Gully and Elise's Travel Blog: City of God

Merry Christmas from Brazil!!! The Christmas spirit is definitely a bit toned down here, but in an effort to mitigate homesickness I’ve managed to draw some parallels between our Christmas in Brazil and the typical Christmas back in Canada: instead of -36°C with the windchill we have +36°C with the humidex; instead of candy canes dangling from coniferous trees we have coconuts dangling from palm trees; instead of Christmas carols we have samba music; instead of half a meter of snow we have half-meter-overhead waves; instead of rum and eggnog we have, well, just straight rum. Thankfully, Elise’s family made the trek down to Brazil to spend Christmas with us in the town of Buzios, giving us at least SOME sense of normalcy this Christmas.

About a week ago now, after spending a couple of days in the (supposed) outdoor adventure getaway for Rio de Janeiro’s elite (all there was to do there was jump off a waterfall), we decided to give The Big City itself a try. Rio: the undisputed beach capital of the world and the place with the most awe-inspiring cityscape in the world. Sounds romantic, right? Question: anyone out there seen the movie City of God? Anyone familiar with Rio De Janeiro’s favelas? If not, suffice it to say that the favelas (of which there are 1000 in Rio alone) are some of the seediest of underbellies, the slummiest of slums and the ghetto-est of ghettos in the world. Thus, driving in Rio (btw we rented a car to drive from Sao Paulo to Rio) presented a whole new set of problems for the reigning International Driving Champion, aka me. Now, I’ve navigated the streets of some pretty hectic metropolises – recall our jaunt through Eastern Europe last summer where I conquered the likes of Athens and Istanbul – but the urban chaos of Rio may have been my greatest test behind the wheel to date. Dodging traffic and pedestrians on cratered cobblestone streets with no lanes or traffic signals is challenging enough, but the stakes are raised when one wrong turn can bring you unwittingly into a favela. We knew that we in such a situation when I noticed all the parked cars on the street were suddenly burnt-out and sitting on blocks. I slammed on the brakes and did an Austin Powers-like three-point turn on the one way street and gunned it hell outta there. Some favela-dwellers were just staring at us in awe (luckily without weapons drawn). After an hour and a half of tense moment after tense moment (and almost rolling backwards down some of the super steep hills paved with slick cobblestones) we managed to find our place, us and the car all in one piece.

-G