Into the wild, again!
Trip Start
Feb 24, 2010
1
88
93
Trip End
Dec 12, 2010
Lencois, State of Bahia, Brazil
Monday, October 25, 2010
Next morning at 8:30am we were at the agency, ready to go. After about 2 hours driving we arrived at the beginning of the trail, walked a couple of hours and stopped at a yellow river for lunch. Surprisingly we learned we could drink the river water! Flor, the guide, was really good, even if he only spoke Portuguese. And he also was a very good chef, which we appreciated for the next 3 days.
The first day wasn't too hard, we walked another couple of hours before to reach the camp, stopping every now and then to enjoy the stunning scenery of the canyon and to take pictures of the million different plants and flowers around. We were also very lucky with the weather, it wasn't too sunny and it only started raining when we reached the camp. We had an amazing dinner and that night we slept like babies!
The second day was a bit harder, as we had to climb up to the top of Morro do Castelo, castle mountain, going up a very steep trail and crossing a big cave to get to the other side, and then climb again till the very top where we were rewarded with a nearly 360 degrees view on the Chapada. So beautiful!
We had to get down the same way, which was a bit hard on the legs, and from the bottom we had to walk about one and a half hour to reach the second camp. It was getting dark and we had to use the torch on the last bit of the trail. It was really cool to see the fire flies glowing around us in the dark.
Also that night we had a nice dinner and slept even better.
The third and last day nearly killed us, it was so hot, and we had to walk for 18 Km to reach the town of Andarai, where we would have taken a bus back to Lençois. Most of these 18Km were up hill and the rest were down steep hills. It seemed every time we were close to the end there was more to come. For the last 3 hours all we heard was "uma hora mais" (one more hour left)! Never believe guides about time! Definitely too long of a walk for being the last day, beautiful, but really tiring. Probably that was also due to the fact that we kind of rushed it to arrive in time to catch the bus..... which we missed anyway. We sat in an ice cream place for a while (obviously eating ice cream, and looking at our blisters) and finally we got a taxi back.
We spent another night in Joana's, with 2 more couch surfers from Austria who very kindly made dinner for all of us and taught Ian how to use the crochet needle.
The Chapada Diamantina and the towns in it are really worth a much longer visit. There's so much to see and do, and it's not hard to understand why lots of artists choose to leave there. Life goes by with no rush, and if you manage surviving with no Internet when the rain breaks it... well, you can have a really good time there.
