Day 8: a little bit smaller than New York…
Lençois is a small town ~250 miles outside of Salvador. It’s about a 5 hour bus ride. The city was built in the 18th century because people were looking for gold but instead they found diamonds. The 3rd largest diamond in the world was found in Brazil, today however, diamonds mined in this area are used mostly in industries, such as oil, for drilling. Fred described Lençois as “a little bit smaller than New York, just 4 streets.”
On our way to Lençois we watched a movie called Besouro, the Portuguese word for beetle. It was PHENOMENAL! It is a true story, that took place in 1924, about one of the most famous capoeira fighters from Bahia. I highly recommend watching it. It is in Portuguese with English subtitles. We also listened to a Reggae group out of Rio de Janeiro called Cidade Negra.
Before arriving in Lençois, we stopped to hike up Morro do Pai Inácio. The path is completely rock, so watching your foot placement was key going up and even more so coming down. I didn’t find the hike up to difficult but coming down I was much for careful and my knees started to ache. The view from the top was…there are no words so here are some pictures…
We also stopped in at the half way marker for the middle of Bahia. 
We finally made it to Lençois and immediately went on another hike, a hike up the cobblestone streets to our hotel because the streets are not big enough to accommodate our “Mariah Cary” tour bus.
We had the afternoon free and since we had been in Brazil for over a week and had yet to be in water, we hit the pool first.
The hotel was very nice. I shared a room with Anu, Naomi and Omenka. There were four twin beds and hot water for showers. Electricity is turned on by a key car attached to the room key, so you can only have electricity when you’re in the room. The hotel did have wifi but it didn’t really work in the rooms and connection was “in and out” in the lobby.
For dinner we went to Fundo de Quintal. When Clara plans day trips or weekend trips for student groups she likes to really utilize local places to help the local economy. Fundo de Quintal was an all you can eat buffet, that was mostly for our benefit since Brazilians don’t usually eat big dinners. Wasting food is also frowned upon, there was a R$ 10 fee if you wasted food.
Fred walked us through the main square, showing us shops and bars that we could check out. Lençois is pretty dead on Sunday nights though. Naomi, Anu, Alex, Angie, Iresema, Breana, Deidra, Veronica and I all grabbed drinks at a bar called “Bottegga” but were back at the hotel by 11:00pm.