Brazil's landscape is most famous for its rainforests.

There he goes.

He's off!

But, its coasts are home to some of the world's most extensive dunes of sand.

From an urban dune field in the city of Salvador, to a vast dune system called Lençóis.

It's as though, I'm going to fall all the way down, but I'm really strong and I can move fast.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman, was provided by Agnese Haury.

♪♪ music ♪ ♪ music ♪ Brazil has the mighty Amazon River and seventy eight hundred miles of coastline, so it's not surprising that it has a variety of sand dunes, but among those dunes are some of the strangest and most remarkable in the world.

The dune fields in Salvador, Bahia are urban dunes right next to the airport of Brazil's third largest city of 3.5 million people.

You would hardly know that only a few kilometers away once grew thousands of square miles of tropical rainforest.

These dunes are protected, at least for the present and serve as an educational tool for urban students.

From this platform we can see the largest urban park in all of Brazil.

It's a vast system of stabilized sand dunes.

It's coveted by people who want to expand the airport and by developers, but now it's protected into a public preserve.

Most of these students have never been in this park before, although it's part of their city.

They thought that they had hiked a really long way when they came up here.

When they get on top and they look back and some of them live over here in this new sub division, others of them live in the wealthier parts of town here up north.

It's a real education for them.

(Portuguese) This park is my dream.

A dream to convert an urban dune system into an environmental preserve.

When you fly over this area, since we are so close to the international airport, it is so white that the sands look like snow.

The park is 6 million square meters in size.

One of our objectives here is to do scientific research.

We have ecosystems, never studied before.

These are coastal marine ecosystems.

Areas easily disturbed by nearby development.

As soon as we began to study the taxonomy here of the flora and fauna, we immediately realized the importance of this ecosystem.

This little plant grows so very slowly that it could be actually a hundred years old.

This flower, they call sempreviva, which means it's always alive.

This plant has died, crocked, but here the flower is still alive.

It looks the same as when it opens.

(Portuguese) When we conducted a fauna census of our preserve, we found 1,350 different species.

Many are migratory, such as the peregrine falcon, which arrives here in September, stays until May and continues the migration to Canada.

One of the animals that this preserve is best known for is the burrowing owls.

It looks to me as though this is a pair, male and female.

Just like in most owls, their heads seem to move independent of their bodies.

The ecologist tells me that this whole lake bed is full of tunnels that are made by the burrowing owls so they can connect all over the place.

Okay, so they've come over to this side now and they've got a little mound here so it would make sense that they could connect back and forth underground.

(Portuguese) We have eight perennial lakes here and several more permanent bodies of water.

The vegetation here absorbs most of the salinity content.

But right now because we're in the dry season, the level is very low but you get a different kind of plant activity and animal activity when it's low.

(Portuguese) These are fresh water lakes.

The brown color can be attributed to the substrate of decomposition that occurs over time in the lakes.

(Portuguese) So this lake is well known because it has a carnivorous plant in it.

It actually lives off phytoplankton, bacteria that grow under water but it is a real honest to goodness carnivore.

There it is, there it is.

That pink flower.

It is most unusual.

This is part of its meat eating system.

It's a carnivorous meat eating plant.

Here we have this tiny little ecosystem inside the dunes.

This is amazing.

These are bromeliads, we always associate these with big tropical trees.

They're tank bermiludes growing on the ground and inside they collect water and they'll be tiny little ecosystems themselves, but then they're here under these trees that are stabilizing the dunes and we must have 50 or 60 different plants just in the area of 10 meters or so.

(Portuguese) This is an ecosystem of restinga.

If we leave this system intact, it will revert back to a forest.

The strangest experience in walking the dunes here, is right here.

I'm actually in the dunes.

I'm between a dune on the left and a dune on the right.

Because the soil collects in here and doesn't get blown away, I have a little patch of Atlantic forest here in a vast dune field.

Nearly 1300 kilometers to the north in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, we find a strictly Brazilian fruit and nut tree that flourishes in sand.

This is the world's largest cashew tree.

It's not very tall, but it's 80,000 square feet wide.

It loves this sandy soil and it has the right amount of moisture.

This tree produces about 80,000 fruits a year.

It supports 1200 families directly and indirectly from the tourists who come to see it.

It's only fitting if I get to see this fabulous cashew tree that I go into an entrance with a cashew fruit.

These are the cashew nuts.

We all know those, but this is icing on the cake, it's the cashew juice.

It's fabulous.

It doesn't ship well and so it doesn't really leave Brazil in any great quantity, which is a shame.

To get it fresh, you have to come here.

Under the canopy the place looks like something out of middle earth.

The tree is 125 years old and it keeps sending out more and more branches.

It's hard to know where the central trunk is, but it doesn't matter.

The branches grow out and they produce more and more fruit, more and more cashew nuts and cashew juice.

The dunes where the cashew tree grows are white.

A couple of hundred kilometers to the north, the colors change dramatically.

The colors of the sand I see all around me range from red to glistening white and to understand this battle of the sands we have to remember that South America once was attached to Africa and it pulled away 60 million years or so, but the rock all around this region is still basically African rock and much of it is red.

The white that I see behind me is typical beach sand that came in from somewhere else, basically quartz, but the rock I am walking on or this broken down rock is red.

On one side of the dune system is the ocean that brings in the white sand.

On the other side is the Sertão, the vast outback of north eastern Brazil.

That's where the red rock probably came from.

It may have actually built up as sediments in the ocean and then lifted, but ultimately that sand, that rock came from the interior and here they meet and they mix and we get this wonderful separation of the red on top and as we go deeper we get more white.

Every once in a while, you walk through the dunes you'll come upon some scattered goat scat, rapidly being covered up by the wind blown sand.

The reason it's there, there's nothing to eat here, but the goats' water source is out in the Sertão, a long way away.

Their feed, the grass that they eat and some of it is watered by the ranchers, is back in that direction.

So they have to come back and forth back here, they have a route that they have selected.

Goats can go up to four days without water so they're very good at that but they know where it is and they know the shortest route.

There are a lot of goats around.

This dune field is known locally just as the rose dunes.

It's in an isolated area in the northern part of the state of Rio Grande of the North.

It's increasingly visited by tourists and tourists like to visit dunes and dune buggies and other kind of vehicles.

Fortunately for the dune system and the critters that live here, the state government is now undertaking the necessary steps to make it a protected area.

For the next dune system to the north, I waited till the weather cooled just a little.

The state of Ceara has a coastline of more than 500 kilometers, most of it sandy.

Early in the 20th century, people who lived near the town of Morro Branco on the coast here in Ceara, discovered that the colored sands that abound in cliffs nearby could be made into very pretty geometric designs, poured into glass and very carefully done.

They look like almost as if they are painted in there.

They're not.

They're actually sand.

Back in the 1960s, a very artistic woman from here invented a technique so that she could actually paint landscapes with the natural colors of the sand and from that discovery has sprung a large contingent of very talented artists who make these sand paintings.

There's a fundamental geological principle that if you see different strada, different layers in this case sands, that means the each layer came from a different place at a different time with a different chemical composition.

So every layer means different wind, different sea or different movement from the interior.

These layers were laid down, perhaps millions of years ago, but they're not very hard and the ocean is rising over vast periods of time.

It's taking away these beautiful cliffs and within the next few thousand years or so it will be cut back way inland.

We will no longer have these falezias here.

This is a little bit like going down in the Grand Canyon, it's a mini Grand Canyon at the edge of the sea but we're going down in time.

The sands of these soft rock gets older and older as we go down and I have no idea what the dates is, but I suspect every 10 feet we go down it's another 5 million years.

It's a job for a lot of people.

I like the natural colors better.

I find it very interesting, if they don't refine the sand you can notice the grains.

You can see the individual grains, that's right.

I think it's more artistic, almost like modern painting.

Yeah, and it looks as though it's not made by a machine.

Yeah that's right.

Farther north still up the coast of Ceara, is a dune filed set aside for recreation.

It's inevitable when you've got great sand, big dunes near a city of over 2 million people, you're going to have big time, dune buggies.

We'll see if we fall off.

In the Americas, there are several big dune systems, perhaps the most unusual is the one right here, because it combines the sea, the sand and fresh water.

It gets trapped between the dunes, so the water can't make it to the sea.

So the water collects.

It could be a good-sized lake or they can be just a small one.

Some of them, they are so impermeable to the motion of the water that the form permanent little ponds and you get a new ecosystem.

I think they've done this before.

The idea is to make it all the way to the water, we'll see if he can.

He has to paddle in the sand.

Splat!

There he goes he's off, retained his balance so far, takes terrific poise.

There are a hundred three dune buggies commercially, in this dune system.

You might worry if you're environmentally concerned about the effect on the dunes, but the wind is so powerful in the afternoon, it just seems to clean everything out.

They pretty well stick to certain areas and it makes for a great ride.

It's helped the economy.

It doesn't seem to hurt nature.

Good combination.

The driver asked me if I want to ride with emotion or without emotion and I said I want emotion.

Rapido, rapido, emocao.

Yippee!

Our last stop takes us to the very tropical, very muggy city of São Luis in the state of Maranhão, not far south of the equator.

On the way to the dunes, I have to find out about the unusual cultural history of this city, one of Brazil's oldest.

The city of São Luis or Saint Luis is the capital of the state of Maranhão.

It's only a couple of degrees south of the equator and the climate is hot and muggy.

It seems odd that the French would have founded a colony here.

It's on an island, but it is the only place with a natural harbor within 2 or 3 hundred miles.

(Portuguese) The Portuguese cities here in the north have this characteristic of the wealthy living up high, while the poor people live down low.

The high means their houses are more visible and they could compete with each other.

Down below, of course, they would be hidden.

The musicians here are poor kids from poor neighborhoods in one of the poorest cities in Brazil.

This is an attempt to make a social project to incorporate these kids into something meaningful that will keep them connected to the larger community.

The music is generally used to accompany capoeira, a martial arts form.

They're learning it on its own.

From São Luis it's about a three-hour drive east to the From São Luis it's about a three-hour drive east to the dunes, known as Lençóis, which means sheets because from a distance they resemble, well, sheets.

They are protected in a national park.

It takes a while to get to the park itself.

To get to the sand dunes we have to cross either an To get to the sand dunes we have to cross either an estuary or a small river, we'll find out.

They must've built the ferries without motors in them, cause they have to have a motor boat, a one banger motor boat push it across and then push it back, but it maybe beats the expense of having to install an expensive motor or pull a cable from each side.

It works.

The outfitters call this outfit that I'm riding in a pau de arara, which is a parrot perch.

I guess, because you're fit in like in this cage like a parrot and you have to find a perch and hold on for dear life and not get bounced around in the rough sandy road.

This vegetation is mighty scrubby even though they get 90 maybe 100 inches of rain a year here.

The problem that plants have is there is plenty of water.

The sand dunes hold water very well, but there's so much wind and the sand is so unstable, they get very big the wind will just topple them over.

So they have to hug the ground and the palms are real good at that.

They don't get very tall.

The palms have all these hundreds of roots that go out and they can hold on, as long as they don't get very tall.

Living in the sand dunes, takes a lot of specialization and it's not for really big plants.

not for really big plants.

's Well we're coming to water, there's only one of two ways there could be water here and that is if silt plugged up the bottom, because it's sandy or more likely, we've reached the water table.

So we're down here at a low point and the water seeps in.

It's fairly deep here, it's got to be that.

They can't have a stream here.

So this is one the famous lagoons in the dune system.

This is wet country, but the rain is concentrated pretty much from January to June and the other 6 months of the year they don't get much.

So it can get very dry here and these low areas below the dunes, dust blows in over the eons and it makes kind of a siltey, sandy soil and boy, can it get dusty when it dries out.

Oh man, we're going across a sandy area now.

I hope we don't get stuck.

These are the famous Lençóis dunes but they are huge, it's like they go on forever.

I don't know whether to plunge off myself, well I'm not going to get lost.

There's enough guys around.

It is just huge.

It's amazing.

I've never seen anything like it.

Now when you come up here on the dunes, you don't hear the roar of mufflers and the squeal of tires and shrieks.

All you hear, is the sound of the wind and if you get down close the popping of the grains of sand, as they keep changing the shape of the dunes.

Coming up the dune here, I can see that this is a classic barchan dune.

It's an Arabic term, but if you look at the edge here, you'll see that it's concave.

The wind is always coming from the east, which means it's uniform and it blows it into the center and then the edges are tapered.

So that you have something like a quarter moon here on the edge.

Walking on the top, this sand's pretty compact but if I step off the edge it's another thing entirely.

It's as though I'm gonna fall all the way down, but I'm really strong and I can move fast.

It's sort of like going down in snow, but without the grace.

This dune field is over 300 square kilometers in size.

That's maybe a fifth of the size of the state of Rhode Island and it has hundreds of lakes between the dunes in the wet season and that water in the dunes is fresh, pure water so pure, it's safe to drink it and you can swim till your heart's delight in any of them at all.

All these fields of sand from the sheet dunes of Maranhão, to the urban dunes of Salvador are located in Brazil's northeast.

It's a region not well known to outsiders, but if you like sand as I do, here you'll find dunes to your heart's delight.

Lake Superior is the largest fresh water lake in the world.

The drive around it is 1,300 miles.

I start in Duluth, Minnesota and head northeast to Thunder Bay in Canada.

After that, there are only small towns for 400 miles.

In Houghton Michigan with a little luck, I'll fly to Isle Royale National Park in the lake.

I hope I make it.

Join us next time In the Americas, with me, David Yetman.

One great thing about the dunes is the wind cleans them almost every night.

The wind comes in off the sea and bam and it cleans off the cliff and down we go again.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman , was provided by Agnese Haury.

Yetman , was provided by Agnese Haury.

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