Brazil: Urca/Sugar Loaf Mountain

After spending an AMAZING New Year's Eve on Copacabana Beach, we decided to fully exhaust ourselves in Rio the next day. As you'll see...we surely did! This is a picture of some of us walking down a typical street in Rio. Our destination? We were on our way to Urca and Sugar Loaf Mntn for the afternoon.
*By the way, you can click on any of these pictures to enlarge them :)
After walking for what seemed like FOREVER, we made it to the beach! Liz and I are pretty excited!












Once we arrived, we noticed the HUGE line to get tickets to take the tram up the mountain. It probably would have taken 2-3 hours to get the tram tickets. So, we took this picture by the water and debated what to do with our afternoon.
We finally decided to get some food at an air-conditioned buffet just next to us, and then hike up the first part of the mountain. The huge cone shaped mountain behind us in these two pictures, is Sugar Loaf.










After enjoying some air-conditioning and water sin gas (non-carbonated water, thank goodness), we started hiking half way up the mountain. You have the option to hike all the way up, but it would be a full day hike, not many people are willing to do it, and well...I'm 7 mos prego and didn't feel like popping out a baby in the middle of the rainforest. SO...we decided to hike the first part of the mountain, skip the long lines for the tram, and maybe pick another non-holiday type of day to take the tram all the way up. *Remember, it's New Years, so EVERYTHING is swamped with crowds! So, this is a picture of the boys and of the gang along our hike.









This is just one of the views along our hike through the rainforest. The beach that is wayyyy down there, is where we took the family picture and ate the buffet. Yeah, it was a bit of a haul, but totally worth it :)

And, this is a lovely monkey we fed along the way...










This is a picture of Rio along the hike (excuse the tram cables in the picture)


And, this would be US! We made it! Can you tell by the sweat-soaked shirts and muddy shoes?


The rest of these? These are just views from this halfway point of Rio below. The views were so amazing that we actually took a helicopter flight over Rio and around Corcovado. I will post those pictures on the next one with details of the rest of our day.
Unfortunately, we couldn't take a tram up the rest of the mountain because we didn't have tickets, and we couldn't take one down afterward, so we had to hike it down and walk back to our condo that evening. But, I'll give you all a glimpse of Corcovado and the helicopter in the next post :)