Bona fide tourism!

Yesterday was our first free afternoon in a long while, and, it also being the second to last day in Rio, we hit some of the belezas (beauties) of the city.

A waterfall on the outskirts of the Floresta de Tijuca, a huge park in Rio. We only drove through some of it though it promised to be a marvelous hike. Maybe later.

David and Tio Zi by a map of the forest. You should be able to click the picture to magnify it.

Sometime in the dark decade of the 1980s, at this plaza three cars full of Christians, two being my parents, stopped and released a host of believers praying loudly in tongues. The couples who already were at the plaza high-tailed it.

A bird

Here it is: Cristo Redentor do Corcovado. We were blessed to have both a good view of it and the city given the sky was overcast--oftentimes visitors can´t see anything up there through the clouds. And now I´ve been able to see Rio from Corcovado when it´s sunny and when it´s misty. Both views are breathtaking.

A view. That big rock is Pão de Açucar--more on that below.

Another view from Corcovado. The bridge goes to an island of several cities; if my memory serves right, it took ten or fifteen minutes to cross in 2001. Click to magnify.

All those little houses shoved up the mountainside constitute a favela, where the poorest of Rio live. Favelas are destitute, dangerous places. Contrast them with those nearby buildings and you easily understand why Brasil is the country with the biggest rich-poor extremes in the world.

David in the cable-car to Pão de Açucar (Sugarloaf), the rock you see in the background.

The view from Sugarloaf. We´re actually facing Corcovado, the mountain on which is the Christ the Redeemer statue--it´s the first peak to the left of Dave.

More to the north. It was marvelous to see Rio at night.

To the south and the familial two. The beach you see is Copacabana.

Though I visited Corcovado and Pão de Açucar in 2001, the views yesterday were more meaningful. After having walked through downtown and taken the Metrô (subway) and sat in the bus and greeted the taxi drivers and met the people and spoken the language and eaten the food and bought the ware and breathed the air and stepped on the shore and ate with the rich and passed by the poor, I could appreciate the big picture of the city I´ve lived in for a month, and I longed more than ever for the city to improve and Christ to be known--the real Christ, not an icon or a thing of stone. It was a good day.