Hiking the Dois Irmaos

Rio de Janeiro is surrounded by hills and there are tracks up most of them which are pretty easily hikeable if you're reasonably fit. On many of them you can reputedly get better views than by going up to Christ - although of course that trip has a massive statue bonus thrown in.

On Sunday a couple of colleagues and I decided to do the Two Brothers, or Morro Dois Irmaos, which are the twin hills sitting between the sea and Rocinha above the favela of Vidigal. From the top you get a wonderful view across to Corcovado and the Lagoa, downtown Rio, Ipanema, Rocinha and Sao Conrado.

Like the Corcovado hike there's not a huge amount of information online about the Dois Irmaos walk. I did find this helpful website which was extremely useful in getting us to the start.

Vidigal is a small favela clinging to the hillside above the sea, close to Leblon, and has been fairly

well gentrified. The lower part of the favela even has what look like nice apartment blocks although it gets more favela-like with brick and breezeblock buildings as you ascend. The start of the Dois Irmaos track is almost at the top. Essentially if you enter from the Avenida Niemeyer 210 - the corner of Avenida Presidente Joao Goulart, where there's a sort of big blue monument thing - and just walk up the main street you can't get lost. It's a steep old walk up the street and it's possible to get a motorbike taxi or a van to the top, but Vidigal is a safe place to walk in daylight and it only took us 25 minutes.

The walk starts next to Vidigal's 'Vila Olimpica' or sports centre. There's an astroturf football pitch and a kind of running track. Cross the track to the other side and the path emerges; straight out of the favela into the Rio bush. Then it's straight and mostly uphill apart from a short downhill/flattish section as you cross between the two 'brothers', and mostly through bush. We didn't see many birds or animals, I think as there were so many people, but we did see a gloriously-coloured toucan in a tree (too hidden by leaves for a photo though).

In total from bottom to top and back down the walk took us about three hours in elapsed time, although our moving time was more like 50 minutes up and 50 minutes back down. There was a lot of stopping and of course we spent a while at the top looking at the view, looking at crazy people standing on the edge for selfies, and taking pictures ourselves. Personally I'm not good on an edge, so I generally stayed back, but the views were pretty spectacular regardless.

My main recommendation would be not to do this walk on a sunny weekend as we did. It was packed. It's a narrow path and there were a lot of pinch points where people going up had to wait for people going down or vice-versa. It was also pretty steep and eroded and we were astonished to see a fair few people in flip-flops and even bare feet. Not sure I'd recommend that for anyone who doesn't go barefoot all the time! Take plenty of water too so as not to be the poor girl collapsed from heat exhaustion two-thirds of the way up the mountain (although really, her leather leggings can't have helped).  But if you're prepared for a decent slog uphill and are looking for a really great view over Rio, it's definitely one to try.