Jack McDonald dot Org

It’s always a great sign when the taxi driver doesn’t know the street when you point to it on a map. Tijuca Park was the destination for the day. Twenty minutes into the cab ride, it wasn’t going so well. We had taken the long route around Lagoa, the guy was enthusiastically explaining it’s presence to me like an excited tour guide up until the point where I pointed out the BTT gym and told him I trained there every day. The road to Tijuca park goes through a few backstreets near the Botanical Gardens (a source of at least three minutes of pointing and explaining). But from there it went bad to worse. The cab driver insisted that there was a police cabin a kilometer down the road. Three kilometers of ascent into forest and, well, I had enough of paying a guy who didn’t know the directions. He dropped me off at a place called China Vista. After asking a few people there, who also didn’t know the way, we agreed to part ways on half the roundabout fare.

China Vista is a pretty good viewpoint for downtown Rio, you could even walk it from the Botanical Gardens. As I was snapping a couple of pictures off an old Brazilian guy started talking to me. He was wandering around with his wife and sister, and struck me as the rich traveller type. This was pretty much underlined when I found out he’d actually been to London twice on holidays, which is definately too expensive for the average Rio resident. Unfortunately, he didn’t know the way to Alto Boa Vista either, which was my intended destination. Faced with two choices, up the hill or back down it in defeat, I did what any ordinary person would do and started walking uphill.

This part of Tijuca park didn’t have any hiking trails, in fact, it didn’t have much of anything save for a winding road and forty feet of trees either side. Still, it was nice and quiet, and a good way to get away from the roar of the beach. The locals run here, bike here or even use it as a longboard spot, but on the whole it’s pretty deserted. After about twenty minutes of walking I stumbled across another viewpoint that seemed to be a picnic spot. Just as I was walking there another cab pulled up and the cab driver piled out with his wife and son in tow to stare at a bird (of the avian type). Best of all this guy did in fact know where I needed to go. His directions were large sweeps of his hands punctuated by twisting and turning his palm in many different directions. It was the international language of “You haven’t got a hope in hell of walking there” and he underlined the fact by telling me so in Portuguese. With a happy smile and a “Hey, it’s fine” I continued on my merry way in the first direction he pointed at, continuing along the road. I am pretty sure that my lesson in London Bloodymindedness was in fact interpreted as Tourist Insanity, but cab drivers definately weren’t top of the list of people to impress today.

So I continued along the road, which turned out to be a very very long road. It was a very peaceful walk as my only company was a car passing once every fifteen minutes, and the occasional cyclist (who started doing double takes the further along I got). The road was without a doubt, one of the most featureless roads I have ever walked along, with the single factor of having nigh on a rainforest either side to keep you company. As it was 35 degrees plus today, I was glad for the shade and occasional buzzing noises in the background.

About an hour in, I was hungry. I realised my initial plan of ‘grab a bite to eat at the entrance to the park and climb Tijuca’ left little room for the intervention of bad cab drivers and a road devoid of any features, let alone shopping opportunities. This was a problem. Even worse was the fact that I began to walk by people’s houses. To be more precise, I walked past people’s monolithic front gates attached to sheer cliff faces which protected their driveways from the incursion of anyone without the aid of a bulldozer. Brazilians are big on security. In fact I have yet to see an unguarded front door to a block of flats here. Brazilian architecture truely is representative of it’s community in the fact that they are able to incorporate 2.5 metre high spiked fencing grates to the front of a property and make it look attractive to boot. On this road, these houses mocked me and my hunger. Behind closed doors every mansion contained a chef cooking up a five course lunchtime feast for a laughing family of sixteen while I trudged past their door.

Bizarrely enough, the other facet to Brazilian society came to my aid: street vendors. I am now hungry with a capitalised H. I am at least one and a half hours into my trek, and having figured out where I am on the map, I’m about an hour away from the end of the road. So imagine my suprise when turning a corner I happened to see an old man sweeping the street with some broken fronds and a drinks cart sitting there beside him. I have absolutely no idea how this man managed to get the cart there, and I have absolutely no idea how he removed it at the end of the day, but I was thankful nonetheless. Street vendors are everywhere in Brazil. The extremes of poverty mean that people get inventive. Out here you don’t get an ice cream truck, you get a man with a polystyrene box filled with ice (if he is rich he will have the model up which is a cart with wheels). At any given location that people visit regularly, you will find someone selling beer and water out of a polystyrene box. Back in London, people are used to a couple of dodgy types wheeling around those little hot dog carts, out here, the street vendors can fulfil any culinary desire (plus the usual tourist trash). Pies, barbeques, fish, tapioca, churros (deep fried sweet pastry, real nice), sweetcorn, you name it, chances are someone is wandering along the beachfront cooking and selling it. The man now standing in front of me was part of some cultural trickle down effect. A shop could never exist out here, but there were enough cyclists passing to make it worthwhile to drag a cart into the middle of nowhere and hope for the best. Either that or he was a mirage and the midday heat was playing tricks on me. He had some black tarry bricks of sweet smelling substance, I bought four as two would sate me for now and I was unsure of when I would come across food again. The stuff was like dynamite, some sort of home brew version of the energy bars you get from health food stores. Suitably re-engergised I continued anew.

About an hour later I began hearing music. It was distant but it had to be loud as hell to reach me. Peering over the edge of the road between a few trees as they dropped away, I saw one massive favela in the distance. It must suck to live there, but if they’re having that loud a party at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon, it can’t be all bad. Half an hour’s walking later, my road came to an end. I kinda missed it when I first started hearing all the traffic. The isolation allowed my mind to wander and now I was re-introduced to the din of Rio life. I carried on a bit before taking a wrong turning, I stopped to ask a guy where Alto Boa Vista was, he laughed at me and said ‘You’re standing on it’. Still giggling he pointed me around the corner to the entrance to the park.

The map of Tijuca park is a scramble of roads with an insane childlike scribble of trails criss-crossing it. I stopped at the first restuarant and had my first decent meal for about 24 hours before embarking upon any hiking. It was now 3pm. Tijuca peak and back was probably out of the question, hence why this article is called ‘Tijuca Park Scramble’ not ‘Tijuca Peak Climb’. The nearest high peak was Pedro Da Conde, so with little messing about, no map, and a vague inkling of the direction to the trailhead, off I went. It’s more fun this way, right?

After approximately twenty minutes of hiking in the park, I eventually came across the visitors centre, realised I’d missed the trailhead a few hundred metres back and bought a map on the spot. Picking my way back to the trail entrance I realised why I had missed it the first time round, it was right behind two large bbq table setups that were being used. In fact the only signage to the thing was a general map of the area ten or fifteen metres away. Still, I left the family singing along to acoustic portuguese pop songs and began making my way up the trail.

Thankfully the Brazilian idea of trail is not related to the English version. Here, the trail is about forty to fifty centimetres wide, with a sheer wall of earth and trees one side, and a steep drop the other. In fact, it resembles a tunnel through foliage more than a leisurely English countryside walk with endless rolling fields and cow pats. The entire forest is alive around you, not that you can see much of it apart from insects, because all the larger animals have wisely decided to camp out of arms reach of lumbering humans. Still, the forest does react to you, insects start buzzing, you hear animals scurrying away and so on, it gets quite intense at times. After about thirty minutes I made it to Alto Da Bandera, which is a slight diversion from my intended destination, and a pretty lame one at that. The peak is so infested with trees it is impossible to get a good view. You do get the odd glimpse of mountains in the distance, and suddenly the park seemed a lot bigger than I thought it was.

The trail to Pedra Do Conde went through about three stages, first, the tunnel style rainforest, then when I hit a higher ridge it cleared slightly into almost desert like trees. You couldn’t really get a good picture, but the view of the park was damn good from here. I resolved then to hike the rest of the peaks while I’m in Rio. In the third part of the trail the soil turned slightly orange and the scenery changed again. It was here that I encountered the only other two people I would see on the entire hike up to the peak and back. Not bad for a saturday hike in a park thirty minutes from the city centre of one of the bigger metropolis’ on Earth. The change in soil, combined with a distinct change in gradient reminded me of something I read at university; ‘Every soldier claims their mud was the worst’. The track was broken stones interspersed with natural steps from where tree roots had refused to be worn down by years of people climbing the mountain.

At last I came to the foot of my target peak, here, the gradient took yet another turn for the worse. Every other switchback in the path meant scrambling up some rocks, it was hard work, but worth it. Around two or three switchbacks up the four hours of walking started to kick in and I felt tired as hell. Pushing through the tiredness I was rewarded for my perserverence by the gradient upping a notch yet again. It was now a forty five degree angle up the side of the mountain at points. The rocks were getting bigger by the minute, and I started having to use my hands to get through. Forty minutes into the slog up the mountainside and I got my first real reward. There was a massive boulder in the path. As I got closer I realised that this actually was the path, in that three simple metal handholds had been hammered into the thing. I climbed it and realised that to the right was a sheer drop, but there was no tree cover. Indeed, this boulder was the signpost for one of the best views of the day, right down the mountainside, out into the forest and over most of uptown Rio. I could even pick out the Maracana Stadium.

Fifteen minutes more of rock scrambling and I finally reached the peak. Well, sortof. The peak of the mountain was teeming with plant life, in order to see from the top you had to force your way through a few very overgrown pathways to the lip of the mountain to get a view. There were two to choose from, I opted for the inpark view first which was pretty decent, you get to see the bowl of the forest, as well as all the other peaks jutting out around it. The second view, that of Rio, was pretty insane. At this height (819 meters) you can not only see the park colliding with Rio proper, but the city, the bay and the mountains beyond. In a word, incredible. There was also some sort of gecko hiding up there which happened to be the only major bit of Fauna that I got to take a photo of all day.

Heading back down the mountain, now that was hard. Suddenly all the obstacles which I had previously scrambled beneath kept hitting me in the head like a metronome. The rocks were quite evil on the feet as well. As I got about ten minutes from the foot of Conde, I gave up on my plan of heading a bit further up the path to a couple of other peaks, I was officially beat and had little water left to boot. The trek back took another forty five minutes. It was quite strange to hear the lilting acoustic guitar still going when I got back. The family looked like I was crazy when I exited the trail, and I definately looked the part because I was a thirsty, pasty faced sweaty englishman in a park without a single other western tourist. Ten minutes down the tarmac road and I was vindicated in my choice of not climbing another mountain when thunder broke right over my head. It began to rain torrentially and the entire forest roared with the sound.

Funnily enough, I took the bus back to civilisation instead of flagging down a cab.