The last few days I spent in Lençois visiting different sights of the stunning national park. The park is huge (1520 sq km) and has amazing waterfalls, swimming holes, caves and weirdly shaped mountains.
Lençois is a quiet pretty little town, apparently Jimmy Page liked it so much that he built a house here. In the past the area also attracted diamond miners who searched the riverbeds for the precious stones. Now - since it has become mainly a national park it attracts loads of tourists. Well, I could not quite experience that since it is - as I mentioned before - off-season and really quiet everywhere. The good thing about it is that in youth hostels I usually have the whole dorm for myself and that I meet many more locals - mostly the ones that normally work in tourism but now have little or nothing to do and are happy to have a chat or show me around. Also, our tour groups had most of the sights for ourselves. If you want to visit the sights of the national park you need to book a "passeio" (a tour). Some people also go on 3-day-hikes with guides and camping equipment but most people just go on 1-day-trips (lazy people like me :)
The 1-day-trips I did were really exceptional: I did not expect so many highlights and beautiful and extraordinary sights and activities (o.k., I did not go for the 400 m high base-jump, just looking down a rock face that is 400 m high was enough adrenalin - for the "irish" readers: just imagine the cliffs of Moher x 4, it is scaaary...)
I booked my tours with the agency "Chapada Adventure" and I was quite happy with them.
The first trip was filled with manifold attractions: We hiked along Rio Mucugezinho, which has - like all the rivers there - a reddish color due to the iron in the water. We went swimming in the "Poço do Diavo" - a spectacular waterfall with a huge pool of dark red water, swimming in pools of that colour took me a while to get used to.
Then we went cave snorkelling in the "Gruta da Prainha", which felt like being in a suspense movie, swimming around pitch black caves with only small torches to see the way, beautifully scary.
We visited the "Gruta Azul", the first cave with mystical blue light I ever saw. It comes from a combination of minerals in the water (I've been told it is "calcario, carbonato de cálcio, magnezio" and natural sunlight), it is absolutely beautiful.
We also did a short hike up to "Pai Inácio", a weirdly shaped mountain that gives a 360 degree view of even more weirdly shaped mountains (that is the first picture on top of this post).
After that we did a 1 hour hike through an 800 m long cave, "Gruta Lapa Doce", which is full of stalactites and enormous like an oversized cathedral.
And on the way back I fell asleep in the van :)
The second tour was a hike to "Cachoiera da Fumaça". I did not expect too much, just another waterfall, and was not perpared for what we saw there - the 400 m drop that I mentioned before. Pictures cannot capture the view down that overhanging rock, I'm not afraid of hights but this was something else...
The next day I took a tour break and went to explore the surroundings of Lençois with Elisabeth, a Swedish girl, who was part of the tour group. We went to "Riberão do Meio" a waterfall that has a 30 m long natural slide, good fun! On the other side of Lençois there is the "Cachoeira Serrano" with loads of natural stone pools connected by small waterfalls, very unusual and also great fun.
The third tour took us 150 km into the national park to the "Poço Encantado". It is the most spectacular of all the blue-light caves (see the first picture of the webalbum at the end of this post). It is 60 m deep and the water is so clear and lit up by sunlight that you can actually see the ground! It is surreal and beautiful.
As the second highlight of the day we went to another blue-light cave that you are allowed to snorkel in. It is "only" 40 m deep and you can also see right down to the ground with all its strange underwater rock formations and the blue light coming in through the hole above the cave. Looks like an underwater laser show... I won't say more, just look at the pictures here:
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