The day begins inside a national park and ends in one of the great cities of the world — a compressed version of Brazil itself, with Atlantic Forest at the top and Carnival at the bottom. Between the two lies the old imperial road, a pair of sister mountain towns, and an afternoon spent climbing through one of Rio's strangest and most layered neighbourhoods on foot.
The day opens with the Parque Nacional da Serra dos Órgãos just at hand, its Teresópolis gate sitting at the edge of the city on the Avenida Rotariana. The park was created in November 1939, making it the third-oldest national park in Brazil. Its name derives from the rocky pinnacles above — formations that early Portuguese settlers thought resembled organ pipes — and its most recognisable profile, the spire of the Dedo de Deus at 1,692 metres, has been the founding image of Brazilian rock climbing since the late nineteenth century.
The morning's trail is the Trilha Suspensa, which earns its name: a 1,300-metre circular boardwalk elevated over the forest floor, with handrails throughout, rising at certain points to eight metres above the ground. The trail is accessible to wheelchair users and takes roughly an hour to complete — a gentle, unhurried circuit through the canopy, with rocky paredões visible through the trees above and the sound of the Rio Paquequer below. It is the right scale for an early start before a long road day.
Deleting this waypoint is permanent and cannot be undone.