I spent 5 nights in two hostels in a superb Rio location just above Copacabana beach.

The better of the two is Lisetonga Hostel. Not great for Brazil, but very good for Rio where accommodation is expensive. By comparison my dorm bed cost around $10. Including breakfast.

Some nights I lay in a hammock atop the open air building listening to the sounds of the vibrant community.

Saturday and Sunday nights are crazy LOUD. Everyone is on the streets.

Though the views are great, it’s a steep uphill or downhill to get anywhere in this favela.

Motorcycle taxis can be found at the base of every favela access road. If you can’t walk, you ride.

The Morro da Babilônia is a favela in the Leme neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro built on a steep ridge separating Copacabana beach from Botafogo. …

Babilônia has been controlled for years by drug traffickers linked to the Terceiro Comando (Third Command) organization, which imposed its rules by force on the community. In addition to controlling the illegal drug trade, the gunmen monopolized other services like the supply of cooking-gas cylinders and imposed rules on the population such as the times when they could come and go … In June 2009, police occupied the area without firing a shot. The intention is to make Babilonia into a model community by installing Police Pacification Units …

… in 2009 the neighbourhood started to become more and more popular among tourists. There are at least 10 hostels …

Police are everywhere in Babylon.

Women, children and tourists walk the streets any time of day or night. It looks as safe as any city street to me.

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The Girl from Ipanema … is a Brazilian bossa nova jazz song. It was a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s and won a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1965. It was written in 1962, with music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes. English lyrics were written later by Norman Gimbel.

The first commercial recording was in 1962, by Pery Ribeiro. The 1964 single featuring Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz became an international hit. …

Click PLAY or watch Gilberto & Getz on YouTube.

The song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now Helô Pinheiro), a seventeen-year-old girl living on Montenegro Street in Ipanema. Daily, she would stroll past the Veloso bar-café, not just to the beach (“each day when she walks to the sea”), but in the everyday course of her life. …

related – A Tom Jobim Statue was placed in Ipanema Beach in 2014, 20 years after his death.

I love Botanic Gardens. The favourite, I recall, is Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne.

But it’s Jardim Botânico, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil that tops one list of the 10 Best Botanical Gardens In The World.

There are around 6,500 species (some endangered) distributed throughout an area of 54 hectares, and there are numerous greenhouses. The garden also houses monuments of historical, artistic and archaeological significance. …

A 750 m line of 134 palms forms the Avenue of Royal Palms leading from the entrance into the gardens. These palms all descended from a single tree, the Palma Mater, long since destroyed by lightning …

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Well worth visiting. Stay for coffee or drinks.

Fort Copacabana is a military base at the south end of the beach that defines the district of Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. The base is open to the public and contains the Museu Histórico do Exército (Museum of the History of the Army) and a coastal defense fort that is the actual Fort Copacabana.

…  At the entrance to the base there is a guard in the uniform that was current when the fort was opened in 1914.

For the 2016 Summer Olympics, the fort is scheduled to host the cycling road race (start and finish), marathon swimming and triathlon events.

The museum is only in Portuguese. Up top on Canon’s Dome was my favourite part.

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