My new friend @alexandrefeliz picked @vaipraonde and I up one morning to show us the Tijuca Forest. Feliz is a hiking tour guide, a freestyle skateboarder, and was the number one ranked player on planet earth in Tony Hawk's Underground on ps2 in 2005.
We hopped in his jeep and headed into the Tijuca Forest. The plan for today was to use the car to get most of the way up the mountain, stopping at sites along the way.
He stopped on the side of the road and told us to get out and follow this trail to a big tree. The smell of the forest was lush, reminding me of what I was able to smell in the airport of Rio when I first landed.
I was on a search to spot some exotic animals. When we got back to the car, Feliz saw a monkey fight and we did not find the giant tree. I decided to wear flip flops this day.
We proceeded up the road until we got to this lookout point. Little did I know i was in store for a way crazier view at the end of the day. At this point in the day I was pretty impressed with this view.
I was so impressed by this view that I bought a drone video from a mysterious man that came up behind me while at the lookout point. I hesitantly gave the man about $20 for a drone video souvenir.
The next stop was a waterfall with an old house that belonged to a botanical artist.
It was cool how this forest was free to visit. Artifacts from the 1800's unguarded by staff made this a unique experience compared to what I would expect in North America.
At this stop I experienced my first animal spotting.
A brazilain raccoon, I was surprised how close this animal walked up to @vaipraonde when I was filming.
The next stop was a yoga/meditation area in the middle of some trees. Eucalyptus trees were around us and you could smell the fresh Eucalyptus in the air here. It had good energy. Feliz said you could often spot land tortoise's walking around here. We didn't see one. That would have been pretty cool.
Our next stop was this pond. At first glance it appeared murky but we were able to see fish inside.
Feliz mentioned there was a turtle who lives in this pond. After he mentioned it, the turtle came up to say hello.
We kept going to see some caves before it got too dark.
The caves were cool.
The giant rocks that created them had a lot of quartz inside them. The entire mountain was probably a giant crystal.
Some of the caves were super dangerous. We didn't go down into the dangerous ones because we didn't have proper flashlights. It was cool that none of the caves were guarded or off limits to the public. Explore at your own risk.
We had to hurry to the last spot in order to enter it before they closed it off at 4PM. I didn't know what this last spot was before we got there, but it was a long 30 minute hike up a mountain to a crazy cool view.
The Tijuca Forest is home to a lot of plants and trees that are not native to brazil. When Rio was first created, they turned a decent amount of the Tijuca forest into coffee farms. The coffee farms caused problems with erosion so they rapidly tried to turn the farms back into forest. Their effort to do so included using plants and trees from asia.
The view from up here was actually breathtaking in that i was considerably scared looking down. It was so cool that there were no guard rails or anything. You can see in the background of the photo below a Face inside the side of that rock. Apparently it is Not man-made. Could it be a petrified giant from ancient times?
Feliz is unable to feel fear, so he wanted to show us a little nook that you can can kind-of hike down into and give yourself a heart attack when you look down. I tried to enjoy it but it was too scary. When i would look down, it would almost make me dizzy, which felt unsafe haha.
Thanks to Feliz for taking these cool photos of us.
On the top where we were, was like a giant rock plateau.
I could see two golf courses down below which i didnt know Rio had. There were lizards crawling around all over up at the top. Strange arid vegetation growing on the rock.
This was one of the highlights of the trip for sure. A really amazing escape from the city down below. Rio is an awesome place because of its close proximity to this amount of nature. I was thankful I got to experience this.
