August 21, 2023: we are four months into our (probably) 14-month trip and have reached the end of our first visit to Brazil; we depart for new adventures tomorrow. We will return to Brazil later in the year, into the Amazon!
During our 5-week stay in Rio de Janeiro we did a getaway to Armação dos Búzios and Rio das Ostras. Búzios is a well-known resort area about 100 miles east of Rio. It's on a small peninsula sticking out into the Atlantic and boasts 23 beaches; some larger, some tiny, all quite beautiful. Abram did the research and found us a small hotel - Chez Pitu Praia - located right on Geriba Beach, Praia de Geribá. If I searched a dictionary of places/concepts under "perfect small beach hotel", Chez Pitu Praia would be listed! 🏄🩴 🌴
The shuttle bus dropped us at the top of the little street leading down to our hotel and the beach.
The bar, the tiny cute pool and the lovely beach.
Our room is the yellow door.
Life is tough on Praia de Geribá.
Kids taking surfing lessons.
Breakfast. Most mornings there were a couple dozen surfers out there.
Many hotels in Búzios are located in town or up on bluffs. We were so happy to be 20 steps from such a beautiful beach. And so happy the weather cooperated cuz you never know when it might be rainy or super windy.
One of Búzios' claims to fame is that Brigitte Bardot visited it in 1964 with her Brazilian boyfriend; the resulting publicity began the process that turned it from a small fishing village to a major resort town. Many Argentinians visit and own property and businesses there; Spanish is widely spoken.
We'd arranged to meet up with a Sonoma County friend who now lives in Rio das Ostras, a city of about 100,000 located an hour drive north of Búzios. Amber and her friend Diego drove down to pick us up, then we all headed up the coast. We stayed at the nice Atlântico Hotel, across the street from the beach.
The next day Amber and Diego took us to a small beach that only locals know about - it's so great to be taken around by locals! Rio das Ostras is known for its annual blues and jazz festival and for a very robust series of free music events on the main beach. Also for its outrigger canoe team, which Amber competes on.
It was a beautiful sunny Sunday so people were out enjoying the day and the water. We had lunch and drinks (those dangerous Caipirinhas) in a beachside restaurant.
Amber buying some cashews from a roving salesman, using the Pix app to pay - everyone in Brazil has Pix!
One of the reasons Amber took us to this particular restaurant is that they make excellent moqueca, Brazilian seafood stew. The stew varies depending on what seafood is available and fresh, but the base is constant: onion, garlic, tomato, peppers, cilantro, chiles, coconut milk, and the secret ingredient azeite de dendê - red palm oil.
Moqueca is served hot, alongside steamed white rice, farofa de pilão (made from manioc flour toasted in dendê oil), pirão (a creamy porridge made from cooking manioc flour in a fish or meat stock) and lime wedges. It was incredibly good!! A pic from the internet:
And here's the one Abram made a few nights later with ingredients from the farmers market in Rio:
After our getaway we took a bus back to Rio and noticed lots of white cows grazing on the hillsides. They have humps somewhat like Brahmas but actually are Nellore cattle, first brought from India to Brazil in the mid-1800's. Brazil is now the world's largest breeder of them.
We also noticed that the soil and cliffs were very red, called "terra roxa”; it's due to a high content of iron oxides. It looks very different than the gray granite around Rio de Janeiro. We'd already noticed a lot of red brick buildings and many orange-red roof tiles.
When we were in Rio das Ostras we'd talked with Amber and Diego about the fact that Brazil didn't fight a war to gain independence from Portugal, unlike most New World countries. (Diego is from São Paulo, a software guy, lived 6 months in London. Amber has lived in Brazil, in Rio das Ostras, for many years.) Diego said that in Rio de Janeiro there is war between the regular people, the big drug dealers, the political criminals/white collar crime/graft, and the police (probably in other cities, too, but we were only talking about Rio). He mentioned the case of a woman - Marielle Franco - who had been fighting for the rights of people in the favelas and was shot dead in the street by the police in 2018. As a city council member, Franco fought against violence against women, for reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, and for the rights of favela residents. She chaired the Women's Defense Commission and formed part of a four-person committee that monitored federal intervention in Rio de Janeiro. Her sister Anielle is now in politics, trying for the same reforms; she is Brazil's Racial Equality Minister. Amber told us about going to Rio to deliver the kefir she used to make - OmKefir - and how, in order to drive through some of the favelas to get from one delivery address to another, she'd be stopped by the barrio "guards", instructed to turn on the car interior lights - which indicated that she'd been ok'd to drive through - and proceed.
After awhile, Amber got to know some of these young men; her stories reminded us of the Gomorrah in Naples, trying to help their local families even though their income was crime-based.
On the National level, in June former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was barred from running for national office until 2030 for abuse of power, after he made unfounded claims about Brazil's voting system ahead of last year's election - a good thing, but 2030 will be here before we know it.
And this article just came out:
Complex issues.
On a lighter note, let's talk about food and drink! Food - fish, fruit, feijoada, farofa, not to mention pastries, tapioca, açaí, churrasco, batatas baroa, pão de queijo, moqueca; and drinks - coffee, cachaça, caipirinhas, coconut água, chopps (of Brahma beer). Fantastic sushi here, the fish is so fresh. Brazil has the second largest Japanese population in the world. The fruit is particularly tasty.
It's great to have a kitchen in order to utilize the fantastic food from the markets. This gorgeous array of fish is
from the Tuesday market:
Fish fillets, prawns and a bag of incredibly fresh beautiful sardines, all for under $10.
More photos from the Tuesday market:
There are many good restaurants in Brazil, ranging from high-end to street-corner/plastic-chairs-on-the-sidewalk:
Delicious fresh grilled pulpo.
Feijoada (black beans) is Brazil's national dish, generally made with pork and sausage and served with rice and farofa. That's farofa on the right, made from small pieces of bacon fried with cassava flour. And the hot sauce in that bottle was hot!!
Pastel de nata, delicious Portuguese flaky pastry with custard.
We've dined a couple of times at a restaurant down the street from our apartment in Leblon - CT Boucherie. It's one of the restaurants in Rio owned by Claude Troigros and it features meat... and a vast array of side dishes. The waiters start by bringing various cuts of wrapped (raw) meat to the table to display and describe them; after the main meat courses are served they bring all the side dishes one by one directly from the kitchen still in their cooking pots - very hot, right off the stove - and dish them out as requested. They call it Rodizio de Acompanhamentos, a riff on a way to serve meat that's become a standard in many Brazilian restaurants. Rodizio (rotation or turn in English) is a style of service in Brazilian dining in which the waiters rotate freshly cooked meats of various types past your table and carve them directly onto your plate. At CT Boucherie they do it with the delicious side dishes: fried potatoes, sautéed vegetables, stuffed baked tomatoes, polenta, quinoa/spinach risotto, ratatouille, roasted peppers topped with blue cheese, rice, white beans, red beans, cold cauliflower vinaigrette with tiny red peppers, applesauce with passion fruit (!), and the star of the show, batata baroa. One article about the restaurant said, "yeah the meat's good but what you go for is the side dishes!" - exactly what we said to ourselves the first time we went. It's really fun to see all the different cooking pots and pans come out of the kitchen. They also bring a dish of their particularly tasty farofa and a little bucket of house-made potato chips to the table.
CT Boucherie is where we first tasted mashed batata baroa, sometimes called Peruvian parsnip, described by one food writer as "a potato that eloped with a Macademia nut" - so good!
The placemats showed all the cuts of beef including the "cupim" or hump from the Nellore cattle mentioned above.
In Rio there are lots of street carts and vendors, and fresh juice/snack bars:
Last Saturday we headed across town to the port area, to a former chocolate factory now artist studios, cafes, shops. Pretty hilarious trying to get there. The neighborhood was a bit sketchy and everyone is warned to be very careful, you just don't know how things can suddenly change around a corner. Google maps said it was a 12 minute walk from the tram station and all was good until the last couple of minutes, as it directed us uphill and down a very narrow street where we couldn't see what came next. We decided that discretion was the better part of valor and went back down to the big street to grab a taxi. The man who was getting out of the cab was clearly saying to us, "it's just a 2 minute walk (you Bozos)" but we went for the cab anyway. Like our wacky cab experience in Montevideo, this guy didn't have a phone or GPS so Abram was looking at his phone while we took turns shouting "left" "right" "keep going" "down there" in our terrible Portuguese while we went up up up and around and down dozens of narrow streets only to end up back on the big street where we'd started. Started again, only to find the place right around the corner a block and a half from our starting point haha. We'd driven past it but hadn't noticed it; no signage to speak of. He dropped us - obviously thought we were nuts - and hollered something like, "I'll be waiting down the hill when you're ready to go back to Copacabana!". Crazy tourists!
The former chocolate factory Fábrica Behring is an immense building repurposed a few years ago, but still retaining its industrial feel. Really gorgeous! Great views from the 6th floor rooftop. Artist studios, shops, cafes, event spaces, a birthday party going on; they've kept some of the chocolate-making equipment, too. Very cool vibe. More info:
This past Thursday we took a full day tour and went up into the mountains to Petrópolis, the summer home of 19th Century Emperor Dom Pedro II and his court. Always cooler at that altitude, many Cariocas have summer homes up there. It's a city of over 300,000 people, with a beautiful historic center, and bordering the Serra do Órgãos National Park with its crazy-shaped mountains, forests and waterfalls. It would be a terrific summer getaway.
Our daylong outing included a happy chance sighting of a lovely small wedding at the Gothic cathedral:
The Imperial Palace and the music room:
The air was so clean and fresh up there; sadly, Rio has pretty crappy air quality.
On Saturday I took the ferry over to Niterói, a city connected to Rio de Janeiro by a bridge across Guanabara Bay. It's known for the flying-saucer-shaped Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.
They were setting up for a festival later in the day:
The views of Rio back across the bay were fabulous; also the picturesque short ferry ride:
This morning I finally started the trek to the top of Corcovado to see Cristo Redentor. Corcovado, also known as “the mountain that Giant Stone Jesus lives on”, is a 2,500 foot high granite peak in the Tijuca National Forest. The little train that winds its way through the forest has been consistently sold out so I went up the modern way - Uber followed by van. You can also hike up the mountain from Parque Lago... but yeah... Obviously, lots of tourists - like going to the Taj Mahal or the Grand Canyon - everyone seemed to be Brazilian. The van made its first stop about 3/4 of the way up; bizarre to be looking down on Sugarloaf!
I didn't make it all the way to the top - too dang many crowds of people plus a bit of tourist tummy. But I feel like I experienced Corcovado nonetheless.
The road upward winds through the forest and the small neighborhoods clinging to the side of the mountain.
Construction started started on the Cristo in 1922 and was finished 9 years later. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_the_Redeemer_(statue)
Wrapping up, here are some random shots of Rio, including two more of guys repairing the sidewalk stone by stone because it just blows my mind that sidewalks all over the city are maintained this way!
Not my photo, but an adorable shot of little kids with the statue of Antônio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim (often called Tom Jobim) on Arpoador Beach:
Kinda cute young people learning to sashay:
One last beachside lunch at Posto 11 on Leblon Beach:
This past five weeks in southeastern Brazil we've discovered just a small part of this gigantic colorful diverse complex country. The beach scene is definitely huge, but it's only a part of the vibe. People do love music and dancing; they will get up and dance - and sing! - at the drop of a hat. Walking home from dinner the other night we passed our corner juice bar and a couple of a certain age was sitting outside at one of the sidewalk tables - he was playing a ukulele and she was doing percussion with a plastic bottle partially filled with dry rice, having a super fun time. I loved it! As they say in Brazil, Tudo bem? Tudo bom? - imagine Tony Soprano asking, How ya doin'? - reply: Sim, tudo ótimo!
Up next, we continue our exploration of the Southern Cone -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cone - plus a side trip to Easter Island. We will be traveling back and forth between Argentina and Chile, heading south, waiting for spring - a month from now - so we can see glaciers, penguins, and Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world.
Thanks for sharing!
Excellent pics, excellent commentary. Thanks for sharing.
Wow! Such great photos and videos and descriptions! Love the old chocolate factory and artwork. Wonderful vibe in Brazil!
Thanks for sharing!
Woof!
Wow Val, thanks for inviting us along!! Your journey is incredibly exciting to follow and it is such a treat to glimpse snippets of your fantastic adventure!