Paradise Lost

Today’s Daily Post is the following:

“Have you ever had an experience that was amazing the first time, but terrible the second time around? Or vice versa? What made it different the second time?”

My immediate thought was to speak of one of my Ex boyfriends 😛 But the experience the first time around wasn’t that amazing, so it didn’t fit the topic.

I’m actually going to write about a place in the Algarve in Portugal, that blew my mind the first time I went there.  This is Pego do Inferno.

It was beautifully wild. The only way to get there was to go into the wildness and climb and fall several times. We had to jump a big fence, from which I fell and actually got hurt. It has a waterfall that ends in a lagoon of greenish blue water. Except for the locals, no one knew where that was located. It was like paradise.

Then, one day this place was mentioned on the news as one of Portugal’s best kept secret and a must-see place.

A year after I went there again, already preparing myself for the change that I knew would have happened.  To get there, we no longer had to spend a lot of time with trials and fails. We would leave the highway and there were signs telling us where to go. There was a parking space waiting for our car, and then a huge stairway down to get to the lagoon.We no longer had to jump fences to reach the water.

The water was now a brownish blue and there were people everywhere. We no longer could walk freely without any shoes, because there was garbage everyone. The quietness was replaced by loud noises and also some radios that people keep insisting on taking to public places. We went away immediately.

(Before picture is the one on the top, the after is the bottom one)

It’s great that more people got to know this amazing place, but now it’s just a regular place in the middle of nowhere. No longer paradise.