Rio rocks
You know how it is – you turn a corner, start crossing the road and glance to your right:
Hmmm, ugly buildings, tree covered hills – nothing unusual here.
You glance to the left:
Roads, traffic, lamp-posts – no surprises.
And finally you look UP:
Woah! Suddenly the 15 storey building looks tiny!
This huge rock is called Pedra da Gávea, and is the world’s largest monolith on a coastline. “Gávea” means topsail and when viewed from Lagoa I guess it does kind of resemble a sail. From where this shot was taken (in São Conrado) it looks completely different but no less impressive.
There are quite a few of these huge rocks dotted around Rio (Pão de Açucar, Dois Irmãos and Corcovado being the most notable) and along with the favelas, these were the things that I found most fascinating when I first set eyes on the city.
You can prepare for a visit to Rio in all kinds of ways (learn Portuguese, read books and blogs, get recommendations from friends, etc), but I suspect that nothing can prepare you for the sheer scale of these massive rocks. After two years in this city, they still give me a thrill.
This is something that you’ll not see in any other city in the world. Not even Cape Town!
It really can give you a bit of a shock when you turn a corner to see such huge lumps of rock! It’s a great reminder of what an amazing city Rio is.
I think Hong Kong, which shares a very similar topography, takes much better advantage of it than Rio.
Anyway I found this discussion about different cities, and their terrains, quite interesting.
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1292273
Did you have to research before writing the post, or is it common info, and table talk to you, that Gávea rock is the largest monolith on a coastline? In case of the latter how did you manage to meet a woman, and eventually get her to marry you?
Normal everyday conversation for a man such as I. When we are strolling the streets of Rio you will often see me gesturing expansively at mountains and saying something fascinating like “…of course all the rocks in this area are igneous, originating from the subduction of the Southern and Western Atlantic tectonic plates around 50,000 years ago during the Paleocene…”
(I picked her up at Wednesday night Geology club)
Ah the Paleocene: you sure didn’t witness the moral breakdown – so pervasive in our civilization – back during those days. A time when a man was an ape, and a woman an ape’s rib, and an obedient rib at that. A period in which teotonic plates made agreements so to coordinate their shifts, and said plans were kept because a plate’s word was worth something back then; unlike today when not a single one can own up to their *faults.
Oh how I long for those gracious marsupial hops, baby steps for what later evolved into the kangaroo, and ultimately gave us Captain Kangaroo Cereal thus finishing its evolutionary cycle.
Btw I often use the paragraph above to impress science chicks; but it never seems to work (probably another case of delivery).