June 20: Sugarloaf Mountain

One thing we like about staying in multiple places for only a few days is that if you get a stinker, you know you don’t have to be there forever and better places are on the horizon. Our Airbnb in Botafogo, unfortunately, is kind of a stinker—at least relative to what we’ve already had.

It’s a studio apartment on the 11th floor of a building with a 24-hour front desk, which is good, and the apartment itself is cute, but we keep thinking we’ve left the windows open, because there is zero insulation from street noise. It also took us a while to figure out the weird electric shower head that wouldn’t give us any hot water. Turns out you have to have the bathroom fan on, then there’s a little spoon-looking device that you have to twist all the way to the right. And then there’s another knobby thing on the left that does nothing. Why? Why does this thing exist in 2024?

Anyway… boohoo, Erin. You're in freaking Rio.

Once we got settled, we took the cable car up to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, and it was super cool. There are two mountains, actually—the first being Morro da Urca, which you can stop and wander around on before going up the second leg to Sugarloaf. You can also learn the history of how the cable cars came about. To summarize, some dude with an engineering degree and a fun mustache was like, "Hey, cool mountains! I should build some shit on top of them!" and then his rich friend was like, "I got you, bro."

At the top of Sugarloaf is a little forest with an unexpected surprise: MONKEYS! Marmosets, to be exact, which are the tiniest and cutest of monkeys. They reminded me of squirrels, just skittering through the trees and across the fence tops. I could have watched them forever, but there were warning signs for venomous snakes and also a bar serving caipirinhas at the very tippy top, so… ciao monkeys. We’ll always have Sugarloaf.