The Pantanal Norte
South of the crossing, the SE-204 and SE-100 begin threading through a coastal world that most Brazilians have never seen and few can name. The stretch down toward Ponta dos Mangues is part of the Reserva Biológica Santa Isabel, a protected strip of coastline managed jointly by IBAMA and the Projeto Tamar, which has monitored sea turtle nesting here since 1998. The Reserva is one of the most important nesting sites for the Olive Ridley turtle (Lepidochelys olivacea) on the Brazilian coast, and 53 kilometres of beach within it are patrolled each season to protect tens of thousands of hatchlings. The beach at Ponta dos Mangues itself is wide, white, and almost entirely deserted — no bars, no constructions, no vendors. The headland where the mangroves meet the sea is exactly what the name suggests: an edge-of-the-world feeling, with the river to the north and the ocean to the east and very little else.
The road back along the SE-100 toward Pirambu passes through the Pantanal Sergipano — a coastal wetland system that has been forming for more than 12,000 years across roughly 40 kilometres of low ground between the dunes and the interior. It is nothing like its famous Mato Grosso namesake in scale, but in character it rhymes: flooded plains, mangrove islands, caiman, capybara, and an enormous diversity of birds in the reeds. The landscape shifts constantly — dunes giving way to restinga scrub, restinga opening into lagoons, lagoons narrowing back to palm-lined dirt roads.