RIO CARNIVAL

YOU CAN'T MISS RIO'S CARNIVAL.......

Even if that does involve flying right back across the continent to our long pre-booked week in an (expensive and non-refundable) apartment in the trendy area of Santa Teresa, with a lovely balcony and great views, as you can see below. We booked this back in October 2023 to ensure we beat the price rises and it worked. Massive apartment with 3 rooms, all for £875 for 5 nights over the busiest carnival weekend.

We decided early on to enjoy the spectacle of the RIO CARNIVAL. We had such a ball at MARDI GRAS in New Orleans in 2022 we decided that we needed to add another world famous carnival to our list of 'things we have done'. It also gave our feet a rest as having checked Rio out on our previous visit a few weeks back all we had to do was visit the carnival proper at The Sambadrome (Sunday night tickets $330 each for reserved seats on a concrete step in stand 9) and possibly catch a couple of BLOCOS, street parties for the locals. Other than that we could just chill for a few days before the next continental hop and another bit of hard travelling in Peru ......

We get in late from our rather stressful trip from Mendoza. Santa Teresa is a difficult area for cabs at night as it is all cobbled streets, a bit steep and bumpy. Oh, and it is apparently surrounded by Favelas (no go areas), Its a bit like the old London cabs not going 'sarf of the river guv'. Our Airbnb hosts have briefed us on the lie we have to tell by directing the cab to an OK street nearbye, and then keep on begging him to go higher and higher towards our apartment at the very top.

Sara has done some local research and has stumbled across a less than complimentary review of our bohemian and trendy location, describing it as 'riddled with Favelas, and not a nice place after dark'. So when we go out early next morning to find some breakfast you'd think Sara was in the Falls Road, or The Bronx. Eyes on stalks, scanning the streets for signs of trouble. All to no avail, just a nice place for me to be daft enough to spend £70 on a hand made 'Domingos Cardosa' shirt as my 'Carnival Gear 2024; which I later twin with an original 'Sara Henslow' hand painted hat to match. Sara has indeed been lugging about half a kilo of water paints around for the last month as one thirtieth of her luggage allowance, all to paint a hat.

Having retired to the apartment in our nice quiet location we set to wandering why the locals had plonked 20 portaloos outside. And later, around lunchtime, wandered what all the bloody row was outside. A BLOCO - right outside our door. Our first sight and sounds of CARNIVAL!!

Basically this consists of thousands of young Brazilians, men in just shorts (or a tutu) and some daft headpiece, girls in bikinis and fishnets, basically everyone is half dressed due to the heat, and all sweating. Nice. I am of course in a Harris tweed suit and Viyella shirt and tie, with brown brouges and my ever present daft white hat. Me and that hat are inseperable.

We stick our head out of the front door to see what is occurring and boy - what a sight (and sound). And to hear the noise just click the little music note bottom right of video screen to turn the row on.

Thousands of them streaming everywhere, going from street party to street party pretty much 24 hours a day. We have to bugger off back to Copacabana to personally collect our crazily expensive Sambadrome tickets and end up queueing for an hour to get them.

Our reward was blagging an early dinner table at Marious, one of Rio's top restaurants and well worth the flipping £250 bill we got saddled with. That is a whole days budget gone in one fell swoop! Or one piece of delicious Tenderloin steak cooked to perefection. Marious's thing is to just keep coming to your table with bits of fresh cooked grub from the kitchen and carving some off onto your plate in an all-you-can-eat upmarket buffet sort of thing. So we rolled out of there some hours later and tricked another cabbie into scaling the giddy heights of Mount Saint Teresa.

There followed a relaxing couple of days where Sara shopped for her Carnival outfit and we got absolutely hammered in a beach bar on Copacabana Beach. We drank CAIPIRINIHA (kai-purr-REEN-yah for the purists) a Brazilian national drink made from Cachaca, a sugar cane rum, with more sugar added and a bunch of limes mashed in. Now if I were of a more suspicious nature I would suggest that we were Mickey Finned. We had two of them while chatting to the barman and a big black drug dealer and the bobble haired street boy who just happened to have a lovely wire sculpture with the name SARA on it, what were the chances???

The chances turned out to be thus - that the street boy was handed so much money by a pissed Sara that he offered to buy US a drink out of his winnings, The drug dealer offered to take us to his house to furnish us with some of his goods (and probably rob us), and the barman offered us a spliff. And on the consumption of just two caipriniha we were beyond logical thought and not fully in control of any of our limbs. Luckily my inate alarm bells started to ring and so we bade our new found friends a fond farewell and actually struggled to cross the road to hail a cab - but all was well in then end and another annoyed cabbie ended up with a mangled suspension and was probably mugged on the way out of Santa Teresa. Sara was hors de combat for most of the following day.

Finally Sunday, the big day, arrived. We spent the day in the cool and contemplating how we were going to get a cab to pick us up at 04.00 on Tuesday to fly to Peru. We can't even get the bastards to come up here in broad fucking daylight, let alone persuade one here at 03.00!!! So we throw money at the problem. We will check out here a day early, move to the LINX airport hotel in daylight - be on site to fly at silly o'clock the next day. Now all we are going to need is a cab back to our mountaintop eyrie at 03.00 tomorrow after the parades.

SO IT IS FINALLY CARNIVAL TIME.......

We chill all day, just eat a nice steak lunch in the village centre and enjoy an Acai dessert (local purple berries creamed and frozen) in the five star Santa Teresa Hotel. It just goes to show that my choice of location, yes, mine, as Sara will tell you, can't all be bad with a 5 star in the middle, typical of Rio, sheer luxury cheek by jowl with poverty, only here the poverty folk carry guns. Who cares, the pudding was LOVELY.

Set off at about 8.00pm to get into our seats by 10.00 and we take the Metro, packed to the gills with the usual half naked sweaty Cariocas (keep up - I mentioned way back that Cariocas is the name for denizens of Rio. Denizens? Seriously you don't know that either? 'occupants of a certain place'). Thank goodness the Metro is beautifully air conditioned as it was by now 33 degrees and humid! Arrive at The Sambadrome, the purpose built runway sort of construction just under a kilometer long, width of a four lane road and flanked by 12 massive grandstands. Total chaos! Thousands of the aforementioned naked Cariocas everywhere, cars and buses everywhere....

No signs as to where to go, pedestrian walkways go through shitty side roads, we stuggle to even find a way in, but we succeed. We find our allotted seats and settle in. Its packed!!! Its hot!!!.

Before we get on to interminable pictures of floats, a bit of history and detail. Detail one, in the picture on the left we are eating our jam sandwiches. You are allowed two 500ml bottles of fluid each and two food items as well as a cushion for the hot concrete. All we had at home to make was jam sarnies! Luverly jubberly.

Details 2 through 12: Sunday and Monday are the big nights. 12 Samba schools complete in a championship, 6 each night, judged on music, dancing, colour, theme and floats. The top 10 stay up, the bottom 2 are dropped in favour of the top 2 of the lower division. Bit like the Premier League, and in the same way those dropped loose money. status and their subsidised warehouses, so the competion is real and fierce. Each Samba school has about one hour to do their thing and they each have around 4,000 DANCERS!!!! Each!! The whole production starts around 10.00pm and ends around a crazy 6.00am. 25,000 dancers will have passed before your eyes, all samba'ing around and all dressed in big heavy plastic/crimpelene/vicose costumes that must be like wearing greenhouses. The floats are f'ing ginormous, as wide as a four lane road and some around 10 stories high!!!

It really does have to be seen to be believed - so here we see it...................... [don't forget to click for sound]

I mean seriously? The size of this float. Just scale the figures to the side for an idea of how high it is, and then factor in the fact that the humming bird on top is mechanised. What does that take to construct and even store? Let alone the 4,000 loons prancing around it for an hour dressed in incredible complicated, heavy, no doubt sweaty costumes seen below for over an hour without a break!!

And that 4,000 is PER SCHOOL remember, and does not count the probable 2,000 behind the scenes and all their supporters here tonight in the 90,000 capacity Sambadrome. So around 35,000 people involved in the parade tonight, same again tomorrow There's only 75,000 in the British Army all told. Makes you think.

So we cheered and we stood up to clap, we sat on our concrete, and saw more floats, and we slowly but surely came to the realisation that after 3 hours (with just 5 hours to go) that maybe, just maybe, we'd had the best of it.

I know! $330 a seat, but seriously, once you've seen 20 floats you haven't actually seen them all, but your capacity for further wonderment has been sorely tested, as has your bum. And FOMOC (fear of missing our cab) started. So we snuck out without saying goodbye.....

To say we were fortunate to blag a cab was an understatement as we were told by the cab-mistress. And we had to lie again, and we had to pay extra because of our crime ridden (yet v trendy) location. But even the extra only meant we paid £16 to be delivered home at 02.00 safe and sound. The only drawback was to learnt that we could have saved $660 by standing by the entry gates to the Sambadrome for FREE!!! We drove past miles of floats and dancers all lined up, all practising, all with spectators within feet of them, sitting on flipping comfy garden chairs. I am going to set up as a Rio Carnival Guide.

I'll leave you with a shot of my carnival gear, including my hand painted 'Sara Henslow Original' hat. Unlike 99% of the locals I decided to keep my shirt on, to wear long trousers and sensible shoes, and not to exhibit a sheen of sweat. Well not all the time.

We will also share our opinion that Rio Carnival is definately a 'tick-that-box' event. The sights are amazing and taken in combination with the Blocos, an unforgetable experience.

However, in the great World Carnival Competition we think Mardis Gras in New Orleans has the edge. Its more inclusive (as in you don't pay to see it, you just wander onto the parade route) and the age range of locals taking part is much wider. In Rio the Blocos (free street events) are really for just the young, in New Orleans the street parties were attended by ALL residents, irrespective of age. In Rio most of the bars closed for the Blocos, In Orleans they all put tables of the streets. Just a different vibe. Oh, and in New Orleans most of the people had clothes on most of the time.

SO THAT WAS CARNIVAL............

Next we check out of our cobbled streets where cabs never venture, and into the LINX airport hotel so that we are within a hop, skip and a jump from the international departures at 04.00 on Tuesday for our 5.5 hour flight to LIMA, Peru. We have not heard that much good about Lima, but we have heard a lot of good about Cousoc, the gateway to Machu Pichu, so we are skipping Lima town and transfering straight through onto a 1.30 hour flight up into the hills. Sara tells me it will be colder and raining. I could not be happier! I feel like a bit of cool.

The next two weeks is all tours, trains, sights, and moving towards Lake Titicaca, never thought I'd be going there. To be honest, never had any real urge too....... Funny this travelling lark.

ON TO MACHU PICHU TO LAKE TITICACA