Morro do Corcovado: The Train Was Worth the Queue

While waiting for Rob to land in Rio, Dave and I had enough time for one of the obvious landmarks. We took a taxi towards Morro do Corcovado, where minibus drivers were quite happy to offer us a quicker-looking ride to the top. We refused and chose the train instead.

This was hardly a hike in the conventional sense. My GPS track only covers the upper visit: 0.7 km of walking and 49 metres of gain around the summit complex. The railway did the serious climbing. For this particular mountain, that felt appropriate.

The slower option

From a purely practical point of view, choosing the Trem do Corcovado was probably a mistake. We waited roughly 40 minutes to an hour, while the minibuses we had declined kept moving. The price did not seem dramatically different either. But as an experience, the decision was right. If I was going to one of Rio's most famous places, arriving on its famous railway was part of the point.

The railway is older than the monument above it. It opened in 1884, was electrified in 1910, and later carried pieces of Christ the Redeemer up the mountain during construction. The statue itself was inaugurated in 1931. Human beings apparently needed half a century to decide that the already improbable railway should terminate beneath an equally improbable monument.

At the upper station we stepped into the expected tourist machinery: people everywhere, very little space, and slow movement through the crowd. Then we reached the viewing terrace and the irritation disappeared almost immediately.

Rio looked almost unreal from up there. Water, beaches, dense neighbourhoods and abrupt forested mountains all occupied the same frame. The view was exactly the sort of thing tourist photographs promise, except that the real scale was better. It was hard to decide where to look first.

Looking towards Guanabara Bay, Sugarloaf kept pulling the eye back. Conveniently, it would also become our next target later that day.

The panorama was broad enough to be spectacular, but the details were just as absorbing. Every time I thought I had finished looking, another patch of city, another line of coast or another ridge made a case for a few more minutes.

Even the small things managed to compete with the famous skyline. Two lizards were sitting on a stone ledge above the city, apparently less troubled by the crowds than we were.

Only after spending a while staring outward did I turn the camera back towards the reason most visitors had come. Christ the Redeemer is 38 metres high, but from immediately below the proportions feel larger because the statue is already standing above one of the most dramatic city viewpoints anywhere.

One more look

The practical part of my brain kept saying that we had to leave. Another part kept finding reasons to stay. Dave and I bought a small, overpriced cold cocoa drink and stood there a little longer. I suspect the drink was mainly an excuse not to move yet.

The weather helped. It was mild and dry, around 19°C during our recorded time on the summit, with broken cloud rather than the sort of cover that can erase Corcovado's main attraction. Some neighbouring ridges disappeared into cloud, but Rio remained open below us.

Eventually we went back to the train. Strangely, the queue down was shorter. I never quite understand how that works at places like this. Roughly the same number of people must eventually go up and down, yet one direction always seems to involve more standing around.

Back below, we checked Rob's flight. He still had not landed. That gave us enough time for a second landmark, Morro de Açúcar. I called another taxi and we headed across Rio, with Corcovado already having justified far more time than we had planned to give it.