Chapada Diamantina – Happy Trekking

The plateau (chapada) of diamonds (diamantina) is a wonderful national park in Bahia, some six hour drive west of Salvador. The main town in that area is Lençois and this is where tourists stay during their visit to the huge park. If you go there, you should sleep in Posada do Alcino (Alcino's guesthouse) which is more of a home than a guesthouse. And what a home it is! (Check the photo gallery and some of my own pictures). And what breakfasts! My home cannot match that…

It was there where we met the ultimate guide for our trip – Tiago. For four days we travelled the beautiful park with him and a bunch of Brazilian tourists that made our trip so very enjoyable. Improvising on the famous saying of Will Rogers I hereby declare that I never met a Brazilian that I didn't like.

Each trekking day began with a breakfast that would put a smile on the gloomiest face. Then we would drive to our destiny of the day and start our trek. The highlight in each day was a waterfall or a cascade and the highlights of the entire trip were the bathing under and sometimes even going behind those falls. The exhilaration is hard to put in words. Regretfully, I do not have pictures from under or behind those falls so you will have to believe me that this is something that should be added to anyone's wish-list. All in all, a trekking experience that starts every day with an indulging breakfast, ends in a little paradise in the form of a guesthouse, and in between offers a terrific natural shower with no water pressure problems – is a happy trekking experience.

Enough said. Here are the pictures from each of the four days in the park. Put it on a slideshow, sit back, and enjoy the music (music is not included).

So here are the links to the pictures:

Day 1 - Along the San Antonio and Roncandor Rivers

Day 2 - Pool, Valley, Cave, Mountain - in this order

Day 3 - The Very Very Wet Mosquito Fall and the Paridas Rock

Day 4 - The Ribierao River, the Sossego Fall, and Ribierao do Meio

Rio de Janeiro – Happy End

We landed in Rio's airport one day before the Passover Seder. A taxi driver was waiting for us with a sign with my name in his pocket (where else did you expect him to hold it) in order to take us to Noam and Liliane's house. Noam is a dear Israeli friend whom I know from my South America trip 18 years ago. Liliane is his Brazilian spouse and in the last four years they live in Rio with their kids Yonatan and Amir. In the very last minute before they return to Israel, I finally managed to visit them.

Noam sent to us a special taxi driver because the typical taxi driver in Rio would not know how to get to their spacious wooden house that is located in the middle of the Tijuca jungle in the heart of Rio. Even that driver was on the verge of getting lost. The place is too surreal. Imagine living inside a large metropolitan where a creek runs just underneath your house, a huge steep mountain is located just in front of your porch, and toucans, giant butterflies and monkeys can be spotted from the dinner table.

Rio boasts stunning beauty. The beauty is in the natural setting of that city between the sea and steep mountains and huge rocks, not in its boulevards or edifices. I hope that the pictures below capture some of that beauty.

Apart from the lovely Seder that Noam led gracefully in both Portuguese and Hebrew, and a terrific night in Rio Scenarium night club, the special experience of those days in Rio was our visit to the Rocinha favela. Favela is a slam and Rio has something like 600-800 favelas. Rocinha is considered to be the largest one in all of Latin America. Estimates of its size range between 60,000 to 400,000 (our guide estimated its size to be around 250,000). We took a private tour there with an English-speaking inhabitant. Leandro, a soft-spoken and well-educated 28-year old, lead us safely through the various districts of the huge favela, and tried to shed some light on "the system" of the city-within-a-city, the daily life of its inhabitants, and the delicate balance between the official Rio down at sea level and the shadowed Rio on the mountain. Even though Rocinha is an upscale favela that offers conditions that are beyond the reach of those who live in nastier favelas, it still offered an eye-opening visit to the side of Rio that is frequently overlooked by visitors and almost totally overlooked, not to say suppressed, by the luckier Cariocas – The people of Rio.

Rio de Janeiro pictures

Hey,
Regards from Helsinki! I am visiting here my friend and colleague Aris (whom I know from the trek in India) for some research collaboration. I arrived here last week and will be back on Monday.

I restrict my blog writing activity to exotic places, and Europe and North America usually do not fall under that category. But I must admit that yesterday's experience was a "border-line" case.

It was the ultimate Finnish experience: Aris and I went to an authentic Finnish sauna, that you can see here. That sauna is among the oldest in Finland and the heat there is produced just by burning wood. The heat inside is incredible! But as it is produced by wood, the scents are wonderful. The routine is to get inside for 5 minutes and then rest outside for about 15 minutes, and repeat it 3 or 4 times. Inside, you can cool yourself by throwing cold water on yourself (it is still an inferno though, and each time the door opens and other men get in, they have the annoying habit of turning the knob of the oven that, as a result, releases a vent of hot steam).
In the second "cooling session" we sat outside. But I mean really outside, in the street, completely naked (with a towel around the waist) in a freezing 2 degrees night just like the people in the picture. We had beer (a local brand) to make the experience complete. I wish I could send you pictures of the men and women that come to that sauna. Lets say that they were representing a different strata of society from the one that we mingled with the night before when we went to see "La Nozzi di Figaro" at the Helsinki opera. 

To finish that evening comme il faut, we went to a Finnish restaurant that was very amusing (the interior decor includes tractors...) and I even liked the food. As you can see in the menu, it is not exactly a sophisticated cuisine. I had meat balls with mashed potatoes in brown gravy and beetroot - something that easily falls also under the category of American southern "soul-food". It was filling and tasty and that night I slept very soundly.

Hei Nahdaan Taas, (please forgive me for omitting the 2 diacritic points above each of the "a"s in "nahdaan"),

Tamir

Back in Leh

There’s nothing more fun than coming back to civilization after a long escapade out there. Seeing again the hotel room (with beds, shower and toilet!), the friendly hotel owners, opening the bag that we left behind and fishing out clean clothes, taking a shower, a haircut, a shave, email, calling home, indulging ourselves with simple things like chilled apricot juice or pecan cookies, sitting in a café and doing some people-watching, eating in restaurants, shopping (a lot) , and even taking an Ayurvedic massage… There’s no comparison between doing the same stuff before a trek and after a trek. La joie de vivre! 

The day and a half we had together in Leh was filled with a sequence of farewell meals in which we tried to find the best tandoori chicken in town. The next day, Avi, Anu and Bartek took off to Delhi on their way back home. So we said goodbye not only to Leh and Ladakh, but also to them. We were joined by Gary’s sister who came all the way from London to meet her little bro. She came right on time: It was the month of Sravana, and a full moon day. You know what that means, don’t you? Raksha Bandhan: This is a holiday where sisters fix amulets to their brothers’ wrists to protect them in the coming year. Mor and I were exposed to that beautiful tradition (think of it as the Indian version of Lance Armstrong’s Live-Strong) when we worked together few years ago. Prateek, an Indian friend who worked with us, got one day a package from India in which his sister sent him such an amulet to put on his wrist.

On Saturday morning, Aug 20^th, Avi, Anu and Bartek woke up in the wee hours to catch their flight. We woke up later, had our last breakfast with Gary and then boarded the bus that we rented in order to start our long way down to Manali.

And then there were seven.

The Leh-Manali road

Here’s what I wrote about the road from Leh to Manali in a letter of mine from my previous visit to this region:

That is a two-day ride, one of the hardest ones I took, but perhaps the most beautiful one. Before too long, the landscape becomes breathtaking. The highly curved, narrow and dangerous road took us through deep and uniquely carved canyons, roaring rivers, unbelievably huge mountains, low hanging clouds, picturesque valleys and what not. But the great finale was the best. We went over the last pass (after 22 hours of being squeezed in the bus) and our amazed eyes beheld the Manali valley. This is a sight that I shall never forget. One and a half hours before the end, we saw the entire valley in which we were going to drive during the rest of the journey until the end point of Manali. We were driving in an average speed of 25 Km/h so you can estimate the size of that valley. And what a valley! Huge rock formations, a wild river, cloud-covered peaks, trees hanging from the high edges of the upper rims, abundance of water falls (each one could be a major attraction in Israel), birds flying way below us, jungle-like plants and much much more. Other than glaciers, the designer of this valley put everything in it! Going down that valley reminded me the scene from Jurassic Park, where the helicopter descends slowly into the valley. However, I found the Manali valley much more dramatic and, instead of dinosaurs, we found in the bottom of the valley herds of Israelis that turned Manali into a completely Israeli town.     

Ever since that wild drive, Mor and I dreamt of doing it again, but with a privately rented vehicle so that we could stop whenever we want to admire the view and take pictures. Sometimes, though, realizing dreams is not the way to go. This is the world’s second highest motorable road, reaching 5328m at Taglang La. As that treacherous road carves its 485 km-way through the Himalayas, you can imagine that it does offer spectacular views. However, Mor and I agreed that the experience that we remembered from five years ago was far more intense than the current one. I guess that we were already saturated from all that we had seen thus far.

During the entire ride we waited anxiously for the dramatic ending – the climb towards the last pass, Rohtang La, and then the descent into the valley that I described above. The climb was, in fact, unbelievable and much more impressive than what I remembered. The road gains something like 2000m in elevation, up to 3978m in the pass, only to loose them again immediately afterwards when it descends to Manali (2050m). When our bus was struggling to survive the steep ascent I kept looking both backwards, to the landscape that was slowly drifting away behind us, and forward, on the vehicles far ahead that were toiling their way up the mountain like little ants, just like in Rachel’s poem. My excitement level increased with the elevation, as we were approaching the pass, thinking about seeing that valley again. But a huge cloud that rested on the pass shuttered my dream. From the pass there was nothing to look down unto on the other side. Only after 20-30 minutes of descent down to below the cloud, we could see again that spirit-lifting valley. I stand behind every word that I wrote five years ago. Seeing that valley is a fantastic gift that one can give oneself.

I should add, by the way, that I was wrong to write back then that that valley had all sorts of natural forms except for glaciers. On the way down, when we were still engulfed by the cloud, I was amazed to see that we were passing near a small glacier (or a huge ice cube). Last time, when the sky was clear, our eyes tried to swallow the views of the valley, whence we failed to notice that little glacier just next to us.

Next, you may find hyperlinks to some pictures from the road. The selection is lacking, mainly due to the bad visibility in the valley and a general listlessness of our tired photographer…

The inferno of the Leh-Manali road: Tar-covered workers from Bihar and Nepal struggling to keep the road open. Looking at those workers, I could see only black: the black of the tar, the black of the smoke, the black of their skin, the black of their sad and tired eyes, the black of their misery.

Manali and Rishikesh

Manali is a town that has no special charm to offer except for its location between forests, orchards and green mountains, and serenity. Indeed, hundreds of Israelis get stuck there for many days, weeks and sometimes even more, enjoying the peaceful nothingness. We did that too. We stayed there for 3 lovely days in a fantastic cottage, situated in an English-like garden, and enjoyed a good rest, good food (including falafel and sabich at “Falafel Yuda”), good haircut-shave-and-head-massage, good Taki card games, and extremely bad local ice-cream.

From Manali, we went on to Rishikesh – the “Yoga Capital of the World”. It is situated on the banks of the holy Ganges, in a tropical-like setting. It has many ashrams for those who wish to study yoga, meditation and Hinduism in general. Those who are shallower and less spiritual (e.g., us) can walk along the holy river and enjoy the parade of sadhus (holy men) with their foggy look in their eyes. Rishikesh, by the way, became famous in the 60s when the Beatles came to meet their guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation.

And then there were 6,5,2,1,none

Tonya was the first one to leave us, from Manali to Rajasthan on her way back to the states. And then there were six.

Todd left next, from Rishikesh to Delhi, then to France and back to San Diego. And then there were five.

Noa, Shai and Mor left next for a trip in Sikh country. So on the morning of Saturday, August 27^th, Aris and I were the only two that were left. We had a tête-à-tête breakfast on the roof of our hotel, overlooking the Ganges and its pedestrian suspension bridge. Then we took a taxi to Delhi. That evening we had dinner in “The Clay Oven” restaurant, where we all ate in the night just before leaving Delhi up north. Afterwards we wandered in the streets of the city that was celebrating the birthday of Krishna (just as it did in the last time I left Delhi in 2000) and then took a cab to the airport.

Aris left on a 1AM flight and then there was one.

I left two hours later and then there were none.

Shana Tova (Happy New Year) to you all.

Tamir