Cristo Redentor and Sugarloaf Mountain

We had a fun day yesterday. I've never traveled Rio by bus and metro, so it's been a fun challenge to navigate the city. It's particularly fun how eager and willing people are to help. All we need to do is just a bit of initial planning and then we can be confident that we can ask along the way and people will go out of their way to make sure we know what we need to know. Better than Google Maps... or at least more interesting. I love this about Brazil.

But anyway, yesterday was a fun day of hitting the two most important sites in Rio - the big Jesus statue that overlooks the city and Sugarloaf Mountain. In a lot of ways the journeys there were just as fun as the sites themselves (because of the above mentioned and other people we met along the way)... so here is just a glimpse of our day yesterday....

We first made our way up the mountains to see Christo Redentor - this is from a lookout point on the way up. And that's Sugarloaf Mountain to the right of me.

This is halfway up the mountains and Jesus still looks tiny

But he wasn't so small when we actually made it all the way to the top.

Lots of gorgeous views of Rio.

And we kept our eye on our next stop - Sugarloaf Mountain.

It was a zoo up there. This picture doesn't really capture the strange magnitude of people sweating in the glaring sun at the feet of Jesus.

We debated whether Jesus or the Statue of Liberty is bigger and we decided that the Statue of Liberty is definitely bigger, but Jesus definitely has a presence. We have done no research to confirm or deny our conclusion.

But then we went over to Sugarloaf Mountain and looked back toward Jesus. He's perched on the top of that narrow tallest hump there.

Jesus is on the little lump to the left of Jachin. This view is actually from Urca, the mountain you stop at on the way to Sugarloaf.

There was a renovation project happening on Urca, so we didn't see nearly as many monkeys as anticipated. But this one was actually hanging out eating a banana. A bit trite, but cute.:)

The view of Copacabana beach from Surgarloaf.

We traveled by gondola - first stop Urca and then the gondola kept going to the second stop at Sugarloaf. 

We watched sunset from Urca... and it was really lovely.

Sunset meant a bit of relief from the heat, too. Phew. :)

It's so easy to enjoy this city. :)