Modern Day Photo Booth

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Brotas!

So this past weekend, Ruth and I took a trip to Brotas. Brotas is well known for its raw, natural beauty and is a popular vacation destination for hikers, tree-top walkers, white water rafters, rappelers, and all order of land-and-water-based extreme sport fanatics. I was itching to spend some time in nature in Brazil, which I hadn't really done up until last weekend. And I really wanted to go to Brotas in particular because a previous Brotas trip of mine had been foiled by a mysterious sickness that made me want to sleep for 20 hours a day instead of trapsing through the wilderness and jumping off bridges and whatnot. Ruth had already been there and loved it, so we up and went.    

We left Saturday morning and did "canyoning" as it's called here on the first day. "Canyoning" is actually "rappelling," an activity that involves descending from a cliff next to/inside a waterfall using a big rope and a harness. It's very beautiful and somewhat scary; YOU are responsible for controlling the speed of your descent, and if you screw up, you can fall very far, very fast onto the jagged rocks below. It was also raining when we did this so all of the rocky surfaces that serve as footholds were very slippery, complicating matters further. However, we got a little training before actually lowered ourselves back first off the edge of a cliff, so I felt OK about it.

Badass photo. This was the 2nd waterfall we went down, 50 m (164 ft) high from the top to the water below.

   

So sexy... and so high up. The white splotch at the bottom is the guide holding the other end of the rope.

Getting gooshed with water is part of the experience (our guide dunked us all in the water below afterwards).

We all made it to the bottom! (We were with some random couple that happened to be paired up with us).

Saturday was a rainy day. During the canyoning it was pretty cold and after it was even colder...

Back at the campsite to dry off and relax. 

Here's us in the tent.

Obligatory kissy face picture. I didn't shave because, well, we were camping.

After a rather uncomfortable nights sleep in the tent, we went out and did white water rafting on Sunday. Luckily the weather was much, much better on Sunday. We even got a sunny afternoon to raft in and I got a little sunburnt. 

Our rafting crew. There were 4 or 5 other boats, all of which had DOGS in their rafts. That's right, dogs. Our motto was: "No dogs, no fear!!" (Ruth and the guy on the far right came up with that one. He was a card; went rafting and couldn't even swim!)

White water rafting, whoo!

Group shot! The raft was wedged on some rocks to get us all good and soaked.

All in all it was a very fun weekend. I feel like I satisfied my nature fix for the time being, and got some sweet photos to boot (Ruth made friends with the girl who worked at the agency and she hooked us up with photos for free). I'm actually going to use the first photo of me canyoning and a couple of the others for a Drexel co-op students abroad photo contest. I'll let you know how that goes.

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