March 21, 2007
Day 539
Another area waterfall.
This morning, Ano, Oliver, and Rico (a Swiss guy from my hotel who has been living in Lencois for three weeks), and I decided to walk to Cachoeira do Sossego, another waterfall on the Riberao River, upstream from where I went to the water slide when I first got to Lencois. We picked up some food for lunch, water to drink along the way, and walked down the same track I had already been down twice before. When we got to the river, we found a path that took us upstream and followed it. The path eventually ended but that's where the fun began because we had to scale a series of rocks to continue upstream. At one point, we had to shimmy through some caves caused by falling boulders.
The walk itself was fun, but the reward at the end was even better. There was another large waterfall flowing into a large pool of water with lots of natural platforms for jumping into the water from as high as fifteen meters. There were a lot of other people also enjoying the place, but eventually that all left and we had it to ourselves. We made the two-hour return trip late in the afternoon and I was thoroughly exhausted when I arrived back in Lencois.
Almost everyone from our trek was out on the town tonight. Everybody seemed to have their favorite "secret" restaurant that served the cheapest food and biggest portions. This tour is becoming a second home for a lot of foreigners because the streets are safe, the beer is always ice cold, and it's next to a beautiful national park called Chapada Diamantina.
