Last Saturday I finally got around to see some of the beautiful nature around Rio. I have heard a lot about it, and how close to the city you can find some really nice surroundings. Somehow, I haven’t really made it any further than my runs around the lake until now though. Together with a Norwegian friend and his colleagues I was going to walk up Pedra da Gávea, 828 m of spectacular mountain just west of Rio and 20 minutes away by car.
The trail leading up to the summit offers you quite a challenging hike at times, with some semi-climbing (for those of you who are climbers, read crawling) of rocky parts where you shouldn’t think about how far you would fall if you happened to slip. The Scandinavian expat troop was well geared up though, as always. You can never be too thorough when it comes to safety and surviving the wilderness. Plenty of water, nuts, raisins and bananas (of course), potato chips for the salt, sun block, sunglasses, sturdy shoes, back packs and even a climbing rope. Swedes and Norwegians in a nutshell. After some 45 minutes of hiking we met what seemed to be a school class of boys, half running down the trail, one of them carrying a ghetto blaster under his arm. Ok…fine…they probably hike up to stay the night a couple of times a week or so and are used to it…and for sure they wouldn’t have been all the way up…
About half an hour later we got to the most challenging part of the hike, and to be honest, I can’t remember crawling up too many of such steep, rocky parts before. And I will gladly admit that the rope did make it a lot easier and more comfortable to get up when you couldn’t really reach for anything to hold on to. Not to mention the help it was when going down later on. However, when we got there, three couples were on their way down, obviously also some over nighters. One of them without shoes and the girls in lighter sneakers than what you might recommend. They were struggling though, so fair enough. A bunch of people in Havaianas, and one guy running up and down the mountain (50 minutes one way on a good day…only 52 minutes that day), later - the last edge of wilderness feeling was pretty much blunted off.
Either way, our two-hour hike to the summit was well worth the effort. When we got out of the jungle part about half way up, a stunning view met us. Barra de Tijuca, all of Rio with the mountains in the background and Pedra Dois Irmãos where you could see the hang gliders and para gliders leaping off from the edge. Absolutely gorgeous.I’m also getting more and more convinced that I need to get one of these neon full-body training outfits…they seem to work also for hiking.
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