Source: Dallas Morning News
In downtown Rio de Janeiro, in the shadow of one of the city's most famous landmarks, concrete jungle meets the real thing.
Just past the double-decker tour buses and cable cars that zip up Sugar Loaf, Rio's iconic granite dome, an inconspicuous footpath makes a beeline into thick forest. Winding past trees draped with vines and clinging plants, I climb higher and higher above the city. At one turn, micos – tiny monkeys with pinched-up faces – glare from a tangle of treetops.Though the Amazon gets most of the press, Brazil is also home to another jungle: the mata, or Atlantic rain forest. Defiantly wild, with biodiversity levels rivaling the Amazon's, the mata literally surrounds Rio and São Paulo, stretching in a thin strip all along Brazil's central coast.For travelers like me – nature lovers but not full-blown Survivormen – this translates into a unique one-two punch. Choose your trails right and you can start the day tramping through protected mata in the company of toucans and howler monkeys and finish it sipping caipirinhas on the beach with Brazil's buff and beautiful.
Back on Sugar Loaf, high above downtown Rio, the trail climbs steeply before leveling off. Ahead, the mata opens to reveal a panoramic view of the Baía de Guanabara and the city's winding coastline. Tropical jackfruit – bright yellow and basketball-size – dangle in bunches overhead.
But my jungle reverie doesn't last. Farther on, the same path dead-ends abruptly at a mountaintop snack bar, perched right atop Sugar Loaf. Travelers, fresh off the cable cars, pose for camera phones and snatch up postcards. It turns out that while Sugar Loaf makes for a good afternoon hike (safe, well-marked and moderately challenging), getting a truer taste of the mata requires looking beyond city limits.
South of Rio, in an isolated village on the rugged Bay of Paraty, the local fishermen are busy. I watch as two groups struggle to haul in a net broader than a city block. As the net narrows, the fish caught inside are yanked squirming onto the sand: catfish, rays, crabs and hundreds of silvery whitefish whose scales glint in the sun. Children run to collect the catch before it's washed back into the emerald-colored bay. "It's not always like this," one villager says in Portuguese. "Today's a good day."
The Bay of Paraty, a network of jungle, inlets and secluded beaches about three hours by car from Rio, is Brazil's Atlantic rain forest at its paradoxical best. Back in 1501, globe-trotter Amerigo Vespucci called it the nearest to paradise he had ever been. These days, the area's charm continues to lure travelers from Rio and São Paulo, who pour in for weekends and holidays.
Activity centers around Paraty, a 350-year-old seaside colonial city with broad, cobbled streets and a host of ornate churches built with the riches from Brazil's gold mines. In the historic center, chic restaurants and boutique inns vie for clientele. But just outside the city, and extending for miles in every direction, are tracts of Atlantic rain forest: still untamed and teeming with wildlife.
The trail to that lucky fishing village, a dreamy stretch of sand appropriately named Praia do Sono (Sleepy Beach), starts just a few miles south of the city. (Excellent maps are available in Paraty's tourism center, where guided treks also can be arranged.) Worn into the red clay by generations of villagers, the footpath quickly climbs past a few remaining houses and into dense jungle.
Fallen leaves the size of dinner plates clutter the narrow trail. Above, the canopy flickers with color drawn from a tropical palette: saturated greens, toucan yellow, the blood red of giant heliconia plants.
When Portuguese sailors first stepped ashore in Brazil in 1500, they probably encountered a similar scene. Back then, the Atlantic rain forest covered 520,000 square miles, an area nearly the size of Alaska, and extended up to 300 miles inland. But, almost from the start, the mata was pillaged, stripped and burned.
The first craze was for pau-brasil, Brazil's eponymous timber. By the 1700s, the entire Atlantic rain forest was nearly emptied of the trees, coveted for their deep-red dye. Plantations followed, with massive tracts of jungle clear-cut to make room for sugar cane, cacao, coffee and eucalyptus. Urbanization and the sprawl from Brazil's megacities was nearly a final blow. By the time conservationists started to take notice in the 1980s, less than a tenth of the mata was left.
Emerging from the forest, I follow the path as it plunges to the beach, skirts the village, with its fishing nets and fleet of wooden canoes, and rises steeply to a lonely summit. Beyond, a string of sandy bays stretches to the horizon, mata tumbling down to empty beaches and crashing waves. Shadows from late-day clouds band the water below into strips of turquoise and steely blue.
Hemmed in by cities, backyard to more than 100 million people, Brazil's beleaguered Atlantic rain forest has proved defiantly resilient. Marooned pockets of jungle are now linked via forest corridors, wildlife superhighways made of millions of newly planted trees, and a recently approved Atlantic Rainforest Law has finally given conservationists the tools – from economic incentives to park police – to halt destruction.
Still, whether Brazil's backyard jungle can manage to remain so accessible and so wild, only time will tell. But this afternoon, at a fork in the rain-forest trail high above the Bay of Paraty, the only question is a far simpler one: Do I push on or double back to town in time for dinner and one last caipirinha?