Day,40, 41and 42:Lencois to Capao: hikes, vistas, swimming holes and orchids

We left on our two day trek at about 9 in the morning. There were five of us for the hike from Lençois to the small farming village of Capão: our guide Jair, his wife Regina and an Israeli named Guy. We took the old donkey route from Lençois to Capão. Jair told us that it had been used to bring produce from Capão to Lençois as recently as 5 years ago. Only now, several years into the 21st century do the farmers use the highway to bring vegetables for the weekly market.

Our hike was very beautiful. We hiked up the mountain range from Lençois in hot, humid, sticky weather. We passed through high cliffs (again a LOTR experience) into a large canyon. We then hiked up to the end of the canyon. Jair and his wife were excellent guides, they showed us perhaps 6 different species of orchids -- this region of Brazil is home to over 100 different species of orchids. Our walk passed through grassy fields and deep forests thick with undergrowth and forests of rhododendron and hundreds of other trees and bushes we couldn´t hope to identify. We stopped roughly halfway through the hike to swim in a deep swimming hole. We also drank directly from the streams on our hike. This goes against everything we´ve been taught, but the streams are spring-fed from mountains with no people and no animals. Furthermore, we spoke with a group of people from Dublin who had done the three day trek, drinking stream water the entire time, so we knew we were fine. It is a lot of fun to drink directly from the stream, although this water was saturated with tannic acid, so in our water bottles it looked exactly like urine. It did not taste like urine, however, or what we can imagine urine to taste like.

Our hike was long. Before we left we were told it was 20 km. When we finally arrived (and it took all day in the hot sun) our guide admitted to us that it was more like 25+ km. We ate a huge plate of rice and beans and chicken at a small restaurant in Capão and stayed in a simple pousada. We were completely exhausted, falling asleep at 930. Capão is a very funky little town, its about 20 miles from the highway on a rough dirt road, full of farmers (they grow everything there: bananas, coffee, pinapples, manioc, mangos, everything) and hippies. We had a nice time eating breakfast in the square the following morning and watching the Sunday market.

Olivia also used her hand therapy skills that morning. Jair´s wife had fallen on our hike the previous day and hurt her arm. By the following day it was very swollen and Olivia was concerned she´d broken it. So, on a sidewalk in the central square of Capão she instructed her on edema control, tendon gliding exercises, and fashioned a volar wrist cock up splint from a cardboard box, a Swiss Army knife and some bandaging. We are going to stop by Regina´s ice cream store this afternoon to see how she´s doing. Brazil has public heath care, but from the casts and slings Olivia has seen, it looks to be using circa 1940s technolgy. We hope she is OK. Our hike with her certainly showed us she was a very tough woman.

After splinting Regina we met up with three more people who drove over from Lençois that morning. They were Martin and Ursula, a delightful couple from Zurich and Richard(?), a Japanese-Brazilian who lives in Santa Catarina (Florianopolis area) who was on vacation in Bahia. Jair lead the five of us to Fumaça (Smoking waterfall) supposedly the highest waterfall in Brazil. The hike was beautiful, we hiked to the top of a tall plateau and were rewarded with sweeping views of mountains and valleys in all directions. The waterfall was almost non-existent; the water falling off the 400 meter cliff did not reach more than 100-200 meters before being blown away by the wind. This "waterfall" is only a waterfall after a rain. The canyon, however, was magnificent. We all crawled out on a rock that looks a bit like a diving board, it extended a meter or two out over the canyon. Lying on our bellies we could look straight down over 400 meters to the pool far below. Beautiful, but somewhat of a stomach turning experience.

We ended our hike with a swim in a pool beneath a real waterfall. We drove back to Lençois in the back of a truck piloted by a tough woman from Sao Paulo named Fatima. We were happy to be back at Pousada dos Duendes and enjoyed a dinner of Brazilian Pad Thai (for Chris - and yes, he is the more homesick and missed Pad Thai and burritos) and ravioli with Brain and Emma (a couple from Dublin 4 weeks into a 1 year round the world adventure), Mark and Anna (an uber-London couple out traveling), Tanya (a solo Dubliner also on a round the world trip) and Olivia (the owner of the Pousada). We had a fantastic time.

Today we are chilling out in Lençois. We went to the Monday market, will eat hamburgers for lunch and plan on visiting Regina in her ice cream shop. We have massages at 5 with Dieter, a German expat in Lençois and then will take the night bus east, catching a connection tomorrow morning to a town where we will catch a ferry so that we can catch another bus so that we can go to a beach. We with then make our way north back to Salvador to close out our trip to South America.