Living in a megalopolis has its comforts, but the four-digit traffic jams (with the noise of three), the power cuts worthy of countries at war, the relentless verticalization, the transformation of parks into shopping centers for the nouveau riche, the permanent feeling of insecurity and the multiplication of the destitute in the streets numb us like hell, as the poet almost said while thinking of something else.
In this context, why not drop everything and go live on the beach, in the countryside, open a guest house, as you once wanted to do? During the pandemic, it even seemed possible, and it was even possible to remove the proverbial part, the hostel.
Why don’t you and so many people just let it all go? Why don’t we do something even remotely close to what our desires indicate?
Well, these two comrades, despite a certain desire to control the imponderable, have satisfied their desire to escape the crazy routine of capitals.
Guilherme Cavallari, 63, left São Paulo for Mantiqueira 12 years ago, but that wasn’t enough for him: he regularly spends months on his bike, accompanied only by a small tent and a little survival – and filming – equipment. He has visited the Andes, Mongolia, Scotland and Patagonia and has plans for Iran.
His travels have been transformed into books and films, some of which are available on YouTube, but, more than simply expressing an artistic and now professional desire, they are profound experiences, as he says, of self-knowledge.
During his foray into Mongolia, planned somewhat imprecisely due to the precariousness of maps and GPS, and during which he feared not having access to the most basic of human needs, namely water, he had to abandon the introspection which, according to him, always dominates his first days of travel.
He was seduced by the unbridled hospitality of the Mongols, who still live semi-nomadically, in collective tents where privacy does not exist. The lack of a common language was not a problem.
Carlos Dias, 52, also invents an expedition every year in which he walks and runs slowly over thousands of kilometers. The entire length of the Transamazônica has just been completed, this clumsy road-metaphor of a country trying to “civilize” itself, to dominate nature, a dystopian utopia, a vision of a future born old.
Since his arrival in Lábrea, the Amazonian border on the borders of Acre, and three months and 4,000 km later, when he arrived on the coast of Paraíba, he spent days and nights exposed to the beauty of nature, here and there still abundant; and immersed in the utter desolation and violence of illegal mining – his life came to depend on his ability to convince the interlocutor that he was not a “gambé”.
Gui and Carlão make their journeys out of necessity for survival, in this case perhaps even subsistence, but there are lessons in their experiences that, regardless of the will of either, men who do not consider themselves fabulists or authors of moralistic books, can be absorbed by all of us.
The essence of these lessons, I believe, is that it is possible to go off the rails, to use an image dear to Guilherme, by taking life out of the linearity in which it was supposed to be based, either because it was decided that way by our parents, or by society, with its uses and customs; or the absence of any honest attempt at self-analysis.
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