This thread may now become officially “Capetown-Rio Seamailâ€, as the ship is now blessed (or cursed??) with the presence of a few more LCTers who boarded Friday in Rio, including Wendy & David and Pat & me.
Prior to embarking the Voyager, Pat & I spent four excellent days in that lovely city, using a superb private guide, Cedric Diniz, whom we shared with Wendy & David on two of the four days. Contrary to the soggy experience of the passengers who were in Rio only on Friday and Saturday, the 4th & 5th, our first three days in the city were delightfully dry. That allowed us to see Corcovado and the Christ Redeemer in full sun, misty clouds, heavy fog, and every combination of those meteorological phenomena. The views of the Christ in the mist, both from the ground and from our helicopter, were probably the most dramatic – quite mystical.
The views from Sugar Loaf were in some ways even more spectacular than those from the slightly higher Corcovado. Both of the two mountains provide fantastic vistas of the amazing city, which is a unique combination of endless sweeping beaches, miles of high rise hotels and apartment houses backed up against the mountains, and the largest urban forest in the world, Tijuca Forest. Rio easily lives up to its special name, “a cidade maravilhosaâ€, the marvelous city!!
It appears that all visitors to Rio do not share our enthusiasm for the lovely city, however. At one particularly magnificent outlook in the Tijuca Forest on our way up to Corcovado, we heard a member of another small tour group (whose guide must have raved about Rio’s beauty one-too-many times for the guy’s tolerance level) loudly declare, “Well, maybe we have finally seen all of beautiful f***ing Rio, okay??!!†Our own little group of five, including our guide, absolutely cracked up and, of course, immediately adopted that expression as our trademark expression for the rest of the week. I was dearly hoping that the guy would have boarded the ship on Friday so that we could share “fond†memories of touring Rio; but, so far, I haven’t seen him onboard. The funniest part of the story is that at first we thought that he was the guide!! Wouldn’t that have been the Rio guide from hell??!! Sadly, it turned out that the guide was a very sweet Carioca who loves her city and simply had the bad luck to have had a major jerk as a client.
Ah, considering the rather limited bandwidth of the signal we’re getting on board and the consequent problems I’ve experienced in my attempts to remain online with this laptop, it might be prudent for me to break my ramblings into segments. Thus, this is to be continued… (Let that be fair warning to you all who will now know to add this thread to your “blocked†list.)
Tchau, Fred
