Lili insisted on leaving the bus station and finding a hotel. I objected: “Let’s wait until the sun comes out.”
But she won. We had just disembarked in the city Piripiri, state of Piauí, after an overnight bus from Fortaleza. And now before the sun had even awoken, we were walking the dusty street in front of the bus station, where we had seen two hotels as the bus pulled into town.
She approached the first door and rang the bell. A few minutes later a man opened the door, and the annoyance on his face was evident. She asked about the rates, but the price was beyond our budget and he was not interested in negotiating at this early hour. And there was another problem: he would charge us for a full night if we checked in before noon.
So we headed to the second hotel we had seen. The doorbell must’ve been weak or the slumber deep, as no one came to the door.
We were disappointed, no doubt, but we knew we could avoid staying in Piripiri with a bit of creativity. Lili listened intently to my plan: “We’ll have to visit the park, and then come back to the bus station in order to catch another bus.” It would’ve been our second consecutive night sleeping aboard a bus, but Lili didn’t object. She pointed out one obstacle: “We need to find where to leave our bags.”
I wondered if the bus station had luggage lockers, that mythical service I had often heard of but rarely seen. And, though I can’t recall which of us asked, we were equally disappointed with the negative response. “I’m sure the janitor can help,” someone suggested. We looked at each other, worried but lacking alternatives.
It turns out our concern wasn’t justified. The janitor turned out to be young, laid back and helpful. Ten reais would suffice to turn his closet into our luggage locker, backpacks sitting next to mops and bleach. “Where are you going?” he wondered. I indulged his curiosity and he indicated there was an IBAMA (Brazilian Institute for the Environment) bus leaving at 7am from the town plaza. He had not only solved our current problem, but also answered our next question.
Lili, as always, wanted a second opinion, and decided to ask the moto-taxi drivers. They claimed that the bus, which would normally take both tourists and employees into the park, had been cancelled. They insisted that they were the only option to reach the park gates.
Naturally, I was skeptic. Lili and I talked in private and I explained my concern, but once again she won. “Who do you think knows more about transportation?” she asked me. I flashed back to past incidents, a few months before in the state of Pernambuco and the previous year in Mexico, where taxi drivers had lied in an attempt to secure my business. And, though the moto-taxi drivers would definitely benefit from a lie, I had to admit that the janitor probably knew little about transportation, even if he worked at the bus station.
She came to an agreement with them: they would take us to the center of town, to the plaza, and if the bus didn’t come they’d take us to the park entrance. The cost? Thirty reais. The day was slowly becoming expensive, and we weren’t even going to sleep in a hotel bed.
We reached the plaza in a few minutes, and almost simultaneously a pick up truck with the IBAMA logo pulled up, carrying a handful of employees. “Ask him,” the moto-taxi driver ordered as he pulled up next to it. Before answering, the two drivers looked at each other for a brief moment. “The bus service was cancelled,” he said. If it had been a lie, it was a very elaborate plan, but now the deal was made: we’d ride the thirty minutes to the park on the back of these moto-taxis.
When we got there the park was closed. We waited, talking to the old man who, alone, guarded the entrance. And he confirmed the news: the bus driver had died, and they hadn’t found a replacement. Thus the free bus service had been cancelled. Employees began arriving, some on foot, some in bicycles, a few in cars. A half hour later the same pick up truck we had seen in town pulled up, and the park finally opened.
Rogerio, our guide, led us through the twelve kilometers of dusty, dry trails. We had chosen to do it on bicycles; others chose to drive, the mandatory guide aboard with them. No one walked, not in this weather. This seemed like the hottest place on Earth, but it wasn’t even the hottest place in Brazil. (That dubious honor belongs to Teresina, some 160 kilometers away. Luckily, though our next bus ride would indeed be 160 kilometers long, we were due north and not southwest.)
But within the narrative of these hurried hops from one town to the next, we cannot lose sight of the reason we went to Piripiri in the first place: the Parque Nacional Sete Cidades. And I admit that prior to our arrival we were ill-informed and improvising, but we ended up discovering a marvelous place. We walked amongst rock formations dating back 190 million years. We bathed in waterfalls and in pools of cool, clear water. We imaged aliens visiting the indigenous tribes, extrapolating sci-fi theories based on the red painting on the rock walls.
And those rocks are precisely the highlight of the visit to the seven “cities”, each of them a unique geological formation that nature has created. The elements have polished them along the centuries, creating an elephant, snakes, a bookshelf and even King Dom Pedro II, among many others. Therefore, next to the sunscreen and the water, bringing along your imagination is vital. Squint your eyes and try to visualize…
“What about that one there?” I asked Rogerio, getting carried away in the guessing game.
“That’s the ‘rock of the secret’,” he replied, poker-faced.
“Secret? Why?”
“Exactly. It’s a secret. I can’t tell you.” He smiled, breaking his blank expression. It was a great explanation for a rock that resembles absolutely nothing.
