From Sequins to Sloths: Northern Brazil for the Chronically Curious

When you are seeking that spark of life, you chase it. In our case, we followed a drumline north until the road ran out and the Amazon started.

Nobody tells you that awe is renewable, but you can still run out. We were living in São Paulo, a city I love enough to forgive its traffic, and I had reached the point where I could walk past a samba parade or a tree full of marsupials on my way to buy dish soap. The passport was getting stamps. The personal inspiration was not.

So we went north. No international flights, no visa runs, not even a single chat with an immigration officer about my handwriting. Just Brazil, doing what Brazil does best: reminding you to look up.

Salvador: the math does not work, and it happens anyway

Salvador, Bahia, is less a city than an exclamation mark with an airport.

Carnaval here is not a festival. A festival has a perimeter. This has roughly 2.5 million people in it, about 1.5 million of them visitors, moving through the streets behind trucks the size of buildings. The camarotes (the elevated boxes you buy your way into, which is the civilized way to do this) put you above the crowd with a drink in your hand and a view of a human river that does not stop for six days.

The soundtrack was Léo Santana, Ivete Sangalo, Alok, and at one point, for reasons I have never been able to reconstruct, the Squid Game theme over fireworks on the beach. It worked. Everything works there. The normal rules about what goes with what are suspended for the week.

If you go, book your camarote tickets early. We used Carnaval.com, which worked, but the real trick is deciding what you are willing to lose before you even leave the hotel. Not a burner phone for the story, but a real, honest inventory of what you can watch disappear into a crowd of two million. The energy is contagious. So is the pickpocketing. Both are running at Olympic level.

Lençóis Maranhenses: the desert that fills up

After six days of that, we needed the opposite of Salvador, and Brazil keeps one.

Lençóis Maranhenses is a few hundred square miles of white dunes that look exactly like a desert and behave like nothing of the kind. Wind carries sand inland off the coast and piles it into ridges. Underneath it all sits rock that water cannot get through. So when the rains come, and about seventy percent of the year's rain falls between January and May, the water cannot drain anywhere. It just collects in the valleys between the dunes.

What you get, a few months later, is a desert with thousands of freshwater lagoons in it. Blue, warm, clear enough to see your own feet. Then the dry season arrives, and the whole thing evaporates at up to a meter a month until it is a desert again, and the following January it starts over.

We swam, floated, and walked barefoot over ridgelines under a sky so wide it seemed to absorb sound. The sand squeaks underfoot. That is the detail I still think about.

If you go: fly into São Luís (SLZ) and get yourself to Barreirinhas with someone who knows the roads. Timing is everything. June and July are when the lagoons are full and the sand is still cool enough to walk on. By August, some of the pools are already shrinking, and by September, most of them have called it a year. Atins dries up first, Santo Amaro holds out the longest. If anyone tries to sell you a September lagoon trip, ask to see their definition of "full."

Anavilhanas: six days of the jungle not caring about your inbox

Then the grand finale: six days at Anavilhanas Jungle Lodge, on the Rio Negro, deep enough in that the concept of a notification stops applying.

The Rio Negro does not flow so much as linger. The jungle does not whisper. It runs at volume, in every direction, all night, and then hands you a completely different set of sounds at dawn. Time behaves strangely out there. Six days felt like two weeks in the best possible way.

We swam with pink and gray dolphins. We napped in hammocks. We chased rainstorms across the water. We listened for tapirs every single day and never saw one, which I have made peace with.

And we watched a sloth swim across the river, doing the world's most committed slow crawl with somewhere clearly to be. I have never in my life wanted to hand an animal a pool noodle so badly. I didn't, because you don't, but the urge was overwhelming, and Jay can confirm I talked about it for two days.

The food deserves its own paragraph. Fish steamed in banana leaves. A menu full of things that sound like incantations (jambu, cupuaçu, bacaba). Caipirinhas on the dock made with limes from somewhere within walking distance. I have eaten at restaurants with three times the pedigree and half the memorability.

Wildlife roll call: red macaws, boa constrictors, iguanas, caimans, howler monkeys, tarantulas, and one Goliath bird-eating spider who has been living rent-free in my brain ever since. I would like it to leave.

Magnus Waffles stayed home for this one. We missed him with every monkey screech, which is saying something, because there were a lot of monkey screeches.

What I would tell you

Do them in this order. Salvador first, while you still have the stamina, then the dunes, then the river. Going the other way would be a crime against your nervous system.

Leave yourself more time than you think between Salvador and anywhere that expects you to use your inside voice. Carnaval does not let you walk away at a normal human pace. I tried. My ears are still ringing.

And the bigger thing, which is the actual reason this trip worked: I did not have to leave the country to be astonished. I had to leave the part of the country I had gotten used to. Awe is not a place. It is a state of mind, and mine had gotten lazy. Brazil fixed that in about nine hours flat, starting with a drumline.

From Carnaval's chaos to dune silence to a river that hums, this one gave Jay and me back something we had misplaced: each other, our curiosity, and a pink dolphin or two.