A journey of three years and four months since June 2021, 90 thousand kilometers traveled by car, 10 thousand kilometers by boat and 3,500 kilometers on foot. This is the basic account of Expedition 74 National Parks, which was completed by the São Paulo couple Dennis Hyde, a financial market economist, and Letícia Alves, a psychologist. A successful project that began to take shape in 2018, when they, looking for a different short vacation, went to visit the Serra da Capivara National Park, in Piauí, and, consulting Google Maps, discovered that there was a nearby large green mass called Serra das Confusões National Park, eight times larger than Capivara and about which they could not obtain any official information.
From the realization that, despite feeling privileged by the exclusivity of being the first visitors in a long time to that area, it was sad that it was unknown to most people, the idea was born of organizing a trip that included the then 74 national parks of the country —which at the end of the journey ended up being 75, with the creation of the youngest, from Serra do Teixeira, in Paraíba.
“It took three years to reach the format we considered ideal”, Letícia told the blog during the first kilometers of her journey. The first step was to buy the most comfortable trailer on the market, instead of a motorhome, which would not be able to access many of the planned roads. “Access is always very bad, even in the South, where the culture of this type of travel is more present”, explains Dennis. With the trailer, they would leave their “house” somewhere in the region, following the S10 4×4 pickup truck as far as it could reach and then traveling through the more rustic stretches on foot or by boat, a more common solution in parks in the northern region. .
The account above, it is worth highlighting, does not include the sections made by plane, to Serra da Mocidade, in Roraima, Fernando de Noronha and Abrolhos and Teixeira itself, which was in an area that they had already covered previously.
From this whole trip, it’s just not worth asking them which park they liked best. “It is impossible to answer this question, the parks are very diverse and difficult to compare”, says Letícia, explaining that the parks resulted, at the end of the layout, in something similar to a family, “they are interdependent, they only exist because the others they exist”.
Dennis says that one of the most important observations from the trip was that parks that are the subject of concessions to the private sector, which are the most established in terms of tourism, are the easiest to visit. “We see that, with the concession, we can have a better apparatus for ecotourism, service, a concierge, things that ICMBio, unfortunately, does not have enough people to provide”, he explains. And it suggests that the country adopt, in many cases, a model common in the United States, of granting specific services, such as restaurants or tours, but which do not require a large company to pay for everything, as required by the model currently in force in Brazil. .
As you can imagine, their journey was not just full of good times. In addition to many units being unfortunately unknown even to the residents of their surroundings, and lacking any information (much less offering infrastructure for visitation), in one of the Amazon parks, Rio Novo, teams from ICMBio (Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade ) warned that it was an area affected by the fight against illegal mining and logging, as well as the influence of criminal factions. “We went to the edge of the park, terrified, it was a very good road, but illegal, used by drug traffickers, and we didn’t dare take photos or activate the drone”, remembers Dennis. “It’s an area of lush forest, but with contaminated rivers and no State presence, conservation there is the least of the problems the region faces”, he adds.
There is no shortage of stories to tell and the couple tried to condense as many “stories” and images as possible into the eight-episode web series “Viagem Entre Parques”, which will be launched on the 21st. An exhibition is also being organized with the Semear institute with photos and videos of the six biomes visited, in addition to the marine and coastal area. The exhibition is still looking for a space, and the creation of an institute that facilitates the intention of making the broad collection of environmental knowledge acquired on site a way of life is also in the implementation phase. “We want to have a paid activity related to conservation, combining hunger with the desire to eat, not only to sustain ourselves, but so that we can visit the parks again, all the time”, says the former “farialimer” Dennis, who You can’t imagine going back to the old routine.
“I never say never, right, but it would be difficult, oh, it would be…”, he sighs. And you can understand why.
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