Jack McDonald dot Org

Finding my way back to Tijuca Forest was definately easier than finding my way there for the first time. For starters, the round trip cost me less than the abortive taxi ride which was rather nice. Exiting the metro system at Sans Paena, I succesfully managed to catch the correct bus, thanks to this bus stop being the one in, well, the first one I’ve seen in Rio that actually has a semblance of a route map as well as a string of bus numbers.

Buses in Rio are a law unto themselves. I think that when they designed the training system for new bus drivers the guy in charge must have sat down and watched the final chase scenes from Terminator 1+2, Speed plus whichever Mad Max film has the petrol tanker in it. As a result, Rio’s bus drivers are trained to ignore any and all traffic in between them and their final destination. True, all other Rio traffic generally follows exactly the same pattern, except the buses are three times the size of everyone else.

Oddly enough the manic driving is coupled with a completely over the top sense of customer service. Flag down a bus, it’ll stop, regardless of where it happens to be. It’s down to you, the valiant would-be bus passenger to cross the three lane motorway to the outside lane where the bus driver has quite happily parked and is now impatiently waiting for you. After having been in this city for a couple of weeks I am quite certain that were you to hail an upturned bus that has been set alight in the middle of a forty car pile up, the bus driver would open the doors and motion you to hop on without a second thought.

In essence, the buses act like taxis. This includes cutting each other up, it includes going from nought to whateverspeedtheenginewillgo in four or five seconds, and most importantly it includes getting to the destination with driving skills that veer between hollywood stunt and Grant Theft Auto-style insanity. And the entirety of Rio is quite happy with this fact, because unlike London, the bus actually gets you there, fast.

In fact the system works so well that you could in fact use the buses completely blindfolded. Stick out your hand, board the bus, pay to go through the turnstile and sit down. Then you hope that the bus is going vaguely near where you’re going. This is the most that you can really hope for seeing as your average downtown bus runs a route parallel to the beach and has a destination sign that says something in the region of “Uptown, beach, beach, Somewhere past the beach”. So you board it and pray, it’s a bit like using an Uzi, except it costs less and you’re unlikely to fall foul of Rio’s hardline military police for using it.

In truth, I like Rio’s bus network, I liked it since the first bus I took managed to get involved in a road traffic accident within ten minutes. It’s a bit like a fairground ride, seeing as there is no suspension, neither you, nor any of the passengers, or even the bus driver knows what’s coming next and to cap it all off, you usually get to enjoy the insanity in complete air conditioned comfort. Suck on that, TFL. It’s a shame that all the travel guides say something along the lines of “If you take a bus in Rio you will end up robbed, raped and murdered… OR WORSE” because it deprives so many people of the simple pleasure of experiencing the complete carnage that is Rio Traffic. It’s akin to watching Hellraiser but fast forwarding on the gory bits. Truth be told, half the tourists around here probably would get eaten alive if they stepped two streets away from the beach, let alone got a bus, but then again they’re mostly the rich kid “I’m finding myself” traveller types who plague the world. In short, fuck ‘em.

Back to the matter at hand, Tijuca Peak. The bus made it’s merry way up the mountainside as if Satan was knocking on the back window and a man on a pale horse was riding alongside trying to ask the driver a question. The road up to Tijuca Forest naturally twists and turns so I found myself sliding everywhere. The engine was screaming, the bus shaking, and everybody was completely calm.

Hopping off the bus at the entrance to the park I grabbed a quick bite to eat from the street vendor at the entrance. A cheese pastry, more aptly, a couple of chunks of cheese wrapped in some sort of flat bread and then deep fried to within an inch of it’s life. Quite tasty actually. The trailhead for Tijuca Peak actually lies 4km inside the park, so I set off up the road. Along the way I ended up in some tortoise-and-hare parable with a particularly unfit bicycle rider, who would cycle ahead of me and disappear out of view. Every so often I would trudge past him as he was slumped on his bicycle huffing and puffing at the strain. He gave up 2km in. Wuss.

About three kilometers into the park there is in fact a restaurant that does a roaring trade that consists of a single guy leafing through the menu on Sunday lunchtime. Being peckish I looked myself, but decided against it. Eventually I arrived at the entrance to the trail, and was promptly asked by a bored looking park attendant to give my name and destination before I set off up the mountain. Having filled in the requisite detail, I began the hike.

Tijuca Peak is obviously the jewel in the crown of the park and it shows in the trail, which is relatively well managed and quite wide. In short, it really wasn’t as fun as the Conde Peak climb. However, thanks to the torrential rain of the last three or four days, it was slightly muddy, which made the hike a bit more interesting. After forty or fifty minutes, I made it to the bottom of the peak for a speedy ascent. This was when I realised that I was actually in the cloud line. In the partings of the forest I realised quite how high 900m was, and I still had 100 metres to go.

Tijuca’s Peak is accessible by a rough stone stairway carved out of the peak itself. Though this somewhat detracts from the utter remoteness of the location, it does make the last thirty or forty metres of ascent possible. Otherwise I would have had to contend with a slippy climb up an exposed rockface without climbing gear. The stairs themselves are pretty badly maintained though. There were originally two heavy iron chains preventing anyone from slipping over the edge. However the iron poles that held these chains aloft have mostly rusted through or been vandalised. As a result the stone steps have to be partly traversed clinging to an iron chain along the ground as the incline gets steeper. They also carved half the steps with the apparent intention of reserving the peak for children, or those whose feet had not grown since they were ten. It was around this time that my ears popped from a pressure difference which underlined the fact that I was a kilometre above sea level with a sheer drop on one side of me.

The view from the top is pretty spectacular, especially seeing as I was above the cloud line. It didn’t make for especially good photographs but hell, it was a great experience. As with Conde, there is absolutely nothing at the top to save you from falling, moreover the edges are completely unmarked as well, you follow a trail to the edge and it just disappears over it. The peak was completely silent except for a few birds that were fluttering about. I sat for a while at the edge watching the clouds dance around beneath me in the bowl area of the park.

Setting off, I decided to head back down a different route, which actually led to another lower peak, but was marked as harder. That trail joined the Tijuca Peak trail just at the bottom of the smaller Tijuca Mount, from which you get a nice view of Tijuca Peak (you can’t really appreciate it as you’re climbing it). It was tough. I can see why it’s marked as hard. In places I didn’t so much descend as try to control my fall the best I could. Half the trail was a forty five degree climb up, and thus descending it over wet boulders and so on took it’s toll on my legs. The trail hugged Tijuca Mount as it spiralled down, occasionally it would venture a few metres into the forest as if it’s architects were looking for proof to say “at least we tried to make it a forest trail” but for the first fifteen minutes it hugged the rockface resolutely. Indeed, ten minutes in the trail simply disappeared into a sheer drop, that’s when I realised that the path ahead lay in a groove in the rockface. It was wide enough to stand on, but as it was eroded into the rock, not wide enough to stand up on, so you have to shuffle your way over it hunched over. With a big drop on your left hand side.

After this, the trail once more descended into true jungle, still at the rather insane descent angle. The recent rain had turned all the leaves (and this being a rainforest, there were many) into a squelchy mulch. Footsteps became something of pot luck as to whether your foot would remain rooted to the ground as intended, or whether you were infact stepping on some extra slippery rock or root that would send you flying. On top of all this, the forest descended around my head in a triangular formation. There were endless branches and vines hanging down to poke, scrape and possibly strangulate you if you weren’t paying attention. One managed to go straight into my ear, which struck me as the forest’s way of saying “This means: Not Welcome” American History X style.

About five minutes from the bottom of the trail I happened upon an english couple, plus guide, plus three energetic kids in tow. They were heading up the way I had just descended. I gave the kids about twenty minutes before they gave up on the climb ahead and carried on my way. As a final stroke of luck for the day, I happened across an abandoned building, which looked like someone had dropped a concrete safefull of bricks through it’s roof. Pretty cool. I then realised it was marked on the map, and that this park had a few other places like that around. More targets for another weekend.