Roaring Earth

We left Rio and the Carnival while the fiesta was still going strong, flood lights blaring into the night, samba music pounding, cariocas dancing and performers boasting around. We landed a few hours later, with a strange feeling of emerging for a strange dream, our eyes dazzled by the bright morning sun, our dizzy heads still filled with the rhythms and the exhilaration of the night.
After a few required hours of sleep, I started packing everyone for our next adventure. Destination: Terra Ronca, in the Goias.
The next morning we left with our friends at the early morning hours. We drove about 300 km on a national highway:  a two-way single lane road mostly populated with heavily loaded trucks and interrupted with speed bumps at every village encountered, slowing our journey considerably. Making our way into out-of-coverage areas. At some point we turned onto a dirt road and headed further inland.

The conditions of the dusty road slowly degraded until we started progressing at walking speed. Earlier on the way, we had stopped in a trucker restaurant and purchased a CD of Martinho Da Villa, a famous samba singer and his music carried us through the pot holes and the bumps. The landscape was wonderful, both wild and tame, passing from forested areas to fields and pastures. We passed small groupings of a few houses, distanced by a field or two, away from the "main" road. Amazingly remote, yet all connected to the power line. I wondered how their kids could go to school.
Our journey culminated in an empty possada near a very sparse village, with a beaten up road cutting a few houses apart from one another. The road itself, at the center of the village, was so wide, so damaged, with pot holes so deep that it no longer looked like a road, but more like a dry bed river. And the houses along it looked lost, as if they had been separated at birth by a flood or something similarly dramatic.
Despite eight long hours our kids proved to be wonderful little travelers, in a good mood, relaxed and happy to travel. A few minutes after our arrival,  a good meal and a bonfire helped us forget the kilometers.