The park itself does not have a lot of places where you could stay, but all of them are very neat and you have a spectacular view towards the mountains.
There are a lot of things to see around, caves are the main attraction, but I am sure there are people who would enjoy the local wildlife, swimming next to waterfalls or just taking forest trails.
The amount of various insects is incredible, wish I had a macro lens to show all those "fancy" caterpillars sitting on every log.
I also loved the amount of colours you get to see, the flowers make this place look amazing
Sometimes I had an impression that the local fauna is ridiculously big, I happened to see caterpillars that could not fit on my palm before, but that toad on the picture below was an unexpected finding at night.
Not only it had size of a football (almost), it also walked in a very funny way... yeah, it actually walked instead of jumping, and its gait resembled a fat drunk cat that is running in fear of missing another meal. This Jabba the Hut was hunting when our group first saw it and what it spotted was another ridiculously big representative of local fauna, a giant beetle that had size of my fist. I didn't have my camera when it happened about which I badly regret, because the next moment the toad tried to swallow the beetle and... the attempt was successful, just the beetle didn't care much about being in someone's stomach, it had a strong armor and most importantly, very sharp and strong limbs with which it started tearing the inner organs of the toad into small pieces, turning the toad into a fountain of blood jumping in agony. After several attempts the toad managed to spit the "victim" leaving bloody mess on the battlefield and the beetle just walked off dragging red lumps of toad's parts.
Miraculously, the toad survived and I made pictures of it on the next night... not an easy place to live, even your food tries to rip you apart when it's swallowed.
A number of frogs there is impressive, unfortunately I didn't have enough time to capture colorful ones
Waterfalls are not very tall but still spectacular
And a very tiny one:
We only had time for two caves, the first one was dry which means we didn't have to go in water, but it had a river inside. Essentially, those rivers have been digging the caves for thousands of years.
To get into the second cave you need to get seriously wet, the water inside is quite freezing and if you add darkness and water falling from top you get a perfect atmosphere of an alien world.
The surface of the cave walls sometimes looks really bizarre
What's more peculiar, some of those structures on walls can produce sound when touched, almost like strings and I know some Brazilian guy made a music from those, couldn't find the clip on Youtube though.
Overall, we had a really nice time walking in the caves, I've heard a lot of stories of cave experiments where people were left in the dark for weeks, about strangers getting lost when the caves were unprotected, in one of the caves were were asked to turn the lights off to actually feel the what it's like to be in a cave... I'll never forget this darkness and silence, like everything in the world just disappears, even thoughts abandon you as our minds get so confused... We also had a short cave orchestra made on those string structures on the walls. And of course I don't regret about ruining my shoes and pants in such environment.
In case you ever have the chance of visiting Sao Paulo, definitely think about PETAR park. And I thank the organizers of SPASA 2011 once again, it was a fantastic experience.
P.S. Sorry, but I might not post any more microscopy pictures for a while.
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