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After the pleasant stop at Vassouras we keep going upstream for more than an hour and finally we arrive at Barreirinhas. This town is a little bit larger than the last places we've visited, and now Vincenzo is happy again: the cell phone signal is strong and stable, at last! A lot of tourists come here from all over the world to enjoy the beauty of the Lençois Maranhenses, and we meet a group of technicians and cameramen of a German TV that are filming: they ask us for the permission to film us, and we gladly say "yes": we are happy to be stars of the German version of the Discovery Channel!

The Lençois Maranhenses: a real desert that had never been noticed by anyone but the local tribes until the late 70's. «Lençois» means "bed-sheets" because the first observers who saw this endless sandy surface from the airplane said that it looked like a bed-sheet!

The Lençois are a singular mix of dry dunes and wide lakes full of rain water which accumulates in there during the wet season (december thru june), to evaporate during the dry season. How weird: there are lots of fish swimming in these lakes. This has been a mystery for years: the lakes dry completely up under the ferociuos Brazilian sun, so how can fish "come back" during the next wet season? Scientists could not explain it, until they discovered that the fish eggs fall down to the lake bottom, and when the water disappears, the eggs dehydrate and wait for the water to fill the basin again.

The visit of the Lençois is our last tour with Arnaud and Valentine. They are on a hurry because they need to go to São Luís to catch their plane to fly back to France. But - as it often happens - we miss them and all we find is a message they left at our hotel reception with which they say "goodbye".

Next morning, we too go to São Luís, where we are supposed to stay three days. São Luís is a large city and it used to be a very important place when, one century ago, the industry of indiarubber was at its peak. Then artificial chemistry made natural

rubber almost useless, plantations were abandoned and São Luís lost its leading position. The downtown, though, still shows the signs of the ancient wealth, testified by the azulejos, painted tiles which cover most of the buildings of the old and narrow streets. Such tiles are considered as the symbol of São Luís, and they've been adopted to decorate even some modern facilities like the... traffic-lights!

No matter how beautiful São Luís is, we decide to leave straight away; the pousada we stay in is the worst place we've ever slept in: hot and humid, dark, almost claustrophobic, dirty, with lots of signs of previous... love meetings! In addiction, it's raining cats and dogs, and it seems that it won't stop for the next weeks. So we go to the office of TAM (the Brazilian airways) to anticipate our flight to Manaus... Next morning we are at São Luís airport and... surprise!!! We meet Arnaud and Valentine! The mysterious power of chance! There is not much time, but it's nice having breakfast together and talking about the things happened after we missed each other in Barreirinhas!

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