A good friend of mine is in Rio at the moment, and that got me thinking about my trip to Brazil.

 

I was only 11 years old, so these are recollections through a child's eyes.

 

 

 

Of course there are the beaches - more of which later.  We went to the Corcovado (the large statue of Jesus) and the Sugarloaf mountain, but those aren't the things that I think about when I remember Rio.

 

 

 

A previous employee of my father's picked us up at the airport and took us to our hotel.  We were right on the beach - Ipanema I think - and the hotel looked very grand.  Our hosts seemed impressed and, when we got to our floor, they turned left, towards swanky doors and gold embossed numbers.  

 

No, no, our porter told them, this way, and he turned to the right.

 

It seems that these were the cheaper rooms, and we had bunk beds and one of those beaded curtains in our room.

 

Maybe the travel agent in South Africa had no idea there was a line dividing nice and crap rooms running down the hotel's elevator shaft... who knows?  I just have one of those pre-teen memories of acute embarrassment at our hosts seeing us in a crappy room.  Why the hell didn't they wait for us in the lobby?

 

I remember the hotel concierge explaining to my father that there is a lot of crime in Rio and that he should take a little money out with him and leave everything else in their secure lock boxes behind reception.  He also told us to avoid the beach because of thieves.  

 

Maybe he was doing us a favor - I have no doubt at all that we had "Know-nothing tourist" tattooed across our foreheads - but I was a little pissed at him.  What little I knew of Rio back then included pictures of beautiful beaches, and I sure as hell wanted to walk along one.  

 

Whenever I go to a place near the ocean, I feel like I must at least paddle in the shallows.  I don't know why, it's just a thing with me.  I even braved a floating condom to do it in Santa Monica.  Rio is probably the only place in the world where I haven't done that.

 

But we did walk along the famous black and white beach sidewalks.  I don't have access to my parent's photos from that trip, so you'll just have to do make do with some from the net:

 

 

The other thing I remember about Rio is how big, and how full, the church was.  We went to Sunday mass and we had to crowd into the back.  Yes, good Catholics to go mass, even on holiday.

 

 

 

My dad's ex-employee took us to his apartment and we had a look at the wonderful view from the balcony.  But then I looked straight down, and I saw the favela, or shanty town.  On a hill right next to the apartment block, there were people living in shacks.  

 

Now this may seem completely ridiculous coming from a woman who grew up in South Africa which, of course, has massive shanty towns, even to this day.  But there were laws back then about who could go where, so I had never seen real poverty in South Africa, not even the proof less than ten minutes drive from my own house.

 

Later that day we went back to our hosts' car and it had been keyed, all the way along the side.  They explained that poor people are angry and take it out on rich people.  The discrepancy in income is huge in Brazil.

  

This fact was crystallized for me later that night when we sat outside next to the beach, having a drink.  A tired old woman, bent over and wrinkled, approached us, offering us peanuts which were roasted in a little contraption she carried - two tin cans, one with hot coals in the bottom.  As our hosts declined her offer and waved her away from our table, I looked behind her and saw a fat man, with a moustache (of course!), wearing a Panama hat and dressed in a white suit.  He was being loud and wobbled across to an open-topped luxury car.  He was like something out of a movie.

 

I think a small part of me, in seeing that stark contrast in economic status in Rio, had a better understanding of the truth of my own country.

 

 

 

My dad's ex-employee and his wife took us to eat at a churrascaria.

 

It was nothing short of amazing. 

 

We sat down, family style, at big tables.  You could order a plate of salads and rice if you wanted to, but I saw that a lot of people didn't even bother.  They had come for the meat.  This place would be a vegan's nightmare.

 

You could smell the meat cooking on the open fire outside. 

 

Then the men started coming round.

 

They had long, thick skewers with freshly barbecued meat on them.  And they came up to you and, with sharp knives, carved some meat onto your plate, cutting and cutting until you asked them to stop. 

 

 

And they just kept on coming.  And coming.  And coming.  

 

And the meat was good.

 

When we got too full and started to shake our heads - No, thank you - they seemed to get a bit annoyed.

 

I must have had eyes as big as saucers.  I've never experienced anything like it in my life. 

 

 

And so those are my memories of Rio.  I'd love to go back, and include a trip up the Amazon - on a nice boat with mosquito nets, of course.  I'd also like to see the carnival - from a nice hotel balcony. 

 

Maybe one day...

 

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