Trekking between nature and waterfalls

That’s what you can see after 3 days walking in the forest ! We decided to do some trekking in the Chapada Diamantina park (west of Salvador, in the Bahia state). This is currently not the tourist season because the monsoon starts. That’s means rain very often. But for us it was a good opportunity to go now and be alone on the trek, less hot and to be able to see water in the waterfalls (it needs rain for that !). That’s the point of view of the girls:

We walked 6 days in autonomy, sleeping in tent or in a cave. And it’s not so easy to organise the morning when your team is 8 persons in a small cave with all cloths wet from the storm in the night.

We found 6 other persons in the same age than us that also want to do this trek. Nobody already did it and many people told us to pay a guide for this trek as it could be difficult to find the way or dangerous. But we decide not to take a guide but a map, compass, my phone (with local GPS maps if we are lost) and half liter of pastis that I brought from France in case we are very lost. And that’s true that the path is sometime difficult to find, but sometimes even the nature don’t know which direction is the right one!

More pictures of the trek at the end of this article.

After the trek, we come back to the small village where we start from : Capao. It’s a little village between waterfalls and forest with organic coffee and some hippies hanging around. We like the place so much that we were hesitating about to rent a house here for a month. Finally we decide not to do and negotiate a camping for one more week. We are alone in the camping, we each have our hammock set up, lot of peace, quiet and time to do things. We live at the sun time: this last days we woke up at the sunrise (6AM) without alarm clock! This is also the opportunity to go a bit on internet to update this blog!

Next week we stay in the area of national park but we are going to another city where we plan to do rock climbing. After that, we were accepted to work as volunteer in a community of people building a village in the Rain Forest of Bahia (but still not far from the beach). On the web page, they said : “huge river to swim in, waterfalls, thousands of fruit trees, many of them wild. We also have a cacao farm and produce organic chocolate!”. They need carpenter (like me), musician (like Paula), cookers (both of us), handy man not afraid by hard work. Projects are bio-construction, planting and care of fruit trees, agroforestry / permaculture. I’m excited about to be there. We will go there on 1st of June and stay one month.

 

some pictures of the trek (more picture here):