I took the 700 Bus which raced through the grassy void surrounding Brasília at breakneck speed, lurching violently as we took the sweeping bends, threatening to roll over! At the Rodoviária de Brasília I found a small Post Office and rattled off a postcard to my friend Martin McCormack before having an eggburger while waiting for the bus to Cuiabá.
We left at noon and sped along a seemingly endless black ribbon of road through the extensive sertão. A sertão is the "hinterland" or "backcountry". In Brazil, it refers to one of the four sub-regions of the Northeast Region of Brazil (similar to the specific association of "outback" with Australia in English).
Northeast Brazil is largely covered in a scrubby upland forest called a caatingas. Its borders are not precise. It is an economically poor region that is well-known in Brazilian culture, with a rich history and much folklore, something like the American South.
Because the sertão lies just south of the equator, temperatures are nearly uniform throughout the year and are typically tropical, often extremely hot in the west. I was under the illusion that it was always hot in the interior of Brazil, and so apparently were a lot of the other passengers who were dressed, like me, in T-shirts or summer short-sleeved shirts.
The night was cold with patches of fog and rain although in theory the sertão is distinctive in its low rainfall compared to other areas of Brazil. Because of the relatively cool temperatures in the South Atlantic Ocean, the intertropical convergence zone remains north of the region for most of the year, so that most of the year is very dry.
We passed rolling hills, grass, woolly trees, deep red earth and isolated farms. I curled up into a ball and dozed on and off as we travelled through the night.
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