Since all the stores were closed and I still had the car, today was going to be tourist day and I had spoken with Bjorn, the skipper of Susanne af Stockholm whose crew were off doing other things that day and he, too, wanted to see the upper rainforest and waterfalls. The day didn’t begin well with lots of rain constantly coming over the marine, but shortly before noon a window seemed to open up and we got into the car and headed towards the Carbet Falls in the national park. We were fortunate that the rains hadn’t hit that part, since the paths would have been inaccessible or closed had that happened and the constant cloud cover there opened up a bit to let us do our tour. The Carbet Falls consist of a set of 3 falls, the first (highest) was going to be a 3-4 hour hike, the second set is closed due to a landslide after an earthquake several years ago and the third waterfall is also closed for the same reason, but one can take the path to a destroyed suspension bridge and see the cataracts from there. This 20-minute walk wasn’t enough for us, so we took a “M”oyen (medium) difficult path to some destination 40 minutes away. The path got harder and harder as we climbed and our footwear wasn’t up to the task (Bjorn had boat shoes and I had sandals) but we doggedly kept on climbing, with the general idea of “we’ve gone this far so we shouldn’t turn back until we’ve accomplished something”. After an hour of climbing the trail I was tired and my shirt was soaked and I was regretting having my backpack full of lenses and camera gear and the tripod I was hauling around was getting very, very heavy. We encountered a sole hiker who told us that we were still a ways from the destination on the chart (which wasn’t anything special, just a hut to camp in should one get stuck in the mountains) but he said if continued just 5 minutes that we get to a break in the canopy where we could look down at the 3rd set of falls.
Naturally we weren’t going to stop climbing so close to a destination and we continued until we reached the break in the trees. After that we had the difficult task of climbing back down; which is a lot more work than going the other direction. But we finally made it back to the “easy” path after over 2 hours and then stopped by a restaurant (which looked closed but still had staff) for a snack. They said they would have a salad with chicken which was good enough for us and soon, despite being the only guests in the place, we had a regal meal made from local produce – coconut flavoured sugar cane chicken, Accra, yams, curried rice, and a Boudin.
Upon return to the marina both of us were tired from the hiking and full from the large meal, so after a couple of happy-hour beverages I was ready for shower and bed and not hungry for dinner. The reddish clay and dirt from the proved to be almost impossible to scrub off but it’s probably wear off like a henna tattoo in a couple of days.
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