Breaking my coffee addiction, one year later

“What in all fiery hell made you do something like that?” is usually the first response I get when I tell people about this adventure. The answer is simple. I was in my kitchen one morning, sipping a cup of my favorite brew – three ounces of espresso and powdered milk blended whipped in with a hand-held latte foamer – when I thought to myself “I don’t actually want this cup of coffee, I’m simply staving off an addiction.”

Truth be told, that preparation of coffee was – and still is – one of the most amazing things I’ve come across on God’s green earth. It combines the angry punch of an espresso with a sublime creaminess that starts with the foam at the top stays with you until the last drop, a concoction I developed over years in Caracas in with the help of my wife and many Venezuelan friends.

My thought at that moment, standing in my pajamas in front of the stove, wasn’t that I never wanted to drink coffee again. It was more motivated by the question “Shouldn’t I be able to drink coffee because I want to, and not because I have to?”

I could have of course just poured out the cup of coffee I didn’t want so that I could start to break my addiction. But I’d actually tried that before. Several years earlier, just to confirm I was in fact addicted, I tried to see what would happen if I just stopped from one day to the next. At that time I was drinking three or four dark shots of espresso a day. Let’s just say it didn’t go well. Yes, first the headaches, then the dizziness. Within two days I was constantly nauseous. The third day I was vomiting. As you can guess, the fourth day I was drinking coffee again. I can’t help but smile to myself when I see the coffee industry groups insisting caffeine withdrawal only causes “temporary, mild discomfort.”

That was enough to scare the daylights out of me. For the next six years I didn’t give the slightest thought to ditching my morning brew, even downing a few sips of warm Coke when I couldn’t find coffee on the road, or munching on chocolate covered espresso beans on camping trips. But over time the thought came back to me – do I really want to have to drink this stuff every day? Part of my problem is that I even when I was a regular coffee drinker, I had to constantly resist the call of coffee anyway. My metabolism only allowed me to have my own cup of coffee in the morning, which gave me the nice jolt I wanted. After that, coffee usually did more harm than good. Those slow, boring afternoons, when I was nodding off from a big lunch, drinking a cup of coffee would simply make my head swim. Granted, I don’t have kids, so I sleep pretty well, otherwise this might be a different story. So I thought, if I can’t try this now, when will I ever be able to?

And so it began. When things first started I was putting about two teaspoons of coffee into my little espresso pot, so I started to taper down while I kept the water constant. It was a slow ramp-down, but I could feel it. In the afternoons my stomach would clench up, and I’d have this irresistible urge to lie down on the floor. People asked me if I was sleeping OK. Most of the time I just told them I was tired (which was true). It was probably a period of two weeks or so where things were tough, but after that it got noticeably better. And, at the same time, the coffee was getting noticeably worse. By the end I was only putting in 1/8 of a teaspoon of grounds, which yielded a pale watery brew with a few grounds floating on top of it. The declining quality of the coffee was a deterrent to continuing to drink coffee. So I quit.

And to my surprise, I haven’t missed it as much as I thought I would. I do sometimes walk past a coffee shop and really feel myself being pulled in by the overpowering scent of roasting beans. And I so get up on Saturday mornings and have a cup of coffee with my wife while I read the paper, and I truly enjoy it. It becomes a special occasion with that absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder intensity.

I remember one dark early morning a few months later I had to get up at some godawful hour to return from a reporting trip, I stood in front of a coffee counter at the airport. I wasn’t sure if should take advantage of the moment to indulge in an espresso. Would the coffee keep me up on the plane? Or should I drink the coffee so I could stay awake on the plane and then get home and rest? Or would the coffee dehydrate me too much on the plane? And then I had a sudden realization, like clouds parting to reveal a brilliant sun – “I don’t want coffee!”

Our global food drama (redux)

I came to the conclusion that there’s not much of a place in the news world for what I think is the most overlooked issue of the debate over the world’s food supply: waste. Last week’s extensive investigation in the New York Times about how climate change is cutting into the world’s food production is one such example. A thoroughly reported, clearly sourced and well-written story outlining how demand for food is outpacing production and the consequences of this trend – yet without a single mention of the staggering inefficiencies and endemic waste at every level of the world’s food production (and consumption).

I mentioned this not long ago in my post about the FAO report that concludes that a jaw-dropping one-third of the world’s food goes uneaten. That post argued that the world prefers dramatic Malthusian tales of the human race slowly starving like castaways on a desert island over the much more prosaic reality that really solving this problem will require changes in how much consume food and not simply producing more of it at any cost.

I will admit that I’m falling into a trap here that I don’t care for, which is stirring up a debate about the debate itself – rather than a debate about the issues themselves. I find meta-debates problematic because they get people more cemented into their positions and less likely to think openly about what needs to be done. But this issue is sorely lacking in our consciousness of the problem, and it’s one that escapes the eye of blog and newspapers. The “We’re all gonna starve” script is simply more appealing, rich with its villains and heroes, its moral quandaries and complex ambiguities, its tales of oppressors and downtrodden, of profligate hedge funds stealing land from poor African tribes. In contrast, the mindboggling amount of food wasted each year can be boiled down to the eight famous words of American comic strip character Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I’m glad the Times is looking at this issue of how global climate change will affect our capacity to produce food. But the trouble is that the more food we have, the more we waste – and the more we waste, the more convinced we are that we need more of it. There’s nary a mention of this in the Times story, which instead rings a lot of the customary alarm bells (passages of which I’ve included in italics).

“There’s just such a tremendous disconnect, with people not understanding the highly dangerous situation we are in,” said Marianne Bänziger, deputy chief of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a leading research institute in Mexico.

Ironic that this comment should come from Mexico, where 70 percent of adults are either obese or overweight – the highest rate among developing nations in last year’s OECD study. Obesity, as a rule of thumb, is a often a good sign that as society is not making very good use of food, or of the elements that go into making food. It is not caused by a person eating too much, it’s almost always a function of a person eating too much of the wrong things – processed foods, red meat, and rendered animal fat (of course a lack of physical activity is key here). These foods are notoriously inefficient in their use of planet’s resources, because, as we know, eating grains ourselves rather than feeding them to animals and eating the animals would save an order of magnitude of resources. Neither in this story nor in the debate about food in general is this presented as a choice we make, rather a fait accompli that we have to accommodate by producing more food.

… food and feed demand was starting to take off, thanks in part to rising affluence across much of Asia. Millions of people added meat and dairy products to their diets, requiring considerable grain to produce.

The Asian miracle is also an oft-cited reason for the rise in food prices, and China is not without reason proud that hundreds of millions of its citizens there are eating more than they used to. What doesn’t seem to come up is that China is by some measures headed down the same nutritional dark alley that the United States is stuck in – 15 percent of children between 10 and 12 living in Chinese cities are or overweight, and more than half of those are obese. If the Chinese want to eat themselves into oblivion the way Americans have, then I agree with the gloom and doom predictions one hears about the world’s shrinking food supply. Given demographic and geopolitical trends, it’s hard to argue that a 12-year-old Chinese boy is not a potent symbol of the world’s future. What we are not contemplating is whether the Chinese – along with Brazilians, South Africans and Indians – who want to escape the malnourishment associated with poverty can make the choice not to enter the over-fed, overweight, diabetic middle class living on unhealthy quantities of corn-fed meat and poultry.

These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand.

Fixing a broken food system can’t simply rely on producing more calories. The system we have today provides so many calories to one growing minority as to make it sick, while systematically denying another growing minority the calories it needs to survive. The idea that this system will somehow be set straight by pouring more food into it is a bit like saying Donald Trump needs huge tax breaks or he won’t be able to pay the salaries of his army of minimum wage employees.

A wheat physiologist at the center, Matthew Reynolds, fretted over the potential consequences of not attacking the problem vigorously. “What a horrible world it will be if food really becomes short from one year to the next,” he said. “What will that do to society?”

Will we all die like pirates lost at sea, wasting away from scurvy, counting our last rations of hard-tack as we scan the horizon for signs of land? Or will we realize that we have more control over this than we’re allowing ourselves to believe?

Take the stairs!

I’ve discovered that most buildings have special devices that give you the exercise of a Stairmaster, only they simultaneously transport you from one floor to another.

People still look at me like I’m an idiot when I tell them I climb up the twelve flights of steps to our office instead of taking the elevator. It probably doesn’t help that I get into the office panting like a freak with a drop of sweat on my forehead. But I’ve managed to win over a few coworkers with a pretty simple explanation: it’s free exercise.

Modern existence has left most spending much of our days moving only our mouths and our hands for hours on end. We take great pains to avoid walking anywhere or doing any mild level of physical exertion. Then at some point we get motivated and join a gym, so can spend an hour or two making up for the previous eight to ten hours of ass time. I tried to think of a different want to do this – what if you could spread the exercise out over the course of the day?

Sure, I walk into work huffing and puffing, but I get to enjoy a slight tingling in my quads and a pulsing in my lungs as if I’d actually I’ve gotten a cardiovascular work out. The reality is I have, just a very small one. It doesn’t take more than three or four minutes to climb up all those stairs, but it leaves me with the sensation of actually having done something. This contrasts with the typical day that involves sitting in the office, sitting in a taxi, sitting at a press conference, and then sitting on the bus on the way home.

It also offers an alternative when you’re nodding off in the early afternoon. Those are the moments when I usually head for the coffee machine or go downstairs (in the elevator) to buy snacks. I find most of the time I do this I’m not actually hungry or sleepy, just really bored and needing a change of pace. Twelve flights down the stairs, a walk around the block, 12 flights back up, and I’m feeling a lot more awake. And with no snacks or caffeine.

I’ve started to notice the effects of taking the stairs. A couple months after I started this routine, I went on a hike with a friend of mine who was running half marathons, and somehow my lungs were holding up better than his. Friends started commented that I looked skinnier (I guess that’s not hard for me), even though I wasn’t doing much else in the way of exercise. A least a couple people in the office have said they like the idea, and talked about doing it themselves (mostly talk so far, from what I can tell).

Stairs can also teach you interesting things about buildings. Some buildings won’t let you anywhere near them. At my old office in Caracas I once stopped on the way out by security because I tripped a fire alarm by walking down the stairs after I got tired of waiting 10 minutes for the elevator to show up. Our Sao Paulo offices block them except in the case of an emergency. At a hotel I stayed at in Times Square, I spent a few days walking up and down the stairs, which involved wandering through service areas, walking past utility control closets and laundry rooms, nodding confidently to chambermaids as if pretending I really did belong there (eventually a staff member saw me doing it and told me to stop – seeing the fallout over the former head of the IMF I can understand why). My apartment building’s stairs serve as repositories for residents to stow whatever unwieldy objects like large packaging or strollers or broken chairs that residents don’t feel like leaving in their homes.

People sometimes ask me if taking the stairs is all part of, you know, that whole good-for-the-planet stuff I’m all into. Yes and no. Elevators do use a considerable amount of a building’s energy, and I like to think I’m reducing the number of elevator trips every time I take the stairs. The problem is that assumes that somebody else doesn’t take the elevator anyway – somebody might be pushing the button on the 12^th floor just as I walk past the bank of elevators toward the staircase. The elevator would travel anyway, without me in it, which saves a bit of energy but not a huge amount. Unless several hundred people in the building joined the Take the Stairs Challenge ™, you would probably not see a decline in the number of trips the elevator makes. I’m under no delusion that that many people would consider doing this (and am not really upset about it).

At my apartment I may be saving my condominium owner a couple bucks every year by walking, since there are a fewer elevator trips and I’m generally alone in most of them. But that’s not really the point. The benefit is to me. And I can’t even begin to imagine the benefits that the occasional stair hike could provide to millions of people with heart problems, clogged arteries, obesity, or circulation difficulties. Or to people who are just plain bored in the afternoon.

Oh my GOD – the world’s running out of food!! (Ok, not really)

Not a day goes by that I don’t hear somebody hollering about how human beings face an imminent shortage of food. The screeching headlines about this issue generally ignore what this FAO-commissioned study thankfully reminds us – a third of the world's food goes to waste.

People flock to the Malthusian tales of human beings heading toward starvation as the population cruises toward a staggering 9 billion people. It’s usually the key underpinning of arguments for things like genetically modified crops and factory farming, and is the basis of furious insistence we need to greatly increase our production of food.

It probably shouldn’t be too surprising that developed nations waste as much food as all of Sub-Saharan Africa produces, or that the equivalent of half the world’s grains crops go to waste. The report also aptly points out that large quantities of food in the developing world are lost because of inadequate harvest and collection practices and weak logistics systems that leave grain rotting in ports or warehouses.

As of about seven years ago, Americans threw around 15 percent of the food they purchased, while Brazilians threw away about 20 percent. Both of these figures have probably changed since then, but I would guess not by much.

In the United States, a huge amount of waste happens in fast food restaurants or 7-11 type convenience stores that have Big Macs or rotisserie hot dogs sitting under heat lamps that must be thrown away every certain number of hours to meet health codes. This is not meant to make targets out of those businesses -- they do this because customers expect them to do it and would complain if they didn't.

I’m used to a lifestyle in which I can buy an entire roast chicken at just about any hour of the day on a moment’s notice. That’s often left me wondering what happens to all the chicken that’s left at the end of the day that by law cannot be sold and in some cases may not even be given to the homeless. It leaves me asking myself whether making food available in that abundance is really possible without wasting a significant quantity of it. The truth is I'm not an expert on this, but my guess is in many cases it’s cheaper to throw lots of food away than to tell customers that there’s nothing left for the day. How much food do groceries stores and restaurants throw away in my neighborhood? What would it look like if they really wanted to cut down on food waste? What would it take to educate consumers about food waste such that restaurants wouldn't face a backlash from people who are accustomed to getting nearly limitless quantities of food?

Unfortunately, these sorts of questions are no match for dramatic tales of nutritional doom that are usually accompanied by an incessant clock-ticking countdown until the day we all starve. The debate veers back toward GMO, the struggle for land around the world, the sagas of agricultural conglomerates breaking new boundaries in crop yields -- all relevant issues, but hardly more so than 1/3 of all food going down the drain.

In this context, the less sensationalist why-don’t-we-quit-doing-so-much-dumb-shit-with-food approach doesn’t stand a chance. Looking it this way would involve more prosaic day-to-day recommendations for dealing with the food problem: shop for what you need, eat what’s on your plate, do refrigerator sweeps to catch food before it rots, think systemically about how food systems around you are unintentionally wasteful.

I’m glad to see the FAO trying to get people to think along these lines, because the debate so far has reminded me more of Lenny Bruce’s “We’re all gonna die!!!!” routine.

Can consumers lead businesses to change? Yes … sometimes.

Americans are convinced that daily consumption decisions are the most powerful mechanism we have for leading businesses to reduce their impact on the environment.

Where we spend our money is a powerful influence for change, but day-to-day consumption is by no means an election in which each dollar is a vote for or against a set of business practices.

I thought this was one of the most interesting conclusions of a book I just read called Four Fish about the depletion of the world’s fishing stocks and what to do about it. The author Paul Greenberg gives a detailed account of how human consumption of fish is increasingly dominated by four species – tuna, salmon, sea bass and cod – as well as all an extensive discussion of the vices and virtues of farming these species.

Greenberg also points out that people concerned about the environmental impact of fish have been given a litany of don’t-eat-this-eat-that-instead instructions that generally leave consumers confused and appear to have little effect on overall production or consumption of those fish.

In contrast, he points to one such effort that did work – a boycott of swordfish that included a coalition of key chefs and well-known restaurants that had the explicit goal of pushing the government to halt fishing in Gulf of Mexico breeding grounds for part of the year. Two years into the campaign US authorities closed swordfish nurseries to fishing, and two years after that the swordfish population had jumped back to historic levels.

Yes, consumers were crucial. But they were not the cause of the improved fish stocks, they indirectly pressured the government to take measures that improved the lot of the swordfish.

Greenberg’s point here is that a focused consumer-backed campaign that pushes authorities to take decisive action cannot be confused with a barrage of isolated “Don’t eat this fish” campaigns. I agree with this, especially since there are so many warnings about every purchase that we make, ranging from where we buy gasoline to what soft-drinks we consume. “Don’t buy from them, they do business in Sudan.” “That place doesn’t serve fair-trade coffee.” “That restaurant serves factory-farmed chicken.”

It’s too easy for so many commandments to get lost in the swirl of “thou shalt nots” that leave even the most civic-minded types confused about what to buy and where. To have a lasting effect, the economic vote-with-your-feet mentality needs to be channeled into focused (and probably limited) campaigns with clear goals.

Arabic: My back-burnered hobby, my unrequited love

My passionate study of the Arabic language for a good two years is now officially on the back burner. The good news is it sure was fun. And from time to time still is.

It was not a very good idea to begin with, I admit. I like to tell people that I started studying Arabic for dumb reason (no, not a girl) – because I read Ghost Wars. If you’ve read it you know why this is a dumb reason (it’s about the non-Arabic speaking country Afghanistan). The truth is I was generally interested in the language because I was reading a lot about the Middle East at the time.

What I didn’t take into account was the biggest pitfall to studying Arabic – the language evolved over thousands of years across thousands of miles into more than a dozen different dialects that are often mutually incomprehensible. The formal or classical version of the language is supposed to unite the different branches of it, but in practice nobody in the Middle East actually speaks it. Arabs of different countries often communicate in English in French. If you’re doing business in the Middle East, being a Muslim will probably open as many doors as speaking some halting Arabic. Oops, wrong language?

Maybe, but I got hooked pretty quickly. My favorite part was and still is the fact that it looks cool. This must sound silly to someone who grew up with the language, maybe a bit like hearing some say “Wow, check out these letters, A,B,C – cool!” Learning a new alphabet seems like the most daunting part of learning a distant language, but I actually found it was the easiest (it’s much harder, for example, to learn words that have no relationship to anything you’ve ever heard before).

I started out spending a couple months with a book and a set of CDs practicing how to write the script and doing some dictations. It sometimes felt like being on drugs. Trying to think in totally different characters made my head pound. It made my heart race. And it was addicting like a narcotic. For another six months after that I practiced with Rosetta Stone, until its predictable repetitiveness and its cookie-cutter approach drove me insane. That’s when I found Mohamed.

A Tunisian language teacher who had gone to Venezuela to teach French, he found there was more demand for Arabic and became the only game in town. He taught at more universities than I could count and worked absurd hours. I’ve never had a professor that was so enthusiastic about what he was doing. He would spend an hour writing Arabic on a dry-erase board in three different colors of markers to differentiate the root letters, the normally unwritten vowels, and the grammatical endings. For a bit over a year, twice a week, Mohammed explained the structure of the language in penetrating detail. I’ll never forget the first class we had; he stood at the board writing, talking, pacing back and forth, getting really excited every time I could more or less answer a question. He was so busy he didn’t even touch the cup of coffee I had brought him until it had gotten cold.

When I left Venezuela I basically left my Arabic classes behind, but kept studying on my own. I had several amazing instruction books that Mohamed had written, but I needed something that would keep the language alive for me. I chose a method that would likely make most language teachers cringe, but has helped keep the language in my mind since then even in the absence of formal instruction.

I made lists of words with the Arabic on one side and the translation on the other (I’m sure somebody out there already wants to say “No, no, no, never do it that way, you have to learn intuitively and never, ever rely on translation” – I’ll stay away from this one for now). I would carry them in my pocket and stare at them on the metro, while standing in line, or when I couldn’t sleep, figuring out mnemonic devices that would link a word with a pronunciation like “ha-ja-ma” with the English word “attack.”

I learned enough of these words that I could enter my training grounds – BBC Arabic. At first I could only get through the headline, but over time beefed up my news vocabulary by memorizing the Arabic translations for terms like “election” or “president” or “arrest.” For months I would stare at the words on the screen, parsing every letter and scrounging through the depths of my memory for the meaning. After a while I could get through the lede and first few paragraphs of a story, usually with the benefit of having already read the same story on the wire in English. It was a closed and controlled environment that gave me exciting experience of reading things in Arabic that had to do with current events in the Arab world. But what was even more exciting was when I got to the point that I didn’t have to pick through each letter because I had started to recognize words, which meant something truly amazing to me: I was reading in Arabic. It was a thrilling learning-to-ride-a-bike sensation, one I still enjoy every time I glance at an Arabic text (OK, an Arabic text related to a news story that I can relatively easily follow, but you get my point).

I spent months following the Yemen civil war at a time when the country was pretty well off the radar screen of Western news agencies – ironic because these days it’s headline news. Even back in 2009 when the world didn’t care, it was a pretty dramatic saga. The government of Yemen launched weeks of air strikes against the Shiite Houthi rebels in the north while simultaneously battling Sunni separatists in South. The Houthis at one point even killed a Saudi security officer in a cross-border raid, leading the Saudis to bomb Houthi positions in Yemen. In a bizarre twist, BBC Arabic reported the Houthis were recruiting Somali refugees to fight the Yemeni government.

When a Yemen-trained Nigerian militant tried to blow up a plane landing in Detroit on Christmas Eve 2009, the world suddenly discovered this nation existed.

In my halting Arabic, I followed stories in late 2009 and early 2010 that have long since been overshadowed by events in the region: the brewing Lebanon political crisis, the partition of Sudan, the Israeli siege of Gaza and bombardment of smuggling tunnels, Iraq’s almost year-long struggle to build a unity government.

I did have an ace in the sleeve: VerbAce, an incredibly thorough digital English-Arabic dictionary. It also helped that the stories were written in simple BBC style that made it easy for me grasp their meaning even if I missed some of the words.

But it had the perverse consequence that I always flocked towards stories that I knew would be easiest to understand, which were generally the ones about suicide bombings and predator drone attacks. They were always written in terse just-the-facts-ma’am phrasing with a structure that was almost always identical. I from time to time would stray into Reuters’ Arabic service, and when I was feeling really bold would explore the wilds of Google News Arabic, at which point I was pretty quickly drowning in local Gulf politics and inside baseball about Lebanese political coalitions.

The trouble was and still is that I can’t speak much Arabic. Without that element there’s very little social interaction, which turns the experience into a solitary exercise with little obvious social outlet. Actually learning to speak it is of course complicated by the multiple dialect problem – you don’t know which one you want to learn until you have an idea of who you want to speak with. Some cursory searches for an Arabic teacher in Rio didn’t turn up a lot of obvious leads (the main Middle Eastern community in Brazil is in Sao Paulo), and at the same time it didn’t feel right to be really studying Arabic while I was living in Brazil. The adventure started to feel like a path that I would never get too far along. Or, as I put it in one Facebook status update, Arabic started to feel like one of those women that always smiles but never gives her number.

I still flip through some BBC stories from time to time. I get some tweets in Arabic from an Al Jazeera correspondent that are fun because they’re short, they’re informative, they relate to current events, and I can sometimes understand them without the help of translation software. I’m not a likely candidate to get sent off to cover the Middle East turmoil, but it’s nice to be able to watch video footage of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or Yemen and be able to understand some of the slogans painted on signs.

So until there’s some obvious change of course, it stays where it is. It reminds me a bit of my decision in 2001, just after moving to Venezuela, to start studying Portuguese, for no apparent reason. I even spent a month in Rio in 2005 taking a Portuguese course and getting to know Brazil. There was no obvious upside for doing that at the time, but it ended up working out like gangbusters once I got a job in Rio. Arabic is so much further from any language I know that it seems less likely it will come in handy. But you really never know.

In Rio, it can be hell trying to reach Jesus

An idyllic trek through a tropical rainforest to see Rio’s iconic Jesus statue wasn’t supposed to include a non-stop drum of pumping helicopter blades or clouds of diesel smoke. It would be a much nicer hike without those trappings of industrial tourism -- but instead of yelling and screaming about it like a good outdoors elitist, I’ve decided to just find better hikes.

It didn’t help that I picked a beautiful sunny Saturday the day before Easter when everyone and their grandmother decided to go up Corcovado.

The hike itself is a nice 1 ½ hour walk up the mountain, only we were always listening to the thrum of helicopters. I think I would have felt differently about it had they been police operations to ferret out drug dealers in Rio slums. They were in fact tourists paying several hundred dollars for 5-minute jaunts with panoramic views of the city, which I was less sympathetic to. Eventually you reach the funicular tracks that carry tourists up on a train, and from there it’s a 15 minute walk to where the actual statue is.

Only once we got there we realized we couldn’t actually get in – you can only buy a ticket down at the city level. We could see bits and pieces of Jesus, so to speak, and hordes of people standing in lines, but getting in would have involved going back down the mountain and coming back up. No thanks.

We ended up walking back down for another two hours. The stretch first was along a road with no sidewalk where we had to duck vans flying up and down with tourists. Then we got to a circus scene of bumper-to-bumper traffic that stretched for probably a mile, packed with people trying to walk along the side of the road, covered in clouds of exhaust.

The system seems to encourage people to drive up to a mid-point and then take a van service the rest of the way up (cars are prohibited past that point). They could of course encourage people to walk up by actually allowing them to buy tickets, which they don’t seem to want to do because this would break the van transport service’s monopoly.

But some of this is simply capacity overload. There are just too many people trying to get up a mountain to stand on a relatively small platform overlooking the city. It’s such a monument to Rio that the city can’t maintain it as an exclusive site for well-heeled cariocas and jet-setting tourists. It’s a logistical problem that I don’t see an immediate solution to. My own problem with this experience has an obvious out – go somewhere else. Floresta da Tijuca, which covers a huge portion of Rio, has plenty of hikes to do. I’d rather go on one of those than holler about how access to Corcovado should be revamped so that I’ll like it better.