Winning the Rio Carnival Without Knowing Samba

As far as travel stories go, digital nomads have pretty much heard them all. And, cards on the table, this was not a digital nomad story - it was very much a boys holiday to Brazil.

It just happened that Rio Carnival landed slap bang in the middle of it.

As for me, it was trip number two to Brazil. Last time I was “dragged” there by a girlfriend for her sister’s wedding.

I fell in love on that trip. But not with the girlfriend - that was already cooked - but with Brazil.

And so, the boy’s trip.

We spent a few days chilling and caiprinha’ing in Buzios (highly recommended by the way), and headed back south to Rio by way of a private chauffeur.

He dropped us at our hotel on the beachfront of Ipanema (Simon nailed this booking by the way), we bundled in all excited, spent 30 seconds in the room to add sunscreen, and headed out.

On our way out the concierge, with her sales hat on, beckoned us over and asked if we had tickets to the carnival.

Now, we had no idea we needed tickets. I had seen the Sambadrome (basically a one-mile long football stadium with a road running through it) on my last visit, but it was May then so no sign of feathers and drums then.

She explained that the carnival was a 3-night event, running from 9pm to 6am, and it cost around $90 for a ticket in the stands for a night to watch the procession. We weren’t really sure we wanted to spend 9 hours there, so it felt a little steep.

Salesperson as she was, she sensed out hesitancy. In a flash she flopped open a folder with pages and pages of images of colourful costumes.

“Alternatively, you can buy a costume and be in the carnival”, she said rather nonchalantly.

We looked at each other, and without any consultation, I piped up. “I am definitely doing that!”.

So, we pored through the pages. There were colourful ones, ones that were just a football jersey, ones with feathers, revealing ones, full-body ones…it was almost endless.

We picked one which wasn’t the cheapest by any means, and had feathers and a huge headdress. Go big or go home, no?

Anyway, I don’t think it spoils things to say it was the best $250 I’ve ever spent.

We had chosen one that was from the Beija-Flor favela, and they had won it the year before. This meant they were last off on the last night. So, 5am, 2 nights later.

We spent the next two days doing the usual stuff. Food, beaches, cocktails, parties on every street corner, a risky night in Lapa, even taking in Flamengo’s game at the Maracana. We took a taxi up to the Corcovado and took in a backpacker who told us about arriving a week early to learn to samba in one of the samba schools so he could take part in the carnival.

We chose to stay quiet on our route in, mainly because it quickly dawned on us that we knew nothing about samba.

At that point we chose the only path to samba success we thought right. Get drunk before we got there.

On the evening we were due to perform the costumes arrived at the hotel and luckily they fitted beautifully. We left them in the room to go out and start mission “get drunk”.

Only, the adrenaline hit us hard. We failed. I even had a bottle of champagne to take with us to the Sambadrome that my girlfriend at that time had arranged as a surprise at our previous hotel on Valentines Day a few days earlier. That didn’t work either.

At midnight we headed to the Sambadrome to get acquainted with the area and - to be frank - give us plenty of time to work out where to go as we spoke zero Portuguese.

Now, as three Brits who’d barely even been to Notting Hill Carnival, we had never really witnessed a street food market or festival. We were about to.

It was wild. People half-in-half-out of costumes, vendors cooking meat from the trunks of cars and vans, caiprinhas being smashed up on rickety camping tables, samba music blaring out.

We stuck out like elephants in an ant farm.

A couple of hours of partying - and still stone-cold sober - we wandered off to the queue of costumed favela-ites to find whoever we could with our costume. We assumed that there’d be more than the three of us.

Eventually, through colours, singing, laughing, and mostly semi-naked locals we found a group of around twenty with our trademark blue, white and gold headdresses. An inadvertent positive of picking such a flamboyant outfit.

It quickly became apparent that we were wildly underprepared. In general, we were welcomed by the group. A big guy took us under his wing and tried to show us some moves. Once again, we were lucky to have so many feathers pointing out from our shoulders and heads - we worked out we only had to move and we’d look like pros, or so it felt.

Perhaps more importantly, the guy made it clear through obvious sign language of sorts that we should not take pictures. Whilst they were probably very grateful of the $750 we spent, it was meant to be authentic, so foreigners weren’t really supposed to be in it. We had a week’s worth of tannin by then, so maybe we’d get away with it.

Soon we started to move. The road we were on was perpendicular to the Sambadrome, so at the end we’d need to take a sharp left to enter it. We shuffled along, and Simon being a few inches taller than me kept getting whacked on the back of the head by a serpent’s tongue from the float immediately behind us.

We didn’t mind keeping an eye out for it though as sat atop was a very nearly naked Brazilian dancer.

We made it to the end without getting caught staring (or we told ourselves that at least), and then, euphoria.

Turning into the Sambadrome was a seminal moment I will never forget. Simon forgot the rule about cameras for a moment and got the most epic photo from any trip I’ve taken.

It truly was like a full football stadium, only with samba music, everyone was cheering - not just the one team’s supporters - and anyone in the front rows was grabbing and kissing dancers (yes, we were “dancers”) who got near enough.

The one-mile, 45-minute dance-a-thon down the Sambadrome went in a flash. It was overwhelming, exhilarating, and empowering all at once.

At the end, if I’m honest, it was a bit of an anticlimax.

Everyone dispersed toward buses, or down dark streets. It was 6am we realised, and all of the other samba schools had probably gone home.

We got a taxi - the driver was a legend as took us to Copacabana for sunrise on the way - and pulled up at around 7am. A stall was opening up across the street on the beach so we got beers and for the first time sat and laughed for an age at what we’d just done.

A beer later and we headed to the hotel for breakfast and then to bed.

We woke at around midday, starving. We must’ve burnt a couple of days worth of calories the night before.

There was a steakhouse we’d already been to at the end of the next street so went for lunch.

On the television there was a show starting up with highlights of the carnival competition. We wondered if we’d be on the screen, though with thousands of participants we thought it unlikely.

Anyway, we didn’t really get to focus on the people as across the screen - in big yellow letters - were the words…

…“Campeões: Beija-Flor”.

Champions: Beija=Flor.