Brazilian Breakaway.

So. Brazil.

I have been back from Rio for two and a half weeks and I am still finding sand in jumpers I haven’t worn since I landed. The tan is fading. The mosquito bites are nearly gone. The 4am Carnival songs still surface occasionally in the queue at Pret, which is a disorienting experience for everyone involved.

Twelve days. Two cities. One apartment neither of us had ever been in before, belonging to a colleague of Richard’s who was away and lent us his keys with the cheerful recklessness of someone who had lived in Rio long enough to stop worrying about his things. One beach town we accidentally fell in love with. And one moment of pure horror at the Christ the Redeemer statue that I will get to in due course and which concerns not the statue but my own catastrophic relationship with basic historical facts.

How We Got There

Richard’s bank had a client event in São Paulo in early February. He was going regardless; I had annual leave to use; we looked at the map and noticed that São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are approximately the distance apart that London is from Edinburgh, and that it was Carnival, and that the correct thing to do was obvious.

So he did his two days of client dinners in São Paulo while I read, which is my ideal version of a business trip, and then we flew up to Rio together on the Friday night and the trip properly began.

Gemma, who had February half-term, stayed in Horsham with her grandparents. My parents were delighted. Gemma was philosophical about it in the way fifteen-year-olds are philosophical about things that are happening to them regardless of their opinion, which is to say she wasn’t. She texted me approximately every four hours. My mother later told me this was more communication than she’d had from Gemma in the previous six months combined, which I found simultaneously touching and slightly wounding.

Galeao, Saturday Night

We landed at Galeao late, the heat hitting us in the corridor before we’d even cleared customs. The drive into Rio was a sensory assault — the motorway at speed, vendors standing between traffic lanes selling fresh produce and wide-brim hats and cold Coke through taxi windows, our driver enthusiastically informing us that Rio during Carnival was “how you say — you will not believe.” We spotted the Sambadrome lit up out of the window. We made approving noises. We were already exhausted.

Richard, to his enormous credit, is a very good traveller. He does not complain about the heat, or the noise, or the chaos, or the fact that the apartment was on the fourth floor with no lift. He also has the rare quality of being able to fall asleep on any surface in any climate within approximately four minutes, which I have spent twenty years alternately admiring and resenting. By the time I had located the bed linen and made the bed, he was asleep in his clothes on top of it. I took a photograph. I have not yet decided what to do with it.

The Apartment, and What I Saw from the Window

Sunday morning, slightly groggy, I pulled back the curtains. There, rising up the hill in the middle distance, was a favela — stacked, painted, layered, alive, with washing on lines and music coming down from somewhere inside it and the faint sound of children. I stood there with a glass of water for about ten minutes before I said anything.

I’ve thought about this a lot since I got home. There are guided favela tours — local guides, community-run operations, genuine access. I considered it and decided against. Some places don’t need my presence in them, and looking at it from across the city while it made its music felt like the right amount of distance for me to keep. What I will say is that the view reorganised something quietly in my head about cities and who they’re built for and how you read urban space when you’re inside the part that gets the investment. Having spent extended periods of time in cities on the opposite ends of the globe, I have some thoughts about development and where it goes. They’re not fully formed. They’re getting there.

Carnival, Properly

Right. The thing itself.

There is the Sambadrome — the formal parade ground, where the major samba schools compete in extraordinary, sequinned, feather-and-float productions. We drove past it twice and saw it lit up at night and it is genuinely spectacular. But the Carnival we were in, day to day, was the blocos.

The blocos are street parties. There are nearly a hundred of them across the Carnival period, official and unofficial, planned and entirely spontaneous. You are walking down a street and it is a street. You walk down it ten minutes later and it is a thousand-strong open-air party with a brass band on one end and a flatbed truck with a sound system on the other and locals walking around with backpacks of homemade caipirinha mix that they will pour into a cup for a few reais. You bring the cup. They bring the rum. The whole thing moves down the street like a single warm organism.

We did the blocos on Sunday and Monday. Sunday was the warm-up. Monday was something else entirely.

At one point on Monday afternoon we were sitting at a pizza place on a street corner when a delivery van pulled up at a red light, opened its doors, blasted music out at concert volume, and started a party. No announcement. No permit. No apparent concern for the cars now queuing behind it. Just music, and movement, and the immediate cheerful response of fifty strangers deciding this was, in fact, the most reasonable response to a red light. The cars behind it sat there for forty-five minutes. Their drivers, with the patience of people who had been here before, got out and joined. I sat at my pizza and watched Richard — Richard, who once told me he ‘didn’t really see the point of dancing’ at a wedding in 2003 — tap his foot. I said nothing. I filed it away.

This, I have decided, is the rule of Carnival traffic. If you’re stuck, you’re not moving. You may as well dance.

The energy is impossible to write properly and I was warned before we arrived not to try. What I’ll say is that it is loud, and hot, and wholly unfiltered, and there is no version of you that stands outside it. At some point I was dancing next to a woman entirely covered in green glitter, a man in a full pirate costume, and a child of about seven who had moves that made every adult around him look frankly amateur. Nobody was performing. Everyone was just… there.

A Brazilian BBQ

Tuesday, while the city was resetting, Richard’s colleague had his wife’s family round for a proper churrasco and we were invited. Picanha steak done on the grill — the proper version, which I had never had and which has permanently recalibrated my understanding of what beef can be. Rice and beans. A salad I can’t name but would eat again immediately. Cold beer in cans so cold with condensation they were essentially decorative.

Everybody talked over everybody. Children shrieked and ran through the room at intervals. A grandmother pressed food on me with the loving authority of someone for whom refusal is simply not a concept she’s encountered, and I ate everything she gave me and was extremely happy about it. Her daughter told me in careful English that her mother was saying I looked like I needed feeding up. I chose to take this as a compliment.

This is the thing about Brazil that I hadn’t properly anticipated: the warmth isn’t a performance. It’s just the default. You show up to someone’s house and you are folded immediately into the whole enterprise of the afternoon. No edge. No warming-up period. Just: you’re here, have some more picanha.

Christ the Redeemer, and My Own Ignorance

Wednesday morning, Corcovado. You take the cogwheel train up through the Atlantic Forest, which is extraordinary in its own right — dense, green, vertical, the city disappearing behind you — and then you emerge at the top and there’s the statue, and the view, and the particular quality of light Rio produces at that altitude in the morning.

The statue is stunning. Standing at the foot of it, looking up at those open arms with the city unfurling in every direction below and the Guanabara Bay catching the sun on the left, is one of those moments where the photograph doesn’t quite contain the actual experience. We stood there for a long time without saying very much, which is the correct response.

Less correct was my grasp of basic facts. I had assumed, with the unexamined confidence of someone who has never once looked it up, that Christ the Redeemer was centuries old. Portuguese colonial, perhaps. A product of the nineteenth century at the very latest. It was built between 1922 and 1931.

My grandmother is older than it.

I contested this with some vigour. Richard produced his phone. I stared at the Wikipedia article for a meaningful amount of time. Then I said: “Right. Fine,” and looked back at the statue, which was exactly the same statue it had been thirty seconds ago but was now somehow also ninety-four years old, which is not the same thing as ancient. Richard, who has learned when not to make a meal of things, said nothing.

(He did, however, mention it at dinner.)

The view from the top of Corcovado is the finest view of any city I have ever had. Mountains one side, ocean another, the city between them, and from up there the favela and the residential tower and the hotel and the stadium are all the same scale, which they are not on the ground and which is, I suppose, the point of getting above things.

That evening, as a thank-you to Richard’s colleague, we took him and his wife to dinner in Ipanema. Japanese restaurant, on a colleague’s recommendation. The sushi was — and I am fully aware how this sounds — better than any sushi I have eaten in London. Properly fresh. Precise. I mentioned this to Richard on the way out and he said he’d read something about Rio’s Japanese population being one of the largest outside Japan. That checked out. It also explained a great deal. London sushi has not fully recovered in my estimation.

Búzios

On Thursday morning, slightly hollowed out by four days of Carnival, we took the bus north up the coast to Búzios. About 165 kilometres, the coastline out one side of the window and cattle farms out the other, and by the time we arrived I had fallen asleep twice and was considerably more human.

Búzios is a peninsula town, a cluster of beaches joined by a main strip, Rua das Pedras, which is lined with restaurants and bars and small hotels and boutiques selling linen things and hammocks. Wealthy Brazilians and South Americans come in summer. Brigitte Bardot came in 1964 and liked it so much she stayed for a while and the town has been slightly smug about it ever since, in a very charming way. It has very strong Coromandel energy — if you know the Coromandel, you know exactly what I mean: a beach town that has somehow avoided being ruined by being a beach town. Better cocktails than the Coromandel, though. The paçoca alone.

We had a small hotel room with a balcony you could technically stand on if you didn’t extend your arms, air conditioning that had opinions, and a view of terracotta rooftops down to the water. It was perfect. We arrived at 2pm, had lunch, went to the beach, had cocktails at a bar on the main strip where everyone seemed to know the barman, and were in bed by ten, which was the first time either of us had been in bed before midnight in four days.

Búzios at that pace — slow mornings, long lunches, afternoons at different beaches working our way around the peninsula, evenings at whatever looked good — is the best possible counterweight to Rio. The city is the firework. Búzios is what your nervous system needs afterwards. We stayed five nights and I was not ready to leave on any of them.

Highlights, in No Particular Order

A Valentine’s dinner — we’d forgotten it was Valentine’s until we arrived at the restaurant and found it decorated accordingly and slightly more expensive than the menu we’d researched. We stayed anyway. The food was excellent. Richard gave me a slightly embarrassed look across the table when the candle arrived and I have been dining out on this for three weeks.

A glass-bottomed boat trip the morning after a heavy evening, on which I established that there were fish, confirmed this finding to my satisfaction, and considered that a reasonable use of ninety minutes.

An apocalyptic rainstorm on our third evening that hit halfway through dinner and turned the street outside into a river inside about four minutes. The restaurant’s drainage did not so much fail as politely opt out of the whole situation. We sat there with two more drinks until it eased, watching mopeds navigate what had become a waterway, and a man across the restaurant made a paper boat out of his napkin and set it on the table and we all watched it go nowhere together.

The beach at Praia Brava on the last full day — rougher, less populated, the Atlantic proper, waves that meant you actually had to pay attention. We swam until we were properly exhausted and then lay on the sand in the sun doing absolutely nothing for two hours, and I thought: this is the first time since we got back from New Zealand that I’ve been genuinely still. Not recovering from something. Not preparing for something. Just still.

Richard fell asleep in the sun and burned the back of one calf. I noticed and said nothing because I was also slightly dozing and feel that we are both responsible for the outcome.

Last Day

Bus back to Rio on the Tuesday, one final day, and I did what I’d been meaning to do all trip: I walked the city properly. The long loop from Copacabana up toward Botafogo, then through Flamengo, then into Lapa with its arches and the steps leading up to Santa Teresa, the hilltop neighbourhood with the tiled staircases and the colonial houses painted in colours that have no business being that vivid. Then a taxi back to Copacabana for one final swim.

I think it was the day I understood Rio best. Carnival is the firework. The city in normal time is the actual fire.

We very nearly missed our flight. Stuck in Carnival-adjacent traffic on the way to Galeão, we got to the terminal with twenty-two minutes to pushback, sprinted through departures with our hand luggage embarrassingly airborne, and made the gate with minutes to spare. The gate agent looked at us with the calm expression of someone who has seen this before and will see it again. We did not speak until we were seated. I ordered a gin. Richard ordered a water and then also a gin.

What It Was

I loved Rio.

I loved it the way you love somewhere that is completely unlike anything in your frame of reference and doesn’t apologise for it. The warmth of the people, the food, the extraordinary physical fact of the city wedged between ocean and mountain and just… getting on with it. The blocos. The van at the red light. The grandmother with the picanha.

And Búzios afterwards, those five quiet days, were the perfect counterweight. The trip’s quieter chapter, where everything Rio had put into you could settle.

I came home with sand in my clothes and a recalibrated view of sushi and a vague and specific longing for paçoca that I am managing with limited success. Gemma, when I told her about Carnival, listened with genuine attention and then said: “We should go.”

She’s not wrong.