Riocha Cardosa

It was our last day of real vacation travel, with half of it taken up by the trip back to São Luis. It ended up being a relaxed river tubing excursion down the Riocha Cardosa river. It took about an hour of driving through the largely unpopulated cerrado forest to reach a place were we could begin floating down the river on inner tubes. We were joined by a crowd of mostly female senior citizens who were chatty and friendly.
No pictures unfortunately because our camera isn´s water proof. We stopped at the house of a local family that made us tapioca and coffee. I also for the first time ate cashew nuts that had been roasted by a human being, sold to me by a cute five year old girl.They were toasted unevenly, meaning each one tasted slightly
different.

The trip also took as past a bizarre bridge to nowhere put up about 15 miles from the nearest paved road. I took a fleeting picture of it  from the truck. It looked like it was made from poured concrete (did they drive concrete mixers for an hour across the sand road?) supported by 10 pillars. It does not connect to the sand road on either side, but does have a rickety hand-made wooden ladder leaned up against one side in case anyone wants to climb up and look around. The truck we were in did fine driving across what appeared to be a small wooden pedestrian bridge that went across the small gully that this Sara Palin-inspired work of civil engineering was attempting to span. Fortunately someone had taken advantage of the structure to set up a
small bar with a pool table underneath it. At least it was providing shade.