That’s Jesus. Christ the Redeemer as its known locally. And it is truly magnificent. I’m not a particularly religious man, certainly not big on Christianity and not too sure about worshipping graven images. Though it must be said, people don’t come to visit Christ the Redeemer to worship. They visit to take selfies. That’s the main objective, so it would appear. Though a strong secondary objective is to queue. Oh my, but do you queue. The Brazilians take queuing and elevate what is normally a mere chore, into a complete art-form. And its all done with stunning inefficiency, chaos, randomness and stupidity.

Here’s what happens. Or, what happened to us.

We’d booked the ‘tour of Rio’ for our first morning here, because that’s what you do. You don’t loll around taking photos of girls’ bums on the Copacabana… well, you do but not til later, you don’t lie out and burn, you don’t drink beer all morning and waste the opportunity; you get out there and go see Christ. So we’d pre-booked this about last April. Its not like He wasn’t expecting us.
The car picked us up at 9.15. A jeep. Big jeep. You wouldn’t want air conditioning or comfort when its only 35 degrees outside, would’ja? No, you want to be breathing the same superheated, diesel-heavy air that the locals breath.

Jesus sits on the top of mountain. Called the Corcovado. And half way up we stopped. Traffic. Lots of traffic. Lots of people. They reckon that two-and-a-half million people descend on Copacabana beach on New Years Eve. What they don’t tell you is that most of those people spend the preceding day taking selfies at Christ the Redeemer. And showing off their tattoos which, coincidentally, heavily feature crosses, jesuses and even a fair few Redeemers in ink.

So you get out of the jeep, eventually, after a half hour climb up the last bit of the hill. Then you join a queue. Two-and-a-half million people long, so it would appear. But that’s just one queue and no-one tells you what you’re queuing for. So when you get to the end the tour person managed to sneak us rather slyly into the next queue. Thus the first queue was merely an hour and a half warm up to get you ready to queue for the bus up the final leg to Jesus himself. And a half hour later we emerged to the point where you are effectively staring right up Jesus’ robes from below. And you realise at that point that, selfies aside, you’re not there to see Him. You’re there to see what He sees. The views from the top of the mountain.

And what Jesus sees is all of Rio. From the Macarana (he hasn’t missed a match since 1932) all the way to the beaches where He can check out the thongs all day from his amazing vantage point on the hilltop. It is quite magnificent. He is quite magnificent. Rio is simply fabulous. But could do with some serious organisational skills.

Off for dinner at the ‘actual’ bar where they wrote the original ‘Girl from Ipanema’. To look a the music, soak up the atmosphere and EAT TONS OF MEAT.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx