Lençois Maranhenses

Walking through this desert filled up with sweet water lagoons is a surreal experience, its like being inside a Dali painting. The 80 Km long walk through Lençois Maranhenses National Park with flip-flops or barefoot through the different types of sand (soft, hard, swampy, humid, dry, loose and some other types), brings you across lagoons of all sorts of sizes and shapes. Due to the perpetual winds in the region, the dunes advance fast over what ever crosses it's path, forests and villages get wiped out, as if there was nothing there before. The wind has combed the trees for decades, now leafless and lifeless, some remain standing, petrified. That same wind shapes the sand, carving it in different directions like roads that lead to nowhere. Being in the middle of this mystical 1,500 km2 (580 sq mi) desert, is a unique experience, it changes drastically during the day. There's the biting ecuatorial sun, storms, lightning, rain that bounces in the sand, wind; and there is little you can do to protect yourself, there is no escape in all this vastness. You feel human again.