Day 21 - 26 Dec.2011 - Torres

Let us start by saying thank you for all your Christmas wishes. We hope you had a good one as well.

Now let us explain why we ended up in Vacaría. We came here in order to visit the famous Canyon Itambezinho, which we had believed was close to the city of Vacaría. As it turned out there is a place called Itambezinho close to Vacaría, however, the Canyon Itambezinho is somewhere completely different, some 200km away from Vacaría. In hindsight we could have driven down the coast and have a much nicer spot for our Christmas turkey. What’s more when we looked things up on the internet we discovered to our disappointment that the canyon is closed on Mondays. As there are other canyons in the surrounding area, we decided to drive to the nearby city of Cambará do Sul in hope to visit another canyon. To our surprise in the tourist information in Cambará do Sul we were told that due to the Christmas holidays the Itambezinho Canyon was in fact open. There were about 18km of earth road to get there. After about 14km we were stopped by another tourist coming towards us who said “Don't bother going there. It is closed”. As we got already so far we decided to drive the last 4km to the gate and see for ourselves. Don’t ask us why….maybe we were just to lazy to reverse as the road was quite muddy and our car takes ‘an elephant circle’ to turn. No joke, sometimes we feel like driving a tank. And so we got to the gate and guess what, the guard was there, we paid the entrance and drove through the gate. The guard told us that she saw indeed the other car just turning around some meters in front of the gate. It must be that he saw the barrier down and did not bother to drive closer to check.
Despite of all these it must have been written for us to visit the canyon today. And lucky us, what a spectacular place! Although it was partly foggy, it made the canyon and the surrounding forest even more magical. After about one hour walk we arrived at the verge of the canyon. What a great view! Just as if the earth split apart in front of us. We met a nice Gaúcho couple already at the car park of the canyon and saw them again here at the verge. We asked tem to take pictures of us and so we did for them. As it was already getting late, we walked back to the visitors centre and on top of it we were really getting hungry. At last we had our long awaited picnic with our bought salami from the other day.
When we left the park the fog intensified and at times we could only see a couple of meters. It was really a shame as the view would have otherwise been quite spectacular. Once we arrived at the bottom of the Serra Geral we realised that the fog was actually dense cloud we were driving trough.
We continued our way till we reached a small village south of Torres directly at the coast where we found a nice pousada to stay.
On our way we already saw a nice seafood restaurant directly at the beach where we had dinner. Regis, the owner explained to us that we had some sort of a small shark or so – we forgot the name though.