I stayed at Orlando’s place for a month with my sister and boyfriend and so I want to leave a detailed review about the apartment.
The Host.
Orlando is great, he is very responsive and he speaks both English and Portuguese so that made our stay a lot easier. He will do his best to make sure you are happy in your stay, he’s very hospitable and he checks in as well.
The Home.
The view is gorgeous, we loved watching the sunrise. It had all the essentials needed for a long stay. We cooked, we grilled outside, supplies to keep the house clean during our long stay. The one negative thing was the wifi was pretty bad. Normally this wouldn’t matter much because it’s a vacation home but this affected us quite a bit because we were there for a month and I was working online and my sister had online school. The wifi only worked well in the bedroom with the router. The kitchen and living room didn’t work very well and it definitely didn’t reach the patio. We often had to take turns sharing who was on the wifi. I stayed at 4 other places while I was in Rio without any wifi issues so maybe it’s the wifi company he uses or the router? I’m not sure.
The Location.
This is something I want to be transparent about because I read the reviews and I was like “oh the house is on a hill. That’s fine.” No. Not hill. The house is on a mountain. It’s up in a favela. This was my first time visiting Brazil so I wasn’t familiar with the term favela. It’s about 15-20 minutes of switchbacks and a lot of sweat to get up that hill. The good thing is it is a relatively safe area, I walked it at night many times. The bad thing is that sometimes it will take 30 minutes to try and order an Uber or 99taxi because they keep canceling once they see the location. Or twice we got dropped off at the bottom of the hill at night because the driver didn’t want to go up. There are motor taxis and a microbus that goes up and down it so you can wait for those as well. The good thing is that once you get down the hill, there is a artisanal market that runs almost everyday. There are tons of restaurants, coffee shops, bike trail. Flamengo beach is a 15 min walk, people don’t like flamengo much because the water isn’t as clear but we actually enjoyed it because the waves were calm and we could use our paddleboard.
Overall.
For the price, the hospitality, and the view I would recommend staying here. It has its pros and cons but I think it was more difficult for us because we don’t speak Portuguese so it was not easy to get around. But the home is clean, it has all the amenities you could need and it has a beautiful view.