The Crack

While travelling with my parents we covered a significant number of kilometers, and while that number itself might not seem impressive, the hours certainly are.  Even the travelling on toll roads was not without cities, speed bumps, major pot holes and chains of slow moving trucks and no passing lanes.  Travel by vehicle here is just a painful process.  Add to that the overstuffed mini-minivan, bulging at the seams with people and "stuff" and it's enough to make even the most motion-tolerant traveler car sick.

DaddyHealy had it in his mind that with a  short detour on our route from home-apple country-beach we could make a swing and witness another amazing natural creation here in southern Brazil.  He'd seen on google this massive feature, which we call (for lack of the actual name) "The Crack in the Earth."  It is, in fact, such a site and so popular (he assured me) that google is littered with people's personal photos of its beauty.  Normally game for an adventure, I bought into this idea (before pregnancy and nausea were once again a part of my daily life.)

Not that the roads we'd been taking for the first 10 hours of this journey were anything we'd consider acceptable in the States, but there is not an anti-nausea medicine on the market powerful enough to overcome what we experienced on this little "side trip."  When DaddyHealy turned off on a random and unmarked winding mountain road, we were skeptical, to say the least.  When the gravel road turned to more of a dirt goat path (and if you think you've been on some poorly kept country roads, this would give you a whole new baseline!), the harassing really started
"...this had BETTER produce something that knocks my socks off, or you'll never hear the end of it."
  The usually self-assured driver, DaddyHealy started setting time limits on himself. 
"We'll drive for another 30 minutes, and if we don't find it, we'll turn around."
"...and go through all that again?! Are you crazy!?"

Mind you, this amazing and popular natural tourist attraction appeared to be so popular, we only passed one other car the 45 minutes we travelled on this goat path.  At this point, we were really having no mercy.  All we saw were very rustic homes and farms, kids with fishing poles and a small crowd surrounding a mini-excavator watching it work as if it's the first time they'd seen anything of it's kind.  Just as the next 10 years of harassment was setting in on his brain, DaddyHealy drove up a hill and at the top was, oddly, a little wagon/concession stand, and 5 or 6 cars on the side of the road.  Strange.  Around the corner we actually entered "The Crack" and it was exactly as we'd seen it on google, only more breathtaking. 

You can't really photograph something like that and grasp the surprise factor, or the enormity of it, but here are a few we took to try to remember it.

Although it'd been nothing but hot summer all through January, when we got out of the car at The Crack, we were surprised to find ourselves freezing!  The kids all wrapped up in their blankies and bore the cold bundled up.  This is the road we turned on to when we first realized we made it.

Grandpa, causing trouble as usual, by planting ideas in the kids heads "I want to climb up it like Grandpa!"

Our overstuffed mode of transportation.  My mom and I literally travelled the 14+ hours with a backpack or bag on our laps, beacuse there was not another nook or cranny to stuff it into.

We drove down to the bottom of the crack, and then worried greatly if the over-stuffed, under-powered Zafira would be able to climb back up, but thankfully nobody had to push.

In the end, we all enjoyed the little detour, the walk around, the fresh, brisk air, and DaddyHealy no longer had to worry about years of harassing about driving for hours in search of nothing.  But much to my dismay, I found out too late that the only way out was the slow, rough, and painful way we came in.  ugh.