, but luckily, we remembered it there! It showed many results nearby! We went to Refeitorio Organico in Botafogo and we have never seen a 100% vegetarian buffet like that! It cost around 9 – 10 euros and you could eat as much as you could 😋 The video below doesn’t even show everything that they had! Edda was so happy and Markus found the food delicious, too!

The place to be for vegetarian lunch, yammyyyy!

Happy Edda with delicious food!

After having our stomachs filled, we walked towards the Sugarloaf mountain. The day was quite clear, which was perfect for some panoramic views. There were not long queues and the gondolas went up and down all the time.

Smile!

The ride to the top of Sugarloaf mountain is in two parts. One can hike the first part too, but after traveling from Penedo in the morning and suddenly being in 39 degrees Celsius, we didn’t really feel up for it. 😀 We took the first gondola to the lower mountain. There were some shops and cafés, and we walked around to see the views. It really was a perfect activity to do on our first day in order to see how Rio is formed. After walking around for a while, we took the second gondola up to the Sugarloaf mountain itself. The views were breathtaking! We stayed at the top for maybe three hours or so and saw the city in a day mist, the gorgeous sunset and then the city lights. We even saw a thunder on the Northern part of Rio, but luckily it stayed there 😅

Enjoying a cup of coffee on the top of the first mountain

The ride to Sugarloaf Mountain

Nice views from the top! And then we saw the sunset 😍

And the Rio city lights 😍

Edda had checked on Lonely Planet that there should be a good beer & burger place close to our hotel, so she brought Markus there on the first evening. The place is called The Boua and well, it was okay. They didn’t have the first beer that Markus ordered and their burger was quite basic.

The next day we visited Copacabana beach, because well, since in Rio, we guess it’s a must at least once. You can read in many places that it’s a beautiful beach. Well, it is a long beach, that’s for sure (4 km), but other than that – it’s just a beach, filled with people. The sea water in Rio is so polluted that Rio’s tourist information said to us that it’s not recommended to swim anywhere. Still many people were swimming and playing in the ocean. Not only is the beach extremely crowded but here is not a single second when one would not hear the beach vendors shouting “beer, water, coconut” or something else in Portuguese. We stayed maybe 1 – 1,5 hours and left. Another thing that was a bit weird is that there are no toilets on the beach (at least around the area where we were) even if there are tens of thousands of people there... Wonder where the waste ends up!?

Copacabana beach

We also visited the famous stairs of Escadaria Selarón, located near Glória area of Rio. The stairs are made in 1990 – 2013. A guy called Jorge Selarón started to repair stairs in front of his own house with different tiles and mirrors he found on the streets. Later on, visitors from different countries donated tiles to him and that’s why one can find tiles e.g. from The Netherlands or a Santa Clause 😊

Kissss!! 😍

Some Dutch tiles 😃

Street art on our way from the stairs

On our way back home we visited Lapamaki, also found through the Be Veg – app. The place itself looks a bit “cheap”, or nothing special, but their food was delicious! We ordered both Yakisobas (noodles with something), but Edda’s noodles were made of zucchini. A place we highly recommend – delicious and a lot of core ingredients on the plate and not just a few mushrooms or pieces of chicken. Only negative was that their A/C was on really cold and we were freezing all the time! 😖

We took a walk back to our hotel and took a few photos. Immediately someone came to us and told that we should put the camera away because there are so many thieves around. 😨

Street view in Centro at night 

Aqueducts and Catedral Metropolitana de São Sebastião

  

Then it was time to move. We had booked our apartment through Airbnb for about 1,5 years ago (because new year’s) and we were really excited to finally get there! The apartment is located between Leblon and Vidigal and it’s right in the beginning of a small favela. But our apartment was modern and pretty. The view from our roof terrace was beautiful, too!

Our beautiful airbnb apartment 😍 

The view!

And at night!

Our white apartment is located apprx. in the middle of this photo, behind a tree.

What we were excited about was that after two months we got to cook ourselves! Our bodies had changed a bit to worse during two months of restaurants and it had been often a bit difficult to find something else than fried chicken or some other meat/fish. We were excited to just prepare our own breakfast! 😋 Btw, it was extremely difficult to find any type of porridge in our stores in Rio. Maybe people in Rio don’t eat porridge?

Random picture from Leblon beach 

This window cleaning doesn't look very safe 😮 

During our stay we visited also Catedral Metropolitana de São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro. You saw it earlier in one picture – it was a weird-looking building lit up with purple color at night. Not a very traditional cathedral, huh? There was no entrance fee, which made us happy (everything is so expensive in Brazil!!). The cathedral looked more like a space ship also from the inside than a cathedral in our opinion, but it was refreshing to see something else than a regular cathedral. There are four panels of stained glass from floor to ceiling – 64m tall each! They were beautiful.

Doesn't really scream cathedral to you, does it? 😛 

We also visited Rio’s biggest favela, Rocinha. We tell about our experiences later on. Stay tuned!