Presidente Figueiredo

Here, finally, is the post I was supposed to do on Tuesday.

On Thursday morning, I got into the car and drove (I wasn't the one driving) to this place about 120 km north from Manaus called Presidente Figueiredo. Well, I didn't actually go to the city itself, because the city isn't what's interesting about the place.
What is interesting about the place is that there are so, so many waterfalls in the area. I don't know why they're all there, but they are. And that's why I was there too.
I've been trying to go to Presidente Figueiredo (no, I don't know why it's called that) for months now. But I realised pretty early on that the two most practical ways to get there to see the waterfalls is to either go on a tour organised by a company that organises tours, which is quite expensive, or take a car and drive. So I'd been trying to find people who would go with me, preferably someone with a car, but if not then a group of people who could then rent a car, which I've heard is relatively cheap here.
But no such luck. It turns out that the students also here have no money to do anything fun, even though going didn't actually cost that much when someone already had a car. And since the rents here are so much lower than in Finland, the students here living off of the student allowance are actually left with more money after rent and bills than the Finnish student living off of the student allowance. And the food here is way cheaper. So I don't know.
Aanyway.
Back to the waterfalls.

We went to two waterfalls, because that's all we had time for in one day. But there are so, so many waterfalls around there.
this one is from cachoeira (aka. waterfall) do Santuário, from below the waterfall. I'd dug out a blog about the waterfalls before to figure out where we should go, and this didn't look so interesting in the fotos there, but it was a lot better in real life. That might also be partly due to the fact that the couple who wrote the blog went to see these later in the dry season when there's not so much water, while for us, now, the dry season is only starting. It's been raining a lot for months, and the water levels are right now pretty much as high as they get.

This one is from higher up in the waterfalls.
And man, I love waterfalls. Seriously. They're one of the best things. I mean, none of the waterfalls here are Wentworth falls (near Sidney, in Australia, I was also there at a time when it was flooding and it was absolutely amazing.)

One reason I love waterfalls so much (aside from them being pretty) is the sound they make. They make a very loud sound, but at least to me it's a really, really comfortable sound. I usually really hate loud noises, which is why I don't like crowded places, or bars (or cars) with loud music, or capoeira workshops, or vacuum cleaners. Too loud, too long. But waterfalls... Waterfalls are ok. They're great. Their hum is not tiring, or uncomfortable. They're just amazing. Their sound is pure and wild, and doesn't hurt the ears and doesn't tire the mind.
After having lunch there and taking a lot of fotos, we got back into the car and drove to the second waterfall.

We didn't even get all the way to the waterfall from the parking lot before running into something amazing. There were these wonderful caves by the path, and we got stuck admiring them and taking photos for a good while.

Seriously, wow. They looked like they were probably carved out by water, some time in the past, when the water has been a lot higher than it is today.
Or something. Either way, it was incredible.
Even if there were bats in the caves. Not many, though. Or maybe there were, but all but a few were sleeping because it was daytime. We only saw a few. It would have been worth going to that waterfall even if there hadn't been a waterfall, just for the caves.

Because there were a few other people at the main waterfall when we got there, we first walked down one of the paths leading down stream, because there was another waterfall there. Or I guess technically two, side by side. This was called cachoeira de Araras. I tried to get a better picture of both of the falls (the other one is behind some trees there) from below the falls, but I soon figured that I would need to be in the middle of the river to get a good shot with them both, so I gave up.

And then we headed back to the main waterfall, cachoeira da Iracema.
The blog I had been reading said that towards the end of the dry season this was excellent for a natural massage. I took half a look at it and thought "yeah, no." There was no way to get anywhere near that, not even mentioning getting under the waterfall itself. I could feel the faint spray from it on the shore, from where this foto is taken.

Here's a panorama (that I didn't know I could put up here, because I've tried and failed before, but decided to try again now, because really only a panorama can do this place justice, even if it is taken with the phone camera). You should open it as big as you possibly can. (I'm looking forwards to showing my travel pictures to the family once I get back home, because that means I will see this picture wall-sized instead of small computer screen -sized.

Another reason why I like waterfalls is that I think they are excellent in helping at trying to learn to use my camera. It's because all the water is moving, and that means that the exposure time of the photos really make a difference to what the picture looks like. So any time I see waterfalls I like to try to take pictures with different exposure times, to get the water to look a bit different, and that means I have to change the other settings too, to match the change in the exposure time to get a good foto. I'm not very good at it. Or any good at it, really. But I try, at the very least when I see waterfalls.

A third reason why I love waterfalls so much is the sheer energy that they carry. There are incredible amounts of water, crashing down to the ground after plummeting off a cliff. I can almost feel the power they carry, just looking at them, hearing the rumble and feeling the spray tens of meters away.
You know how they say standing on the shore of an ocean makes you feel small, because it's simply so, so much bigger than anything else? Well, I think with the same logic looking at a waterfall, feeling a waterfall should make you feel your weakness, because let's face it, the same way humans are tiny compared to a lot of things in the world, humans are weak, easily crushable and hurt, compared to a lot of things in the world.
But waterfalls don't make me feel small and weak in the face of the power that just appears in nature, all on its own.

The strength of a waterfall makes me feel strong, too.

~matu