Amazing city, this was a fantastic place to start our trip. We chose to stay in a Rio de Janeiro favela. All the colors, music, and vibrant energy gave us an unexpectedly beautiful bem-vindo (welcome). Waves of excitement, joy, anxiety overwhelm us every day. But first, let me tell you a short story about how our MacBook Pro broke down before we even landed in Rio de Janeiro. Crazy, right?
MacBook Pro never saw the city
The first adventure we had started 30 minutes before landing in Rio, after 21 hours of traveling. Annoyed by the Portuguese subtitles on the plane, I tried to use the touchscreen to disable them. I didn’t manage that, but what I did manage was to kick the plastic glass with orange juice on the floor. There was like 30 ml of juice that managed to fully wet one of my trainers and also Chris’s backpack where his Macbook Pro was.
One day into the trip and one laptop was full of sticky suco de laranja. MacBook Pro broke before we landed in Rio
Not to forget that this specific Macbook was repaired twice in the past two weeks and had a brand new keyboard and display and other stuff I cannot name. We took it to a laptop service in Rio and the verdict was #RIP.
Accommodation in the favela
After landing we took a taxi to the bed and breakfast in Rio de Janeiro favela we booked – which is located in favela Cantagalo.
Favela is a Brazilian shack, shady neighborhood where a lot of crime takes place. Yay!
It took longer than one hour to get there. At one point we started going up against some steep roads until we finally reached a rusty sort of gate and a lot of steps which seemed to be the stairways to Hell, by the looks of it.
I left Chris down with the luggage until I figured out if that’s where the pousada (accommodation) was. I climbed like 80 steps until I saw a very skinny carioca man (people born in Rio) on a chair at the top of the stairs – I freaked out a bit as I had never been to a favela before. He asked ‘pousada?’ and I nodded so he showed me to go up a few more steps.
Fact: I later counted and there were 109 steps to the pousada.and we counted them a few more times to be sure :))
Because the laptop broke, we had to buy a new one and made a transaction in the favela. We were so scared because of all the neighborhood legends! Read the full story here.
The next story is about our first day in Rio de Janeiro or view our advice on things to do in Rio.
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