Brazil is at the top of its game: World Cup fever is ramping up, oil is fuelling a boom and the Olympics are on the way. Julian Evans goes on a hat-trick trip, tackling the classic star players from the new Copacabana Palace to the smartest Island striker.Vast, immeasurable, an overspill of cultures, climates and radical identities, Brazil, the fifth largest nation on earth, feels more like an incomplete planet than a very big country. From Rio de Janeiro to Manaus, for example, is 2,700km; the same distance London is from Morocco or Greece. The best way to understand the most influential nation in Latin America is to think of it as a slideshow of ever-changing views.
Take Rio. Take the Copacabana Palace hotel, freshly refurbished to the tune of US$20million. Gone are the chintz and brocade, the swirly shagpile and the sense of stuffiness. The place has been given a lighter, more contemporary look and finally feels like what it is, a beach hotel, a fabulous glittering beach hotel. From my fifth-floor suite there is perhaps the world's most spectacular urban outlook: a beachfront highway, Burle Marx's four-kilometre snake of mosaic pavement, a scattering of kiosk cafes and palm trees, and the stupendous curling, vanishing length of Copacabana Beach, where the sand and the ocean are merely different sorts of light.
What is truly remarkable about Rio is that until recently such a roll-call of views would hardly have been possible to see with ease or pleasure. From the 1990s onwards, the city was on the dive. 'Underwhelming,' I was told. 'Not so much thecidade maravihosa [beautiful city] as thecidade durão [tough city].' The crime statistics - 17 murders a day - and the films ofJosé Padilha (Elite Squadand its sequel Elite Squad: The Enemy Within) about the drug wars and police corruption confirmed Rio's reputation. Above all, you never went anywhere near a favela unless invited. The favelas' historic atmosphere is caught on a flamboyant ceramic mural at the Escadarina Selarón in the Lapa district: 'Nobody robs, nobody hears, nothing is lost. Those who are wise obey those who give orders.'Cariocas - Rio's law-abiding citizens - watched floodlights go up on the big beaches and despaired. Then, decisively, in 2008, the state government began sending the army and the BOPE special police force into the favelas. The drug lords were driven out, with remarkably few deaths (although my guide, Marcelo, hinted delicately that to kill with a knife is 'very quiet'). Marcelo took me to Roçinha, a favela which was pacified in December 2011: an extraordinary place of up-and-down alleys (population 70,000), a fumy potion of garbage, chickens and clove cigarettes, birds' nest of illegal cabling at every corner. But crime had plummeted, Marcelo said, and with the economy growing fast, unemployment, too. And something democratic has emerged at Roçinha, now that the fear is receding: in these low-rise brick-and-concrete labyrinths stacked up the hills, most residents have a million-dollar view.
Brazil's economy is booming almost everywhere you care to look, from the twinkling clusters of offshore drilling platforms you see as your plane descends, to the fashion for expensive orthodontic work that is one of the first things you notice after you touch down. Brazilians are fixing their smiles; many of them have a lot to smile about. In Rio, some things still don't work: if you want to use an ATM while you're here, make sure you tell your bank, otherwise the city's reputation for crime means they will block your card, assuming it has been cloned or stolen.But the Copacabana Palace, with its proper 25-metre pool and weekend brunches of caviar blinis and perfect scrambled eggs on the terrace, obviously works. So do other things. You can now explore the beaches and centre by renting an orange Itaú bike (the name of the sponsoring bank) for five reais (£1.50) a day; across the road from the hotel, you can sit and drink água de coco straight from the coconut and admire its Art Deco façade for even less. Be prepared to find a careless, last-minute spirit to the city, as though it is always being remade. Despite Brazil hosting the next World Cup and Rio the next Olympics, there is little sign of preparations taking place for either yet.
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