Christ! We are in Ipanema!

And so now we are in Rio de Janeiro, and it is absolutely one of those places where you hear the clichés about it so often you can’t believe that they can possibly be true, and then you see it and it is so ridiculous it makes you laugh out loud. Or maybe that’s just me.

After arriving in the rain after a long long journey, on our first night we barricaded ourselves inside our rather cell-like room (oh we miss Ju’s house!) and fortified ourselves against the world with a bit of American series The Wire on dvd on our laptop, while Friday night Ipanema raged outside.

The next day we were suitably fortified to brave the outside world, took ourselves off to the Ipanema beach, and actually could not believe it. Blazing blue skies over a huge long stretch of white sand, covered in a slew of toned, oiled, bronzed human muscle. It really is true – all the men look like they rightfully belong on the cover of Men’s Health magazine (and don’t they know it) and all the women are brown, firm, hairless and clad in miniscule bikinis.

After ten days of being, or so it seemed, the only tourists in Sao Paulo, this bit of Rio is taking me a little while to get used to, catering, as it does, largely to the tourist dollar. As a result it is, like many holiday resorts, a little bit anodyne and no-place. Plenty of places to spend money in bars or restaurants filled with other holiday makers. Fancy boutiques, ice cream shops, postcards etc. I have an absolute allergy to feeling like a tourist and doing touristy things, which is sometimes a bit of a disadvantage, because often the genuinely incredible things in a country are completely touristified. Living in London, you realise that the tourists live a parallel life to the citizens: they do stuff you never do, and vice-versa. The thing I can’t abide is the sensation of buying a pre-packaged experience of a place, which is essentially an experience that thousands of others have had before you. To you right is the sea, to your left is the mountain, let’s all take exactly the same photo and then have a ludicrously overpriced coca-cola and buy a fridge magnet shaped like this natural wonder in order to properly commemorate this day for ever more. Often the tourist experience seems to involve dicing with perceived danger in the safest way conceivable – hang-glide over Rio! Rock climb up Sugar Loaf mountain!

Here is Rio, you can now go on a tour of the favelas, which my gut reaction to seems like grossest form of cultural voyeurism, with an added kick of adrenalin for those who saw City of God and want to boast to their friends that they’ve been to gangland. I’ve had it explained to me that these tours are actually welcomed by favela communities, who see it as a good thing that tourists are finally registering them and not turning the blind eye that most of Brazilian society does, and perhaps it’s wrong of me to judge the motives of the people who go on these tours. But it’s very difficult for me to get away from the idea that it’s treated like some sort of safari – the favelas are too dangerous for non-residents to go into unguided, we are constantly told, so you must pay to be escorted there to see the wild life. Putting myself in the position of someone living in a community dealing with those sorts of problems, I can’t see myself being grateful for a shed load of tourists turning up to take pictures of how shit my house is. I could see that being, actually, pretty fucking irritating.

So yesterday we went up Pao do Acucar (Sugarloaf Mountain), two of the giant boulder-like hills on the edge of the peninsular, strung together by cable cars, which afford an incredible view of the city. We had spent the last couple of days (ever since seeing some sloths in a park in Sao Paulo) trying to remember the seven deadly sins, of which we can only list six. Joined by another friend here in Rio, by the end of yesterday remembering the seventh had turned into quite a competition, with a prize of a massage for the winner. So far we’ve got sloth (slothity), gluttony, lechery, covetousness (envy), pride and wrath. Shamefully our knowledge of this is not gleaned from the Bible, but rather from the film Se7en, of which we all have hazy memories. We spent much of the day yesterday accusing each other of various combinations of sins, and making nominations for what the seventh should be. Bitchiness? Dithering about? Saying you’re going to do something and then not actually doing it? We sat on the top of Sugarloaf mountain discussing this and watching the sun dropping over the mountain tops on the other side of Rio, our backs pointedly turned to the throng of other tourists and the shops selling fridge magnets. Unfortunately our view of Christ the Redeemer, on one of the mountains opposite, was obscured by cloud. We passed a cold can of Guarana back and forth between the three of us. “I’m actually a bit annoyed with Jesus’s failure to make an appearance” I said, and at that exact moment, no word of a lie, the clouds parted for a moment and there he was, backlit by the setting sun. Almost enough to make me believe….oh all right then, it wasn’t. But the timing was immaculate.