Santa Teresa & Lapa

In our preparations for our honeymoon, we researched sights we would want to go see. We read about them and watched videos about it. One of the places that we were especially excited to go see was Santa Teresa and Lapa. We heard that Santa Teresa was an artistic community filled with shops and cafe's. We were supposed to be able to take a trolley "bondinho" from the city center to this community.

Our first clue should have been that the trolley wasn't running anymore. Apparantly there was an accident that killed 7 people and also led to the bondinho's demise. So, we unknowingly had a taxi drive us up to Santa Teresa where we (naively) thought we'd wander down through the neighborhoods until we reached the Arcos da Lapa and the Escalera de Selaron.

I think the taxi driver thought we were nuts when we asked him to drop us off in the middle of nowhere. Little did he know that our map told us that we should have been in the middle of quite the happening place! It was drizzly that morning, so I thought by the looks of things that maybe we would have to work a little harder to find what we were looking for. It MUST have just been hiding!

We started walking. I saw this amazing shop. It looked like it was selling mostly fruit, but it had this amazing blue and white tiled store front. I HAD to take a picture... that is, until the lady inside the shop started yelling/screaming at me to put the camera away. No pictures. We were also being followed by a transvestite-type person trying to sell me "hand-made" jewelry. I was nervous. It also seemed like she was following us. Double nervous. But he/she was the closest thing we saw to a "shop" in the area.

We started wandering down the street looking for shops and the famous Escalera. The place was mostly a dump, most likely went downhill after the trolley stopped bringing the tourists up. However, there were some cool looking buildings I would have liked to take pictures of. I actually had to wait around about 5 minutes until the coast was clear to snap this photo.



The point at which we took this picture, was the last "decent" memory I have of this place. We were not far from the Arcos de Lapa and the Escalera, but we had to walk a little further. We started down... we weren't sure which way to go. We turned the corner and decided that if we wanted to keep ANYTHING we had with us, we needed to turn around immediately and go back the other way. Because around the corner, we saw a street that had a reasonable number of threatening-looking people and there was NO WAY we could blend in... especially with my "yellow" hair (what the Brazilians referred to blonde hair). It even made Dave nervous. We turned around and I started praying for a bus, a taxi, whatever... I didn't care, I just wanted out of there!

About 10 minutes later a bus came by and we stopped it and hopped on. Everyone on board staring at us like we were crazy... and that we definitely weren't from there! Less than 5 minutes on the bus we were at the Arcos. I refused to go back to the area looking for the Escalera and we continued on to the Metropolitan Cathedral & Bell Tower.

Arcos da Lapa


Metropolitan Cathedral


Bell Tower


This ultimately led us to meet our "tour guide" and taxi driver Luiz. He was absolutely amazing. So amazing, that I have to save that for next time... But here's a sneak preview- he brought us to the Escalera de Selaron that I was too nervous to go back searching for.

Views from the Roof-top: Rio de Janiero, Part 1

Our first day of our honeymoon in Rio was after a long day of traveling and immediately following the wedding marathon! We left at 4am the morning after our wedding and drove from San Diego to LAX for our 13 hour flight to Brazil. If I were to do that over again, I would have left a day in-between to round everything up and soak in the first day of being married off of an airplane, but, as they say, "live and learn"! Regardless, the first day in Rio was wonderful. We arrived around 3am in the city, slept till about 10 and enjoyed the beach that was immediately in front of our hotel and the views from the roof-top pool and bar. We were completely lazy. We wandered a bit around the beach areas of Leblon and Impanema, but nothing too crazy. We grabbed dinner along the street. Dave ordered what he thought was going to be a soup and hamburger but turned out to be orange juice and a hamburger! That was pretty funny! We had no idea what we were ordering! But I'll say this, they have the BEST juices in Brazil. Sooo good & super fresh! We had fun trying the different varieties!

You can barely make out the Corcodova on that mountain behind us. At night it was all lit-up and pretty cool.


This is the view of Impanema Beach from our hotel roof.


We were wandering down by the beach at sunset and grabbed this shot. The sun set on the "Twin Brothers" mountain. The first day was one of the few days we got a sunset because it was cloudy and rainy for most of our time there. We actually thought that was Sugarloaf mountain and we would look there to see if it was a good day to visit Sugarloaf. We were shocked when we found out that wasn't the famous mountain! Typical tourists!


View of Twin Brothers mountains and Leblon Beach at night. Beautiful huh?!? We made it a habit to bring a bottle of wine with us to the roof-top at night to watch the scenery and relax. You can see the lights on the side of the mountain, and that is a very large favela. We drove by it on our way back from our jungle tour (more on that later) and it's very sad. Very low income housing area with over 12,000 people living there. If you think the gap between the rich & poor is bad in the US, go to Brazil where it is much worse. Less than a 5 minute drive from this favela is the Leblon beach where condo's sell for between 2-10 million Real's (the Brazilian currency). That is $1.14-5.7 million US dollars. Crazy!


Oh the beauty...