Chapada Diamantina. This was my first trip in Brazil that didn’t involve a beach but to my surprise I enjoyed what nature had to offer me. If you’re into wilderness, hiking mountains, small towns in the middle of no where, random waterfalls, caves, and canyons then this is the place to go. The trip was sort of a mistake but everything ended up turning out well. It’s actually a funny story of how we ended up staying where we stayed during this trip. We stayed in a town called Lençois which is located in the northeast of Chapada Diamantina. Originally, we thought we were going to another Lençois (Lençois Maranhenses) which is a national park which has beautiful sand dunes with water lagoons all through them (check it out on google it’s really cool) however that is not at all where we stayed. After 6 hours of driving inland from Salvador, Bahia we arrived in this “Lençois” town that we had put in our GPS. It was a fairly old city, really small, and let me tell you that there was no sand dunes to be found. After looking for the sand dunes which we had envisioned in our minds and sort of making fools out of ourselves by asking the locals where the sand dunes were, we realized that we were 22 hours away from the Lençois that we pictured ourselves to be in. Why we thought there would be sand dunes in the middle of the wilderness and why we didn’t put the connection together that we were headed to the wrong place before we left, I’m not so sure! However, in our defense when we planned this trip we were in the middle of studying for finals and really tired but hey everything did turn out okay! Thanks to our mistake we were able to see some unbelievable sites such as canyons that we could see from Morro do Pai Inácio (first photo above), the Poço do Diabo waterfall, Gruta Azul (blue water cave), stalactites, and the Gruta da Lapa Doce (the orange formation above) and we even took our rental car off roading through the mountainous terrain. It was a great adventure. We went with no plans, no place to stay, and simply just rented a car and went. If I could go back in time I wouldn’t change a thing!
-Sincerely, Tish
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