By Anthony Chase

updated 10:00 a.m. ET May 15, 2008

Majestic deltas, magnificent beaches, and a festival that makes Mardi Gras look like a convention of accountants—just a few of the attractions luring European surfers and canny capitalist dropouts into the vast reaches of Brazil's sparsely populated northeast coast. Anthony Chase feels the heat.

By chance, I arrived in the harbor city Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará and the gateway to Brazil's northeast coast, toward evening on a Sunday. As the wide sun settled down onto the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people swarmed along the waterfront—on the streets, in the water, on the sand, across the four-lane highway, which had been closed to traffic for the Festival of Sexual Diversity.

I went out of the hotel, trying to make my way toward the distant source of the music and the pounding drums. The whole city was like a subway car at rush hour. You didn't so much walk as slither among the oiled and barely dressed bodies, the exuberant jostling flesh. I couldn't get too close to the central bandstand, but it didn't matter. As if in some medieval definition of God, the center of the party was everywhere and nowhere. Lured by the prospect of exploring the remote and relatively unpopulated coastline of northeastern Brazil, I had traveled several thousand miles only to find that I had been ingested into the emotional core of amor livre. On and on: the great droning bang and the throbbing of sticks landing on barrels and skins. It sounded African, as if the continents had drifted back together again.

I was experiencing agoraphobia and claustrophobia at the same time. Total strangers smiled and offered me food and drink and said hello. Free love, and free food and free drink, and free tokes of this and that … I gave up trying to maneuver, found an empty beach chair, and sat down. With my head beneath the seething surface of the dancing bodies, I felt relief. Like a barnacle in a coral reef, I let the sound and bodies wash around me.

Gay, straight, bi, drag, semi-drag—arm in arm the exhibitions of possible lifestyle permutation sauntered past. It was a chromosomal swarming. Every skin color. All ages. The whole genetic range. I lost the ability to find labels or categories for what was happening. Who knew? Who cared?

There was full frontal nudity. Or ostrich feathers. Or enough costume material for three operas at the Met. Some paraded. Others simply sat, applauding each new instance of the transcendentally outrageous. It was a musical ayahuasca. There were short sociopolitical harangues between the songs—"Por um mundo sem homofobia," "Não o sexismo," "Não o racismo," "Não o machismo"— which everyone ignored.

Eventually it became clear that the concert was giving way to a parade. Each of a dozen bands rode on a three-story-high platform built atop a tractor-trailer truck, which inched up the coast. The block-long rigs were draped in brilliant cloth, a motorized version of the chargers in the Middle Ages, dangling shields, blankets, trinkets, anything that could capture and intensify light. The side of each semi facing the audience and the sea was an amplified black wall of woofers, tweeters, bass, subwoofers that destabilized any tumors you might be starting to grow. The chair I sat in quivered underneath me. I skittered around on the sidewalk like a piece on a Ouija board.

One by one the sound flotillas drifted east. On each rig were not only musicians but handlers, hookers, lookers, lookers-on. There were whole city blocks of people dancing on the rolling trucks: bodybuilders with built bodies and no clothes but those Speedos; women with spinnaker chests; headdresses; spears—it made Mardi Gras look like a convention of accountants. I heard the reincarnation of John Bonham, who turned out to be an unassuming white guy in shorts, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap. His lower body churned out a stately backbeat, while his twelve-armed upper body whirled 359 degrees, letting fly. Somehow what he generated reached inside your rib cage. It was a mind infarction, like applying chest paddles to the groin.

This heartbeat throbbing was the world; it was real culture, a sound that amplifies, fuses people with one another, reassures. As this drummer set the songs going, women leapt to their feet and gyrated in the balmy night. They would dance with anyone, even a cadaverous loser like me. They grabbed me. They implored. When I replied in flawless Portuguese that I was there for ethnographic purposes only, they got over it fast. They handed me their babies, and everyone smiled. Babies slept in my lap while their mothers shook. It was actually quite peaceful, in a delirious way. Men were willing to dance, but the women had to dance.

When I fell asleep toward morning, I felt I had undergone initiation to life itself. Something had been cured.

Maps of Brazil reveal three north-eastern states that march horizontally across the country's shoulder: Ceará, Piauí, and Maranhão, all of which edge into the warm Atlantic just below the equator. The terrain is grandiose, magnificent, and complex. To travel in this New World is to see the America Amerigo saw. It looks and feels just as it would have five hundred years ago: wild, vigorous, open, and raw. There are lush tropical deltas, river crossings, and, most of all, beaches—mile upon mile of ocean and sand, miraculously uninfested by the commercial appetites of modern man. There are also poor farms, desert, the dry hinterlands that Brazilians call the Sertão. It is a thorny scrubland, its red soil baked as hard as a clay flowerpot. The parched heat seems to contribute to an almost permanent state of social distress. Periodic droughts have set off human stampedes of migration to the cities farther south; as much as eighty percent of the population has left in the past forty years.

Matthew Wakem Suna Por do Sol, a popular spot near the beaches of Jericoacoara (a.k.a. Jeri).

Before we set out from Fortaleza, Senhor Ramos, our guide, spread the maps on the hood of the Land Rover that would be our headquarters for the next two weeks. We were an affable, multilingual lot: a photographer from New Zealand, a photo assistant from Argentina, and me. With very little idea of what to expect, our team set out to cross six hundred miles of open coast. All along the way, we would be hugging the shore, which meant we had to travel by four-wheel drive and boat. We would make our way from Fortaleza to Jericoacoara, a beachside outpost of relative modernity that is but a tiny point in 250 miles of open sand, and then from there to the delta of the Parnaíba River, the third-largest delta in the world, to Lençóis Maranhenses, a national dune park of unearthly grandeur, and end up in the colonial city of São Luís, the capital of Maranhão. Looking at the maps, things didn't seem that far apart. But traveling overland had a way of taking longer than expected.

Acidilio Ramos, who was assigned to us by Trip da Areia, a travel outfitter based in Fortaleza, is as dignified as a Portuguese count, with the mild and courteous disposition of an old scholar or a saint. He said he used to be a butcher before taking up guiding. An adulthood in the sun has cured his skin to something approaching moccasin. He is as laconic as a cowboy in a silent western. A bird and the shadow of the bird crossed the empty coastline, a huge white form and its black copy. "Garças," said Senhor Ramos. A few hours later, during a water break, he stooped on the damp sand and drew the webbed feet and enormous six-foot wingspan, and we settled on egret as the English translation.

Jericoacoara appeared on the horizon as a great elongated barrow rising above the flatland and the even flatter sea. In the middle of a white-hot afternoon, it was a long, low isosceles triangle of earth whose flock-nibbled grasses were the color of Andrew Wyeth's Pennsylvania landscapes. The name means "Crocodile Basking in the Sun," and that is precisely the impression it gives. Clearly the indigenous Tupi-Guarani peoples who settled it, who named it, must have felt its insistent power. The sea, now a bright magenta color, with plenty of whitecap foam—and the sound of the sea—was everywhere. The vehicle startled a flock of gulls or egrets. They rose and scattered in the energized atmosphere, like thoughts or words or emotion. As we approached, an approach that had taken all day, three Brazilians on horseback went by. They were smiling as if the daylight were comical.

Matthew Wakem A sandboarder near Jericoacoara.

The village was splayed out in the heat, living its siesta life forever. No more than a tiny cluster of homes, the community is only four streets wide. There are no paved roads, no streetlights, not even docks for the fishing fleet. The fishermen leave their boats tilted on the sand like those in a Van Gogh painting. The Vila Kalango was located just inside the tight perimeter, and we dropped our bags in the sand courtyard and were shown to the semi-detached brick and straw-thatch rooms. In the past twenty-five years, a small colony of canny European dropout capitalists have established enough of an infrastructure so that now, along the waterfront for maybe a hundred yards, the scene resembles a transplanted Mediterranean resort from about, say, 1927. There are three or four outdoor cafés, a few seafood restaurants, a couple of nightspots for music and dancing. In the sand alleys are a handful of surf shops and sunglass kiosks, but during our visit in June, the off-est of off-seasons, there were hardly any tourists about.

I grabbed a rucksack, field glasses, and a notebook and headed out for a quick reconnaissance of the immensity beyond town. Almost without knowing why, I began to walk uphill. The grasses seemed frail from a distance, but when I walked on them, they were incredibly tough, sewn onto the surface of the sand like hemp, or even wire. There were narrow tracks that were nothing but sand, so in a short while, I felt the climbing in my calf muscles and the front of the thighs. Up. Up. Here and there were enormous boulders, then sand clearings and cactus and shrikes perched on them, staring. In 1984, reacting intelligently to the overpowering beauty of the place, the Brazilian government declared Jeri and its surroundings to be an Environment Protection Area, safeguarding the treasure for all time.

Just below the summit, I settled down with my back to a boulder to pull out the binoculars and enjoy a slow pan. Tracking quietly over the unpopulated rough, I almost missed them—a small flock of miniature brown owls with enormous yellow eyes. Guarding the mouths of their burrows, they stared right at me, unblinking, with a resolute intensity, a glare to keep predators at bay. It was a fantastic standoff, a visual showdown.

With no shade to interfere, the descending sun exposed every feather, the ear tufts as they swiveled to listen to me, the tawny yellow claws. Their shanks were a creamy mahogany, the bodies a duff golden brown. If I were to name them, I would call them prairie dog owls since at first glance they looked exactly like the rocks they live among. It was wonderful just to be in this strange company at sunset on the coastline of America.

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