The Seven Cities

There was one place that I wanted to go to ever since Francesca mentioned it at the start of our trip – a place I had kind of heard about since I was a kid. We travelled overnight from Fortaleza (scary bus station) to Parnaiba in the state of Piauí. Another coastal city, Parnaiba is much smaller than the normal cities we stayed in. With only about 150,000 population, from our first moment of arrival it seemed that the mosquitos outnumbered the people 100 to 1. There are signs everywhere in this part of the world warning against the dangers of malaria and dengue fever – both deadly common tropical diseases spread by mosquito bites with no cure. Not good. The trick is to dress smart at sunset and sundown. Long sleeves and pants, and wear plenty of mosquito repellant when out. Unfortunately for us, the pousada (Pousada Chalet Suiço) we chose on booking.com forgot to mention all the other ‘guests’ we would have to share the room with: ants, mosquitos, lizards, cockroaches and spiders. Gross.

Parnaiba seemed to be a one-horse town when we looked around it on the first day, but as we peeled back the layers, it seemed that it did have some life in it after all. We planned to visit 3 places whilst we were there – Parque Nacional Sete Cidades, Parque Nacional Lençóis Maranhenses and Parnaiba’s own Delta. We only made it to one of these…

Lençóis Maranhenses (a huge sprawling sand dune national park hundreds of kilometers squared) is only really accessible from the West side of the park, whereas Parnaiba is located East of it. This would mean a whole day’s travel, mostly by 4x4, including a night stopover. We decided to tackle this from Sao Luis, our next planned stop, on which we were pinning all our hopes of a visa extension.

Parnaiba’s own Delta was a trip we definitely wanted to do, primarily because of the famous red, or scarlet ibis birds that nest there. We encountered strong resistance to this plan, however, in the form of the total lack of tourist facilities in the area. There are no boats out to the Delta except on Saturdays, when presumably it is totally loaded with Brazilians all primed to snap the promised animals with their cameras. Any other day and you are on your own. Local boatman seem to be few and far between, and the tour agencies? Forget it. The only helpful agency in town is Clip Ecotourism, but they still charge the Earth for day tours – you can definitely haggle down, but we decided the Delta trip was not worth it, as we were planning on seeing plenty of wildlife later on in various places (dependent, of course, on the visa extension!). One agency we walked into, Eco Adventure Tour, on Avenida Presidente Getúlio Vargas, were so rude and unaccommodating because we did not speak Portuguese that we just left.

So, we asked the Swiss owner of our guesthouse about Sete Cidades. He helpfully told us all about how to get there, and he also had the bus station taxi us the tickets for the next day. From Parnaiba you have to travel two and a half hours South down to Piracuruca and then haggle with the taxi drivers to drive you the 20km and stay with you for half a day around the park. It is definitely too hot and too big to walk around – pay the extra for a taxi. And this place is worth it! Once we had also paid the $R50 ($US25) for two people to enter the park, we were accompanied by a guide who barely spoke any English – none of them do! The big mistake we made was not bringing enough water. We bought almost 2L, but the temperature soars to well over 35C in this region at this time of year. As a direct result of this, we committed in future to buying a water canteen.

Sete Cidades, or Seven Cities National Park, is a 24 squared mile area in Northern Piauí. It contains a small area (the seven cities) in which tourists can visit, within miles of rocky woodland. Driving into this place you pass some extremely strange rock formations – a taste of what is to come. The non-tourist areas are protected, of course, as there is abundant wildlife here, including rock cavies (mocós), jaguar, rattle snakes, tarantulas, marmosets and numerous birds, bats, insect and plant life. University students perform archeological digs also in the non-tourist areas, as striking evidence of indigenous peoples has been uncovered from up to 6000 years ago.

We teemed up with our guide and we all piled in the taxi to head to our first ‘city’. The cidades, or cities referred to in the name of the park are rock formations that the Portuguese believed were cities left over from an ancient civilization, or some alien race! It is now known that the formations were formed over millennia – by wind and rain. These interesting rock formations, caves and the plentiful wildlife, allowed the people from 4000 to 3000BC to live here. Each city consists of various numbers of rock formations, grouped together by proximity rather than anything else – and our tour began with the 6th city.

The taxi stopped at each city, or point of interest to allow us to get out and walk around. At the 6th city, we were shown rock formations that looked like turtles (tartaruga), an elephant (elefante), and some exceedingly strange rocks that were strewn along the way. This also gave us time to find out from the guide that a tour group that morning had to be cancelled as they had come across a rare black jaguar (a panther) while walking. I’m not sure how many were in that group, but our group consisted of our guide, Francesca and I. Excited and apprehensive, we continued on to the next ‘city’, city number two.

This next city would be covered in about 1 hours walk our guide told us. It was now about 2pm and getting very hot, so, concerned about water, we carried on. Here, we saw the ‘Arco do Triunfo’, a rock formation that looked like a library, and then made an arduous climb up a rock escarpment up to a panoramic viewpoint where we could see the whole park. No roads out here, all of the people living within the parks borders were paid/forced by the government to leave in the 1970’s. Now only park rangers stay here, protecting the park from poachers who trap and shoot the animals. From the viewpoint we could see we were truly in the middle of nowhere. No other tourists were there either – the other group no doubt had left satisfied, if not shaken, by their jaguar encounter!

After the panoramic view, we carefully picked our way back down the trail, and our guide assured us indigenous natives used this trail thousands of years ago! We paid little attention to this talk, awed by the sights, sounds and smells of the present, until we came across what really puts Sete Cidades on the map: 6000 year old rock paintings! These paintings vary in age, 4000-6000 years old, but all of them are fascinating to look at. Raised viewing platforms are placed in front of the paintings where you can stand – and we realized then that once Brazil has it’s shit together, this place will be swarming with tourists, and the department of the government tasked with looking after it, the UCF, will have to do much more to help preserve these paintings. Currently you can easily reach out and touch these paintings, or throw water on them if you so desire! The ones that have survived the test of time are the ones facing away from the sun, on rocks that face South or North, that also have a steep inclination to naturally protect from the rain.

The latest thinking is that the people who lived here used their handprints as a sort of family name. They did not have the ability to write, of course, and so used patterns on the palm print to indicate which family they were from. Various shapes signify different familiar objects; stick men are people, spirals is the sun, various animals are depicted, etc.. We now believe that the adults of this era had the mindset of modern children, and so the artwork is fairly primitive. They would have used minerals from the rocks mixed with animal blood to make the paintings. Geometric patterns are the oldest paintings, back then they could not manage to represent everyday objects. Dots are also formed alongside an object signifying the moon – we have now discovered that these are rudimentary (and correct) calendars.

Perhaps the strangest rock paintings are those done by the six-fingered family. Their signature lives on as proof of a genetic deformity that scientists believe was caused by incestuous behavior.

I remembered these strange rock paintings from a book I had read of my Mum’s whilst I was in school – Erik Von Daniken’s Chariot Of The Gods. Von Daniken asserted that these cave paintings were alien in origin. The spiraled helix was DNA, he said, and another pattern was of an alien face. Looking at them first hand it is clear the spiral is a millipede and the face is a leaf, and, indeed, Von Daniken is ridiculed in all serious scientific circles. Still, he sold a lot of books peddling that bull-shizzle.

The most famous cave painting here, and the logo for the park, is the lizard. This is 4000 years old, and is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. That and the images of the shaman that were also painted.

Another theory is that the Phoenicians came here way before any of the European explorers – back about 2000-3000 years ago. There is a symbol left that our guide assured us was the same as a Phoenician symbol meaning that they will return.

Next stop was the 5th city (clearly we were not doing these in the labeled order!). This city holds the most sophisticated examples of the rock paintings. Lizards, flowers and butterflies, all simplistically reproduced by some of the oldest known paintings on Earth (although even in Brazil, cave paintings have now been dated back to 9000BC – by none other than Teddy Roosevelt’s granddaughter!). There is even a map here – but it is not of Sete Cidades, and we are still trying to figure out where it is and what it means today.

We also visited two caves at city number 4 – Furna d’Indio (Indian Cave), and Gruta do Catirina (Catarina’s Cave). The Indian cave was were a family would have lived – or perhaps several families – this was were our Portuguese fell down a little. Our guide was doing a great job, though, struggling in the heat to give us as much information in a mixture of Portuguese, English and, bizarrely, German (like our Swiss guesthouse owner, there are lots of German speakers who live and visit this area). By this time our water had shamefully run out, too, so she was even sharing her canteen water with us. As far as we could tell, Catarina’s Cave was originally the tribe’s shaman’s cave. I found out afterwards that it was used in the 1930’s and 40’s by a man they call Jose Ferreira do Egito (of Egypt) who believed from an early age that he was to be beautified as a saint. He cured the local populace from this cave with his ‘miracles’ (almost certainly using herbal remedies from the area). However, he could not cure his young son (they say he was possessed by demons!) who died and is buried somewhere near the cave – no-one knows where. What we do know I that the holes in the rocks were man-made thousands of years ago for the generations of shaman to sleep in.

Also at city number 4 are other formations, called things like Kissing Lizards, the Map Of Brazil, the Indian Passage, the Easter Island Statue and the Solstice Hole (the sun shines right through it on the solstice only).

The third city also had some interesting rock formations in the form of Emperor Dom Pedro I, the Three Wise Kings, and some gaps were oratories were placed when more modern Portuguese lived here.

There is a natural spring water here were some of the off duty guides had bought their friends, but we could not swim as we had not brought our bathing costumes. Shame really as it was so hot!

The first city has rocks that look like canoes, a cave were the little furry rock cavies live, and a big maze of rocks that our guide told us we were not to enter. Apparently it is extremely dangerous because it is so difficult to navigate out of. There are poisonous rattle snakes and plants here. We were also shown copious amounts of mint, and carnivorous plants that trap flies using their leaves. Unfortunately, it was here that we had a little accident. As we were getting out of the car, I closed the back seat car door I had got out from. Our guide had exited the front seat and had foolishly put her hand on the car with her thumb inside the back seat door jam. The door slammed shut on her thumb and she screamed so loud, I’m sure it scared any rampant jaguars away for miles around!

I opened the door and immediately started applying the water we had stocked up on (the guide had taken us back to the visitors center as her water had almost run out due to sharing it with us). It looked pretty serious, but as the guide said – the hospital was too far away, so we should just carry on with the tour! Insane, but true. I still feel guilty about what happened even though it was an accident. I’m sure we will both be paying more attention when getting in and out of cars in the future – I certainly will, as this happened to me years ago on holiday – and my thumbnail went black and fell off! Gross.

The last city (the seventh for those keeping score) had one last cave for us to see (there is also a waterfall in one of the cities but we were told it was dry this time of year). This cave had many calendars in it – all scientifically verified as having matched the Julian calendar and it’s lunar cycles.

After this long day, we headed back in the taxi and luck was with us. The bus back to Parnaiba was pulled in and waited for us. We arrived back in time to get some money out and score some food, and slept the sleep of the tired.

Our last day in Parnaiba was pretty uneventful, we took a walk up to the river front but everything was closed for the midday siesta, or whatever they call it there. That’s a shame because there was some nice looking stores. The only place that was open was an amazing looking guesthouse that was filled with local art. All the rooms were completely empty, but they all looked amazing, and we lamented not staying there. Pousada Porto das Barcos. I hope we find somewhere like it as we journey onwards towards the Amazon!