As promised, I will keep you updated on the forest fires in Chapada Diamantina National Park in Brazil.

While hiking yesterday, I saw these fires from afar. Obviously, I wanted to get as close to them as possible. Who wouldn’t?

Here is a video with a few of my explanations.

Two corrections, though:

• Nothing was closed off. I saw some military police at the entrance of the park and apparently drew wrong conclusions from their presence, because I later came across plenty of hikers who had gone into the same direction as me.
• The information that nobody fights the fires at night was a misinformation I had received. Meanwhile I have had an opportunity to spend a day with the volunteers and they have told me that the fires are being fought day and night.

I kept hiking up the canyon, getting closer to the fires.

Ultimately, I got geographically close to the fires, but the problem was that they were up on the southern side of the canyon. Steep cliffs separated the fires and me, and I would have needed to climb almost vertical walls of a few hundred meters.

I actually did try to climb up the northern side of the canyon, figuring that I would have a better view of the fires from there. But I had to stop after maybe 50 meters because the vegetation got too dense. Also, the rocks were dangerously slippery because of waterfalls. But at least you get a video of forest fires and a waterfall out of this expedition:

On my way back, as it got dark, I then spotted the actual fires instead of only the smoke for the first time.

These fires looked very much alive and they flared up again and again. But despite the wind, they didn’t seem to cover a large area during the whole day. The fire was relatively stationary. But then, I saw columns of smoke in a lot of other directions across Chapada Diamantina.

(Zur deutschen Fassung dieses Artikels.)