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...