Earlier this summer, on a trip to northeastern Brazil, I visited somewhere unlike anywhere I’ve been before. A four-hour bus ride from the steamy tropical city of São Luis took me to Barreirinhas, a sleepy fishing town. From there, I took a very bumpy ride on a 4×4 to reach the pristine white sand dunes of the National Park of Lençóis Maranhenses.
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This unique landscape of hundreds of thousands of acres of sand is bordered by thick jungle on one side, and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. The park gets its name “Lençóis” from the Portuguese for “bedsheets,” as the dunes look like billowing sheets when viewed from above.
Climbing to the top of the dunes was no mean feat for my unaccustomed feet, which sank deeper into the powder-fine sand with each step. The reward was views that looked like something out of a sci-fi film. When I visited in July, more than 35,000 lagoons that punctuate the seemingly endless stretch of dunes had filled with freshwater after the rainy season — creating perfect pools I was very glad to have a dip in after a day of scaling the dunes.
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Looking out at what appeared to be a vast white desert interrupted by glittering blue pools felt like being on another planet.
In fact, this isn’t a desert at all. It is, after all, on the doorstep of the Amazon rainforest. This UNESCO World Heritage Site actually gets about 50 inches of rainfall a year — more than double what falls in my hometown of London! Which, from the top of a sand dune in the middle of the otherworldly Lençóis, felt very far away indeed.
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