Hiking Adventure!

All right.  So last week, Alexandre said, "Bruna invited us to go hiking with her. Wanna go?"

Before I got any information, my answer was "Yeah I wanna go!"
I didn't know much about it. Dear Buddy Bruna and another friend, Tomas, were planning everything. Alexandre is much more go-with-the-flow than I am, and he didn't ask many questions.

The hiking trip was some kind of trail event being planned by a gym in a neighboring town. (When I say town, I mean "practically just a village made almost entirely of government housing and open land that miraculously happens to have a gym".) People had to register in teams. Bruna forwarded Alexandre the gym's email about the event. It had some generic pictures of smiling people hiking. I pointed out that the pictures were totally not from Brazil, and were from Utah or somewhere in that region, and probably didn't reflect what we'd be doing because the gym had just copied them from the internet. But the description on the site said something like "a day for everyone, from kids to seniors!" So we imagined it'd be kind of light.

(Spoiler Alert: Oh, how wrong we were.)

Tomas and Bruna picked us up bright and early on Sunday morning. In the car, Bruna mentioned that a guy from the organizing committee had called her to ask her to submit a team name. She couldn't think of anything, so she just said "Students from [their university]". We joked about how silly it was that there were team names, and wouldn't it have been funny if we had made team shirts or something?

...

When we pulled up, we saw all the other teams milling around. Almost EVERY team had team shirts made up.
What the hell was this hiking event, anyway??


Oh, and I clearly didn't get the memo about what pants I was supposed to wear, as a woman:

Seriously. There were about 200 people there, and I was one of like, four women not wearing black tight leggings (that girl in the jeans in the picture, too. Except hers were still tight and knee-length). It was comical.

Yes. So. We signed in and gave our food donation. (Part of the registration process was donating food to the local community living in said government housing. I thought it was a nice part.) Then we we served ourselves some bread and coffee cake that they had available.  Then we waited.  I took some pictures.

The organizers gave a little presentation to the participants. They explained the process: Every team would receive a list of directions. The directions said things like "turn left at the fence" and "follow the river until you get to the bamboo tree and then cross the river." To add in an extra level of difficulty, each step in the directions had a time next to it. It was supposed to take the team that much time to get from one step to another. Random places along the trail would have event organizers stationed. The organizers would check the time that our team got to the given location. For every minute that we were early or late to that location, we'd get a point. The goal was to have no points. The team closest to zero points at the end was the winner. I think that's about right.

Each team started at a different time so people couldn't just follow each other. That meant we had to wait about 45 minutes for our turn to start. We were still kind of in the dark, but excited!

Our team was called up. The organizers gave us our maps. Then they watched their watches (English fun), counted down from 5, and sent us off!

It took us about 35 seconds to figure out that this "trail" was totally going to be off the beaten path, most literally. Because the hand-drawn arrows and trail-less terrain weren't enough, the people who wrote the directions decided to intentionally send us in circles, or through abandoned buildings, or in circles inside of abandoned buildings (like in the first step).

The boys each had a copy of the directions. The boys disagreed at first.
"No, you're wrong. That way sends us right through the tall grass. There's a road right here."
"No, but the next step says to follow the river, and the road goes away from the river. I'm telling you, we're supposed to go through the tall grass."

That's right. Most of our trail included tall grass that we walked through. And rivers. And big gatherings of trees.

At first, I was irritated. This shit was destroying my good tennis shoes. If I'd known, I would've worn my heavy waterproof hiking books. I thought we were supposed to be on a trail good for kids and seniors alike, not a possibly-snake-infested mato! Oh, and the cockamamie instructions were really a testament to how Brazilians just don't know how to give directions. I'd like to think that I'm just generalizing, except I get lost every time people give me directions in Portuguese. (And I don't get lost in the US.)  And when my students study my chapter on directions, they have a really hard time, because they always want to skip important parts ("turn left, now turn left later on, and you're there!")  So I think it's partly cultural (not all Brazilians get lost), but I'm not completely convinced.

(I wish I could add music to different blog entries as a sort of soundtrack. The song playing through my head all day was "In California" by Joanna Newsom. If you'd like a soundtrack, you can click on this):




Anyway, when I got over my initial shock (and when we got out of the scary tall grass), I felt better. I decided that my shoes (and my legs) would be destroyed no matter what, so I could either spend the entire tiring day grumbling, or I could make the most of it.  At the parts where I wasn't balancing precariously on a muddy river bank or shimmying under a barbed-wire fence, I got some great pictures:

weeeeee're standing in a river oohhhh my god pleasenofishpleasenofish oop, picture!

Yup, we all had to go through that.

Super happy Alexandre

All the land was so wide open and colorful. The brightest green grasses, and the bluest sky, and the reddest mud. Even the dead winter stalks were a brilliant gold. And even with all the other teams, it was actually really quiet and calm. (I was the anxious part of the ordeal, jumping around in the tall grass like a pony, convinced that something was going to stop my nervous system with a deadly bite. Did you know that the world's deadliest spiders live here, in this region?!) 

We saw giant mutant Land Before Time ants. And awesome flowers that looked like honeycomb. And a lot of horses and cows. And baby chickens. And so much land. Oh, and some brown sheep! (?). They were brown with black heads. Totally didn't know that they existed. And the rock in the rivers was ancient.

We passed a few little quaint waterfalls that dribbled into babbling brooks.  

Oh yeah, and it took us about 6 minutes to lose complete interest in the arbitrary points system. We knew we weren't going to win, and we cared more about (a) not getting hurt (b) enjoying the trail and the scenery (c) not walking in useless circles and (d) avoiding crossing rivers whenever possible. However, other people were way too serious about it. We did inevitably run into other teams: people who'd taken wrong turns or who'd just gone faster or slower than we had. I actually snapped sarcastically at some dumb girls (their team shirts said "Equipe Salto Alto": Team High Heels") who actually tried to push past us on this tiny high ledge that had a river on one side and a barbed wire fence on the other. 

What I actually said in Portuguese was, "Wow, that's a pretty bitchy thing to do. Would you guys like us to fall into the river, or would you prefer to push us into the fence?" And one actually tried to say "Oh, well, um... we have to push past you so that WE don't fall in the river." and I said "oh, really?"  and then when we got onto more solid ground and they ran past us, I called, "good luck with your points!" 

Super pleased that my Portuguese is good now.

At one point, there was a sort of clearing, and the organizers had set up a resting point with free bananas and ice-cold water. Best bananas and water I've ever had in my life.

The directions also led us through the town.

It was simple, but stable. The residents sat in front of their houses and watched the passersby, amused (confused?). A lot of little kids said "hi" to us.

Then we had to cross under a bridge and through some more brush, and we got to a lake. From the lake, we could see the finish line. We could either follow the roundabout directions for another 3km, or we could cross a bridge and be done. We'd already been hiking through all this for about 3 hours at that point, and most restaurants back in town would be closing soon.

It was a pretty fast consensus to cross that bridge and be done with our adventure. We were pooped!

Me with my totally out-of-style shorts (not to mention the sock situation)

So we headed back to the finish line, turned in our jersey thing, and checked out, content with our adventure.

I had mixed feelings during the hike, but in the end I'm glad we did it, and glad we followed the wacko directions. Chalk it up to basic psychology, but I wouldn't have ever crossed through rivers or tall grass on my own accord, and if I hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to see all the memorable sights.

I'm really sore now and my legs are all scratched up, but I have zero bug bites, and it was totally worth it!