A Trilha Alta: Bean gets high

For Nanas

Author’s Note: I wrote this post on July 7, 2012 C.E., the day we embarked on our dawn adventure. Some of you already know what happens. Others don’t. At the time I wrote this post, no one at Iracambi knew what would happen (unless someone can secretly see the future).  I will do a follow-up post revealing the subsequent events regarding Bean, even though they have already unfolded. Right now I feel like J.R.R. Tolkien. Just as he knew the fate of Frodo and The Ring that followed their great adventure, I know the fate of Bean that followed his great adventure. So I leave some of you in dire suspense, sensations of power pulsing through my veins, remnants of beans running through my intestines (My new Iracambi motto: "Eat beans every day." Thank you, Dr. Dre [PhD in both sentence structure and botany], for the poetic template).

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This morning we awoke at 2 a.m. with a mission: to conquer the Trilha Alta (High trail) by sunrise. We pulled on our adventure clothes, packed a hearty breakfast, and set off in the moonlight. The six of us hikers found ourselves to be seven when we looked behind us to see our trusty kitten, Bean (a.k.a. Feijão), following us. We tried to convince him (?) to turn back, but Bean had made his decision. He was coming with us to the top. Bean inspired us to press on, even when we found that our verbally given directions through the windy, hilly trails were quite unclear. We forded streams and climbed steep, rugged terrain. Signs of our elusive forest companions presented themselves in many forms: a pair of eyes here, a rustle in the trees there, the entrance to a burrow, poop. In certain parts, the trees began to thin and we could make out majestic silhouettes of hills and peaks bathed in the moonlight. During breaks to catch our breath, strip layers, and hydrate, Bean lapped water out of the cap of Sasha’s Nalgene. When we crossed raging rivers, he serenaded us with a chorus of meows from the opposite bank before finally sucking it up and crossing. Aside from this slightly annoying tendency, Bean was no longer our kitten. He was our faithful canine, trotting alongside us through the forest, embarking on mini adventures but always returning to graze our hiking boots. As we climbed higher and higher, our hopes of finding the actual High Trail diminished, especially when our path dead ended. Alas, we turned around and took the other fork. After hiking upwards for about two hours, clouds practically tickled the bugs in our hair when we saw the outline of a sign: “TRILHA ALTA à COMEÇO.” We couldn’t believe our eyes. Two hours of what we assumed was aimless wandering (exaggeration) had brought us to our destination. It was surely Bean’s stellar leadership and strong initiative that got us there. We silently marched along the sacred trail (with cat-like tread) until we reached our viewpoint destination around 4:45 a.m. In the dark we could see that we were perched on an exposed bit of mountain, looking down on layers upon layers of fog-bathed hills (all the hills in the region must be spotless by now, with all their bathing). We had an hour to kill before it started getting light, so we basked on the stretches of (seemingly) volcanic rock, stargazin’, spoonin’, snoozin’.

I awoke as the sky began to lighten, beckoning me to watch the constantly morphing view. The other day I learned that the rising and setting of the sun occurs faster in the tropics than in higher latitudes. This morning I noticed that the colors and brightness changed especially quickly, creating a dramatic effect. As we watched the sky’s performance, we unfurled and devoured our delicious breakfast of Carminha’s cake and homemade bread with guava jam and homemade cheese. We fed Bean generously (a rare treat for the kitten, who normally begs and begs at every meal without reward). This might have been our fatal (potentially literally) mistake. Contented and satiated, Bean ran off…and didn’t return. We ended up waiting on the rocks for two hours for our (not so) trusty gatinho to return, but to no avail. We returned as six instead of seven, and are desperately hoping Bean finds his way back before he gets eaten by the jaguar or mountain lion (we saw its menacing poo) that apparently dwell in those very hills.

More photos coming soon (probably)