Ilha Grande - day 2

A forest covers most of the island, but there are paths through it. Most of these goes to the different beaches and also connects the small villages. I think there was only one path which went in towards the middle of the island. This one went up to Pico do Papagaio - the Parrot Peak - which was the target of our second day on the island. Before coming to the island, we had read that you were strongly recommended to hire a guide when hiking these paths. This was, however, quite expensive and we didn't think a guide would improve the hike much more than potentially pointing out spots where you normally find some animals, so we decided to go on our own. 

The parrot peak up on the right.

The round trip was supposed to be approximately 13 km and take 6-7 h. This might sound like a very long time, especially since we recently ran about the same distance in approximately 1 h. However, this was predominantly on a small path and almost always up - the peak was at 982 m. Either way, we started walking at 9 am, carrying some nuts and the most important thing - the camera. OK, water was also quite important. We brought a bottle of 1.5 litres, which was no where near enough. 

The path was broad and open in the beginning, sometimes with huge bamboo trees, as you can see to the left, but it quickly became much more narrow, as on the left. The worst part of it being that narrow was that it was impossible to see anything but trees. OK, the trees were nice and I did enjoy walking in the forest, but there was no way to tell where we were, how far we had walked or how far we still had left.

Another annoying thing was all the spider web. It turned out that I was the first person to walk this path this day, so I had to clear up all the web the spiders had spun since the previous time somebody walked there. It was really a lot and I only sometimes saw it before I walked into it. It was nicer to see some banana trees:

Some times we heard monkeys and we also heard some of them shouting like crazy. Some birds flew past and I saw a big lizard (about 1m in length) but it quickly ran away.

After having walked quite far and getting close to the top (as we'd later find out) something quite unexpected happened: a dog came running really fast out of nowhere. It was extremely out of breath, he could barely breath. It's not too strange that he was tired, I would also have been really tired if I ran up there, but I have never seen a dog that tired. Immediately when he caught up with us, he sat down and rested, but as soon as we started moving he walked with us. Since he was suffering so much we felt bad walking since we knew that he would follow us instead of catching his breath, so we decided to stop until his breath became somewhat normal again, which took 5-10 minutes!

It was good that we let the dog catch his breath again before reaching the top, because the view was breathtaking (sorry, but I couldn't resist...).

After we had enjoyed the view for some time, a German couple appeared. First we thought that the dog belonged to them, but they told us that that it didn't. The dog found them in the beginning of the day and walked with them for a long time, but then all of a sudden it disappeared. They became a bit worried, so they were happy to see it again. 

After a while the five of us started to walk down again. When we were about halfway down, we met a Lithuanian guy, who was on his way up. We talked a little bit and when we started walking again, the dog left us and walked up the mountain again, keeping the Lithuanian company.

In the end the trip took about 5h (2.5 h to go up, 1 h at the top and 1.5 h to come back down again) including stops for taking pictures. However, as I mentioned we didn't bring enough water, so when we came back we went to the supermarket and bought a lot of water. Then we went straight to the beach, so it was a pretty good day.