Spangligese

One of the many valleys in the Chapada.  I have no idea if it's one I actually saw, but it could have been...

 
I left Brazil at 5:00 yesterday morning.  Post-Carnaval, Dan and I went east from Salvador to a town called Lencois, which is near the Parque Nacional Chapada Diamantina.  I haven't figured out a way to upload my pictures onto the hostel computers I've been using, which makes it almost impossible to convey how beautiful Chapada Diamatina is, but borrowing strangers' pictures might help.  (I hope to replace these pictures with my own as soon as I can upload them, but these ones get the idea across.)

That sand is actually tiny spiral seashells!

The first day in Lencois we hiked around the town itself and hit four different swimming holes, all of which came with attached waterfalls.  I went swimming in all of them and ended up with a pattern of sunburn streaks and swirls that came close to mimicing the sunset we watched the following night from the top of a giant rock outcropping. There are no real marked paths through the jungle, so we hired a guide, Yuri, who in addition to showing us around regaled us with pickup lines he'd learned from Ludacris songs.  ("Damn, girl, I really dig your lips!" was a particularly ineffective one.)  The second day we took a highlights-reel bus tour of the Chapada Diamantina's main attractions - massive caves with what our guide called "stalactits and stalagmeats," glass-clear ponds lined with microscopic seashells, and monkeys.

One of the more deserted stretches of beach

Our last few days we spent in Arraial d'Ajuda, a beach town where the elite go to look pretty.  It was almost impossible to get to (a bus to nearby Porto Seguro, another bus to the ferry to Arraial, the ferry across a narrow channel, a third bus to the Arraial town center, and then a taxi to our hotel) but worth it - thick "Lost World"-style jungle butting up on beaches with water the color of a blue rasperry popsicle.  The crowds, as always happens even in the most pristine places, clustered around the beachside restaurants serving beer and pizza.  Dan and I walked way past them, almost to neighboring Trancoso, and totally misjudged the sunset, as is becoming my trademark.  It turns out things clear out pretty fast after dark.

Brazil was, as my CouchSurfing host Bruno would make fun of me for saying, awesome.  (Apparently I say it a lot?)  That said, I'm kind of relieved to be in Colombia, if only for the language.  I don't speak Portuguese.  Like, not at all.  I developed this bizarre patois in which I would say the first word of my sentence in Portuguese and then finish in Spanish ("Onde está el supermercado?").  It was semi-effective at getting a response - except the response was invariably in rapid-fire Portuguese, which meant it was functionally useless.  Dan does speak some Portuguese, so we were fine while he was there (with the exception of a incident at the bus station in Rio, in which I tried to convey to the window attendant that we were flying to Salvador by flapping my arms and sort of making weird noises, doing nothing but make both him and Dan almost die of embarrassment), but once he left I was basically a deaf-mute.  That said, I had the biggest triumph of my trip so far in Porto Seguro, where I managed to track down a lock, a power converter, and an alarm clock in the main commercial district by, basically, going into every store that looked like it might have hardware or electronics, looking helpless, and pointing at my wrist a lot.  The joys of traveling can be unexpected.