Wednesday February 18^th ,  2014

Salvador, Brazil, 12 58.5S 38 30.0W 

Today's Blog by David (Time zone: UTC – 3.0 )

Fourteen intrepid sailors braved  6 hours confined in a minibus with laughable air-conditioning as we explored inland Brazil.  The state of Bahia is about the size of France so however far we might feel we travelled we didn’t really make an impact on the map.  We arrived in Lencois, which is in the middle of the Chapara Diamanti National Park – formerly an area where fortunes were made and lost among diamond miners of yore.   The state eventually banned diamond mining in 1996 based upon the environmental damage it was causing (and the fact that mining by then was not very successful nor remunerative to the state government).

Lencois is a tourist destination – we stayed in the best hotel where my room overlooked the river:

This is a beautiful area where the tourist attractions are principally walking to a remote spot where one can swim  or look at a cave full of stalactites and stalagmites.  The draw back in this is illustrated in the above picture – the terrain is hardly flat so the swimming or caving had better be worth it!

Well, you can rely on at least one 60 year old to go in search of his lost youth

Alan Brook (Sulana) arriving at the bottom of a “Water Slide”

The scenery was indeed beautiful,

even if there was rather a lot of it!

Plenty of wild flowers:

A Passion Flower rambling through the grassland

One of those flowers you often see in an expensive  florist and  whose name you can never remember

No trip to this area is complete without walking through caves and wondering at  the way stalactites and stalagmites are formed (Tites go up and Mite come down). The do form some incredible structures:

After so