Continuing his occasional series on whether bucket list destinations live up to expectations, Group Editor Andrew Palmer heads to Rio de Janeiro on the eve of the 2016 Olympics, chasing a city he first fell for thirty-odd years earlier, dangling from a cable car alongside Roger Moore.

Blame Roger Moore. Or rather, blame Jaws—the steel-toothed henchman, not the shark—for clambering onto the roof of a cable car suspended halfway up Sugarloaf Mountain and trying to tip 007 and Dr Holly Goodhead into the void below. Moonraker is not, by any reasonable critical assessment, the finest entry in the Bond canon. But it did something that no amount of online sniffiness about the plot has ever undone: it put Rio de Janeiro on my bucket list for nearly forty years.

It was the scenery that did it, of course, not the plot. That absurd granite thumb of a mountain. The improbable cable car strung across the sky as though someone had simply willed it into existence. And presiding over the whole spectacle, arms outstretched, a statue so famous it barely needs naming. I wanted to see it for myself. I wanted, ideally, not to be menaced by a man with metal teeth while doing so.

Cream Crackered in Rio

I arrived in the predictably undignified state of the long-haul traveller: thoroughly cream-crackered. We had flown in from Peru on what masqueraded as a short hop—four hours and twenty minutes—but which felt, at that unsociable hour, like crossing several time zones by ox cart. This was the summer of 2016, and Rio was visibly girding itself for the Olympics, scaffolding and anticipation in roughly equal measure.

Tiredness, however, has a habit of dissolving the moment you meet the right driver, and Marcel was very much the right one. Marcel was a journalist by trade and a polymath by inclination, and as he steered us through the waking city, he delivered an impromptu briefing on Brazilian politics and economics that would have done credit to a broadsheet leader column. He had the look and the cadence of a man who had wandered in from a Graham Greene novel and decided to stay.

And then, as dawn broke properly over the bay, there it was: Christ the Redeemer, suspended above the mountaintop in the half-light, looking for all the world like a guardian angel keeping watch over the city below.

Marcel, sizing up two exhausted Englishmen, suggested we abandon the day's plans entirely and go to bed instead. It was, without question, the best piece of advice either of us received in Brazil. I have used a couple of well-known operators to arrange long-haul itineraries over the years and have come away disappointed more than once by their indifference to what is actually happening on the ground. Marcel knew. Book the local fixer. Every time.

Copacabana, in Full Cry

Refreshed, we set out on foot along Copacabana Beach towards Ipanema—and if you have never had that tune lodge itself in your head unbidden the moment you read the word 'Ipanema,' I envy you the experience still ahead.

We had landed in the middle of Corpus Christi, the main beachfront road closed to traffic, and Copacabana was living up to every reputation it had earned. Volleyball and impromptu football games were happening along the entire length of the beach. Beer arrived cold and often. A skewer of grilled beef arrived too and was, without exaggeration, some of the finest meat either of us had eaten anywhere.

That evening, from our hotel balcony, the city performed its second magnificent trick. Sugarloaf sat dark in the distance, and beyond it, lit against the night sky, was Christ the Redeemer again—this time looking less like a guardian angel and more like a vision descending from heaven itself. Above it all hung a moon at an angle I have never quite explained to anyone since: rather than rising vertically the way a crescent or half moon does at home, it seemed to tip sideways in, as though Rio had decided the ordinary rules of astronomy didn't apply to it either.

Up the Mountain, Twice

By morning the anticipation that had been building since 1979 was close to unbearable. Marcel delivered us to Corcovado, and we boarded the funicular for the climb to Christ the Redeemer. The ascent has its charm: the city's buildings tilt at increasingly improbable angles as the train climbs, cutting through forest before delivering you, blinking, into sunlight and several hundred fellow pilgrims. The statue itself, I'll confess, is a touch underwhelming at close quarters—built to be admired from a distance, dominating the skyline, rather than inspected at arm's length alongside several hundred other people taking exactly the same photograph. The view earns every superlative going: the whole sweep of Rio is laid out below, with Sugar Loaf rising across the bay as if placed there for the benefit of my camera roll. Entirely worth the climb.

From there, across the city to Sugar Loaf itself and the cable car that started this whole business. I'd already done the considerably more vertiginous version in Singapore and found Rio's effort shorter and steeper but mercifully less high—no Jaws on the roof, nothing more alarming than a thoroughly splendid view.

A Feast Fit for a Carioca

Dinner was at the Churrascaria Palace, a proper carioca institution and reputedly the most traditional barbecue house in town. The system is the classic all-you-can-eat parade of meat, and what arrived was in a different league entirely: cut after cut of beef to die for, a salad course of heroic proportions to start, and a butterfly picanha I am still thinking about. The Douro lamb shoulder and prime rib were not far behind. We worked through a bottle of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon and, in a moment of misplaced bravado, two Brazilian Amazonian liqueurs that tasted rather more like cough medicine than an after-dinner treat.

Last Orders Before the Olympics

Our final hours were spent at the airport, watching the renovation works grinding on, the whole place humming with the energy of a city about to have the world's attention. With time to kill, we opted for a bottle of rosé from Provence, as it happened, and by all accounts, an exceptional year for the grape. It tasted like more than wine in a glass. It tasted like summer itself, and it was the perfect closing note for a city that does not so much live as throb with life.

Rio earned its place on the bucket list in 1979, courtesy of a cable car, a man with metal teeth, and a script nobody would call Fleming's finest hour. Forty years on, it more than settled the debt.