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Show The Salt Lake Tribune Brazil Before discovering the heart of Rio, it seemed necessary to break the through two layers of people tourists, of whom I, after all, was one. and the members of the huge service economy devoted to tourism. Rio has it all by Julia M. Klein Knight-Ridde- r Exploring Rio by Night, first with a tour group, and then with friends met around the pool, was one of my less successful experiments. The first stop on the VTC Rio by Newspapers Our bilingual tour guide delivered introduction to life in Rio de Janeiro. an "Were in a very strong heat spell the worst one weve had since 1946," he said as the bus lurched toward our respective hotels. The temperature had hit 109 the previous day; a forest fire was raging in the mountains, and tourists were dropping from dehydration like flies. There are lots of tourists recently we had to take to the hospital, he said with apparent relish. Stick to mineral water, he told us. Dont eat the melon the first day. Also, our coffee is very strong. Make sure to ask for hot water, or youre going to take off youre going to feel like an atomic bomb. Never take a regular taxi take a radio taxi. Please do not walk around with jewelry. We do not take no anything at all to the beaches purses, no cameras. The sun is very strong. Never expose yourself between 11 a m. and 2 p.m. And be careful of the undertow. Then there was the delicatl subone of the main ject of money reasons that many of us had come to Rio. Last year, an American dollar fetched 251 cruzeiros. By when we arrived, the official rate was about 1,000 cruzeiros to the dollar. (Since then, its gone higher still, to about 1,250.) While this didnt necessarily mean that prices were a quarter of last years, it certainly boded well for our purchasing power. Our tour guide advised us, however, that by shopping around we could get 20 percent to 30 percent more than even the official rate. My name is Carlos, and I never spoke to you about the black market, he added puckishly. Carlos finished on a semiapologe-ti- c note. Other than the things I told you, Rio is a wonderful city, he said to his now somewhat dubious listeners. XXX ble attempts at Portuguese were rarely greeted by bursts of laughter; the Brazilians are a tolerant people, by and large. A waiter did start laughing and pointing, however, when I blithely poured what I thought was applesauce over some sauteed potatoes. The mysterious crushed oranges. As for illness, I did spend my last days in the city wrestling with a variety of symptoms and making periodic trips to a nearby pharmacy. But those trips were a real joy, since no prescriptions are needed to buy drugs in Brazil. If you can pronounce it, you can buy it and nothing I needed cost more than $2. One overwhelming impression that Rio left with me was of a city of extraordinary, breathtaking beauty. The first sight of Rio, after a wearying plane trip from Philadelphia and in between portions of Carlos peroration, was a vision I shall not soon forget a city set harmoniously between mountains and ocean; terraced garden-apartmen- ts jutting out of hills they seemed wedded to; streets filled with color and music; stretches of beach and water extending from crowded Copacabana through Ipanema and Leblon to the wilder waters and more peaceful shores of Sao Conrado, where I was staying. Another memorable view of Rio was from Sugar Loaf Mountain one of the tourist musts. I skipped the VTC tour ($17), and made my way by bus and foot to Praia site of the cable-ca- r station. Before reaching the summit of Sugar Loaf, the car stops at Urea, where the whole city offers itself up to photographers, from the Corcovado (with its welcoming symbol of Christ the Redeemer) to the bateaux mouches plying Guanabara Bay. Lunch is available at an unpretentious restaurant on Urea for $3 or $4. Food from French haute cuisine to native Brazilian is one of Rios many bargains. A still greater view is supposedly available from the top of Corcovado. But the afternoon I let a taxi driver take me there, the entire mountain was shrouded in an eerie mist. The statu5 itself, awesomely majestic, was barely visible from a few yards away, and a curtain of mist hid the city below us from view. All the way down the mountain, my cab driver regaled me in Portuguese with paeans to the beauty I had missed. Ver-malh- a, was the ($36) Cliffs, N.J. all were Americans. Rio was once the glamour capital of the hemisphere, but suddenly, with this years proliferation of charter travel and the plunging cruzeiro, the city room service and its own telex machine, the hotel, by common consensus of both cariocas and Americans, seems to have slipped into gradual decline, signs of which were visible in both slightly shoddy service (the towels were not changed daily, and our rooms were not ready when we arrived) and truly awful food. The prices at the Nacional, to some extent, reflected those truths; it was significantly cheaper than most of the other hotels rated as deluxe (many of which are also located more conveniently in the heart of Copacabana). But this was not enough to mollify those VTC travelers who had purposely booked more and elegant hotels, expensive and found when they stepped off the plane that they had been bumped to the Nacional. An undertone of grumbling ran through many of the conversations beside the circular, overheated pool. had become accessible to the masses. Rio, suddenly this winter, was no different from Miami Beach n or Acapulco a gathering place for secretaries, payroll clerks, pathologists and autoparts salesmen who seemed to want little more more than a cheap gemstone and a good tan. I met all of these, and liked some of them. The Hotel Nacional seemed a mecca for somewhat travelers in Rio. Built as a deluxe hotel on a oped edge of the city, it is a tall, shining cone of a building that dominates Sao Conrado. Despite its architectural magnificence, however, and the presence of many typical deluxe amenities, including middle-America- then-undeve- l- i Menachem was still fuming over having been bumped to the Nacional from the Rio Othon in Copacabana, and he was less than impressed with Rio itself. Think what the Swiss would do with this place, he said. The next stop was Plataforma I in Leblon, for a samba show complete d with lots of girls shaking rounded portions of their anatomy and fabulous, sequined costumes. But hardly the Rockettes. The dancing was amateurish, without seeming spontaneous. And the room was so crammed with tourists from South as well as North America that it was impossible to stretch ones legs. A night later, I tried again. With Ellen and Dolan Garrett, a medical school lecturer and an assistant district attorney from New York, and two other friends, I visited a characteristic Bahian restaurant called Chale, where a request for a wine list brought half a dozen bottles of wine, and then yet another samba also in Leblon. show, Oba-ObThere were more rounded bodies, near-nake- 8 $529 in.WeW.lVA I 8 Exotic Days from Includes Roundtrip Breakfast, Transfers from L.A. daily & City Tour. I'fWS.JI pla $36Q 'pEK? $40Q W I I 529 nights and 8 days in Hawaii. 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The samba show, however, is a a mix of drama, weird animal dance and singing, interrupted by multilingual tributes to the tourist-heav- y audience that never seems to lead anywhere. The men of our party watched, however, with their mouths hanging open. I took two other package tours while I was in Rio, both from VTC, which I later learned charged about 30 percent more than some other tour operators. The first, and more disappointing, was to the nearby city of Petropolis, which contains the winter palace of the old Brazilian monarchs. It would have been more fun to explore on foot. The second was a highly relaxing day basking in the sun on one of the tropical islands not far from Rio. Lunch was another barbecue-typ- e meal, and the water here (unlike at the beach near my hotel) was calm and suitable for swimming. I sunned and took pictures of lavish yellow flowers that had dropped from some tropical tree onto my beach towel symbols of insouciance, I thought. At the end of the day, I hooked up again, by accident, with the Epsteins, a little mellower this time around. They graciously invited me to dine with them at Le Saint Hon-ora French restaurant on the 37th floor of the Hotel Meridien in Leme. It was a place so pretentious and, I would guess, so expensive that the entirely French menu contained no prices. No matter. We talked of Jorge Amado, Brazils leading novelist, and admired the nighttime view of the city. I realized that Americans, despite their linguistic imperialism and frequent snootiness, have a keen eye for some aspects of the good life fine food and good shopping. a, 3-- TRAVEL A TOURS HAWAII a beer and sliced roast pork, ham, chicken and beef from skewers that they held over our plates. It was a frantic scene, balanced by the civilized presence of my seatmates, Menachem and Hadassah Epstein, an orthopedic surgeon and a pulmonary physiologist from Englewood Our guide was not atypical of the cariocas, as the inhabitants of Rio are called, whom we met in the course of our eight-da- y stay. They combined a real enthusiasm for their city with an undercurrent of worry about problems such as crime. After several days of being warned by strangers to clutch my camera for dear life and not to leave unguarded so much as a solitary sandal, I peevishly concluded that XXX cariocas could be divided into two groups: those who cautioned tourists My second impression of Rio was that somebody might steal their less positive. valuables and those who stole I had traveled to Rio because my them. fantasies summoned me there. I In actual fact, theft was not a thought of exoticism Carnival, n celebration problem that I butted up against in the lavish Rio. Nor was the heat a hassle. The (March that reputedly puts New heat never seemed to edge above the Orleanss Mardi Gras in the shade, 90s the days I was there, and drought seemed the symbol of a hedonistic was dissolved by intermittent rain. culture removed in time and mind from the barren, Northern winter I I changed my money at the black-markrate with the Vacation Trav- was escaping. el Concepts (VTC) tour personnel at I thought, too, of beaches and sun the Hotel Nacional, where I was and traces of history in museums staying, and routinely took regular and monuments. I expected the restaxis (after negotiating a fare first). taurants to be fine and the natives In fact, I found cab drivers a useful cosmopolitan. But, more than all source of information about the city that, I chose Rio because it seemed when they were not busy trying, far away, foreign. And, with my in bursts of entrepreneurship run halting Spanish and handy Porturampant, tb negotiate a fare for guese phrasebook, I expected to ensome additional excursion that I had ter that different culture and beno wish to undertake. come part of it, however briefly. I also found that my various fee above But what I found in Rio SKYWAYS Churras-cari- Chopoto, where, in the Brazilian gaucho tradition, vast, seemingfrom ly endless quantities of food fried bananas to french fries were set down beside us and passed up and down long, banquet-lik- e tables. Waiters served bad wine and good discovered, was I substance, Night tour T3 Sunday, March 18, 1984 East 1 1 $ I " Logan (801) American Fork (801) 753-790- 0 Pnc tubtact to availability t 295-944- 3 Ogden,, (801) Orem (801) 394-266- 756-527- 5 baaad on doubt 225-760- 0 occupancy and mbfacl to changa 4 |
