We woke up early that morning. We are staying at Santa Teresa, so our nearest metro station is Carioca. We got to the stop of Copacabana (Siqueira Campos) and picked Henry up from his hotel to have a walk along Copacabana. The beach is as impressive in pictures as it is in real life. It takes over half an hour to walk the length of it, especially if it's hot and you stop for a coconut on the way.
We walked in the direction of the Sugar Loaf mountain, hoping to get the cable car early, avoiding queues, however if you do this you will find yourself at the skirt of a mountain with a small avenue around it made for fishermen. We asked and it turns out we had to go to Botafogo and take a bus from there! And so we did.
The bus from Botafogo is number 512 and it leaves you at the very entrance of the attraction.
There were no queues to buy our tickets(71 reales each) and we were the firsts on the first cable car, which allowed us to take a good video of the way up. It lasts 2 minutes until you're on top of the first mountain and at the top there's a whole construction with restaurants, bars and souvenir shops. You can also walk a green path and do climbing but they are not responsible if you get injured...
We walked around for a bit, went into the museum, took a bunch of lovely pictures and unsuccessfully tried to get some memorabilia from "Moonraker", then we went up the second mountain where there's an even more impressive view. They are still building this part of the attraction, so it is a little smaller at the moment, but definitely worth a visit.
Tips for Sugar Loaf mountain are: go early in the morning in a clear day if possible, allow three hours to complete the attraction and leave when you see it starts getting crowded and finally, take a pen: you can write your name at the top mountain and a little message!
After Sugar Loaf we decided to walk the length of Copacabana and find Ipanema. The sky started to get a little gray and a storm was approaching. We walked regardless.
At the end of Copacabana the rain started and we took shelter until it got a little better to be able to walk what we had left, unfortunately, the gorgeous Ipanema was foggy and dark due to the cloudy sky, and we couldn't appreciate the view. We headed to General Osorio, which is a square in the area to have a look at a Hippie Market that was taking place there.
When we arrived once again to Carioca metro station, we found ourselves unable to get a bus back to the hotel and decided to flag a taxi down. The taxi driver told us he was not going to Santa Teresa, because it was flooded and took us to a bus stop for free, where we saw the disaster that was taking place: pavement and road all flooded, 2 roads cut off where people had water up to their knees. We went up somewhere out of the floods and got another taxi that finally got us back to our hotel.
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