Rio De Janeiro - March 16th

The plan today had been to go up to see Jesus but as it is very cloudy today we aren’t going to do that.  Instead our morning is taken up with a walk up Ipanema beach (which despite the cloud is as populated as Copacabana was yesterday), to the posh suburb of Leblon, and a walk back along the main shopping street.  It is a great street for Dorota, although some of the prices are a bit high.  Having now seen both suburbs I think I can agree with the general assessment that other travellers have told us, Copacabana is the better beach, but Ipanema is the better suburb (in that it has the better shops and restaurants, and it feels a lot less edgy).

As we walk along through Ipanema we catch a glimpse of Corcovado, the mountain on which Jesus stands.  It is partially covered in cloud, so it looks like we made a good choice.  Instead we get the metro to the suburbs of Catate and Flamengo, which Lonely Planet raves about.  However they look pretty shabby when we get out of the station, and although we find a nice (but expensive) per kilo restaurant for lunch, there isn’t that much to see.  There is an old presidential palace from when Rio was the capital of Brazil, but other than that and the Flamengo park, there isn’t much in the area.

Except for two things, a magnificent view of the Sugar Loaf mountain (and the suburb of Urca which it overlooks) and a museum to the famous singer Carmen Miranda, where I guess we could have seen some of her famous fruity headdresses.  However after a bit of walking we couldn’t find the museum so in the end we got the metro back to our flat.

In the evening we went back to the vicinity of the location where the Girl from Ipanema was written.  This time instead of going to the bar we go across the road to a bar which has nightly Bossa Nova concerts.  It costs a little, but the singing was quite nice (as was the food, luckily we learnt to only order starters as the portions were massive).  As Dorota said given our age now I think we are more Bossa Nova people than Samba people.  However we were the youngest in the crowd which were 90% tourists) as with Lapa looking dodgy even during the day, I think the chances of seeing it at night are pretty low.