Day 39 Exploring Rio - Christ the Redeemer & Sugarloaf

Tour day and it is bright and sunny!

We were to undertake a tour to Sugarloaf via their cable car, then to Christ the Redeemer statue, which we did, after a start at 9:45 where we found we were actually part of a tour with about a dozen others. The local guide, Marcos spoke good Portuguese and very average English. He also used a whistle to round us up, which did not go over well with me. Despite this, our tour that was supposed to finish at 13:30 did so at 14;45.

Sugarloaf is a huge rock on the north side of the city and has a double cable car runing to its top since about 1931. This means that you start in the middle of the naval academy near Red Beach and do a short walk amongst trees and squirrels to join the second cable car to the summit. Before we took off, we marvelled at about 20 rock climbers scaling a huge wall to the north of us, on a different rock. 

The cars and pulley system have had three generations, and in 1972 the first cars were replaced, then again in about 2009. Now the system is both far quicker and also carries a lot more people, about 70 per car. 

The view is incredible across all parts of the city in all directions. This includes the airport, harbour and bridge, plus many of the local Favellas or shanty towns that are so famous.

Next we drove for about 30 minutes to the south and up the steep Morro or mountain to the huge statue of Chris the Redeemer that is so famous in Rio de Janeiro. It is quite a process to get there as we needed to take a second van then a lift to the summit among many other people on Easter Sunday. Again the view is incredible and speaks volumes about how pretty and spectacular this city is. 

After that, our van dropped our team at the hotel then inched its way south parallel to Copacabana Beach to drop off others and me near to the Copa Fort where Sheryle was waiting patiently for me for a late lunch right on the water front. The view and food was first class. We then ran our Zoom meeting with the kids at 5pm and walked back the 6km to our hotel at the northern end of the beach.