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.

Read more

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. Read more