The bet was this, made by the Jamaican guide of my bicycle tour of the Brazilian island of Florianópolis: That I couldn’t traverse the island’s most steep and difficult trail, which normally takes four to five hours roundtrip, plus return by bicycle to our starting point 15 miles away, before 5pm.
It was already 2pm. I had three hours to do what “normally” takes five to six hours, without getting lost on trails and roads that I’d never seen before, and without a map.
The wager was the cost of the bicycle tour, about $10.
Game on.
I was bored with the bicycle tour anyhow, and I had wanted to run this trail anyway before leaving Florianópolis after living there for two weeks in February.
This was my last day on the island, and I was feeling charged up from several cups of fresh-pressed sugarcane juice (mixed with ice, lime, and coconut) from a well-known roadside stand along the island southeastern coast, where we stopped during our bicycle tour.
I was also feeling inspired by Kílian Jornet, the incredible mountain runner who I met in December in Argentina on Mt. Aconcagua, the tallest summit in the Western Hemisphere. Kílian was running up and down the mountain in about 12 hours, while I was hiking to the summit and back in about two weeks.
Since then I’d been running daily, “finding my inner-Kílian,” as I came to think of it, spending hours daily exploring trails around super-hilly Florianópolis (and often getting lost in the process). I figured I was in good enough shape to have at least a fighting chance of winning the bet (as long as I didn’t get too lost).
The Jamaican guide locked my bicycle to a telephone pole, gave me the key, and told me the basic directions: Go to the end of the first beach, cross a knee-dip river to another beach, go to the end of that beach, and then follow the unmarked trail about 4.4 miles to Lagoinha do Leste, which is said to be the most remote, inaccessible, and beautiful beach on an island of beautiful beaches. There would be no signs, he warned. He had gotten lost in the past, he added.
I began running.
I took a wrong turn at the jungle-like start of the trail, but doubled-back and somehow stuck to the correct path, and after two miles knew I was going in the correct direction because of the other hikers heading as well to the most beautiful beach in Florianópolis. People gaped at me as I ran past them, hopping from rock to rock and even sprinting when possible. At left is a photo of the dirt trail winding along the coast.
A brief aside, before I explain why I would ultimately lose that bet:
A few weeks earlier I’d raced up and down Pico Paraná, the highest mountain in southern Brazil. The same motivation for taking on the bet at Florianópolis had pushed me in January to return to Pico Paraná, which I first climbed in early October as part of an overnight camping trip. But now I wanted to see how fast I could summit the mountain, which is only accessible via rocky, muddy, tree-root-tangled trails and rock faces so steep as to require climbing up using metal hand-holds.
The website SummitPost.org puts the roundtrip-10-mile-hike at eight to 14 hours. On an overcast Saturday, I ran to the summit and back in about 5 hours. (For me, the hardest part of the day was hitchhiking home.)
Often there’s a moment in these travels and adventures (and in life generally!) when I wonder, “Why again am I doing this?” Why wake at 4:30am on a Saturday, run six miles to a meetup point, wait an hour for my companions to show up, squeeze into a car for a 1-hour drive, and then run off alone into the drizzly fog over muddy trails to a cloud-covered mountaintop? At Pico Paraná’s summit I only had brief glimpses through the cloud-breaks of the other peaks and valleys around me. I felt robbed of the spectacular views from last October’s hike.
But this time, at least, wild orchids were in bloom along the trail toward the summit. A fellow hiker — one of the few I saw all day — pointed out the orange and purple varieties (pictured here). I stopped to smell the Brazilian orchids, so to speak. And they were all mine. It was a small but very worthwhile reward for taking on the adventure. I wanted more.
Which gets me back to taking on that bet at Florianópolis:
I ran to Lagoinha do Leste (pictured left) in about 45 minutes, well ahead of schedule. The beach is bordered by sharp hills and is undeveloped except for a single thatch-roofed coconut stand. It is not the most beautiful beach on the island, but it is the most natural and secluded. Its inaccessibility is part of its reward and allure — any beach looks pretty good by the end of a long hike, kinda like anything tastes good when you’re starving.
I confirmed with the coconut-seller that I was at the correct beach, ran the full length of it for good measure (about a half-mile), snapped a few photos for evidence, and turned back to run the trail by which I’d come.
I returned to the bike at about 3:30, leaving me plenty of time for the pedal home. Here I lost some time, missing a turn and rerouting several miles out of the way along a hot highway before winding back to the more-pleasant back-country road that we’d taken that morning.
Still, I pulled into our original meeting spot at 4:15, victory secured.
The Jamaican guide was standing outside my hostel, eating a hot dog. “I did it!” I exclaimed. He looked at me incredulously and asked, “Man, what did you do?” I showed him the photos, told him I’d even taken a wrong turn on the bike ride home, and then asked him to pay up on the bet.
“No, no, no,” he said, “the bet was you had to be back by 4pm, but you had a one-hour window until 5pm, when you would officially lose the bet and have to pay me.”
“We didn’t say that! You didn’t even think it was possible for a tourist like me to hike to that beach in less than 2 hours, much less hike there and back and bike here in 3 hours total.”
After more back and forth, I took a personal jab, saying: “So this is how you do business in Jamaica, huh?”
He got defensive about that, but he still refused to concede the bet. In any case, I had gotten what I wanted from the bike tour, plus the reward of finding the most beautiful beach in Florianópolis, which he had missed out on. Touché!
Outside, cross-dressers were roaming the streets to mark the final night of Brazilian Carnaval, a time of parades and parties to mark the start of Lent every year. Bands would be playing late into the night and block parties would be blasting music into dense crowds (one particularly famous gathering in Florianópolis is called Bloco do Sujos, “Dirty Block,” because of the debauchery).
I considered it a necessary cultural experience to go out and participate in Carnaval (which meant that I was also wearing a bikini top for the evening). But I was so bored and tired with it all, compared to the fun and the charge I got out of running up Pico Paraná and around Florianópolis.
