Living in a megalopolis has its comforts, but the four-digit traffic jams (with the noise of three), the blackouts worthy of countries at war, the relentless verticalization, the transformation of parks into shopping malls for the nouveau riche, the feeling of permanent insecurity and the multiplication of destitute people on the streets make us numb like hell, as the poet almost said thinking about something else.
Given this, why don’t you drop everything and go live on the beach, in the countryside, open a guesthouse, like you once wanted to do? During the pandemic, this even seemed possible, and it was even possible to suppress the proverbial part, the inn.
Why don’t just you but so many people drop everything? Why don’t we do something even remotely close to what our desires indicate?
Well, these two comrades, despite maintaining a certain drive to control the imponderable, satisfied their desire to leave the insane routine of the capitals.
Guilherme Cavallari, 63, left São Paulo for Mantiqueira 12 years ago, but that wasn’t enough for him: he regularly spends months cycling, accompanied only by a small tent and some survival – and filming – equipment. He has been to the Andes, Mongolia, Scotland and Patagonia and has plans for Iran.
His trips have been turned into books and films, some of which are available on YouTube, but, more than just giving vent to an artistic and now professional desire, they are profound experiences, as he says, of self-knowledge.
In his incursion into Mongolia, planned somewhat imprecisely due to the precariousness of maps and GPS, and in which he feared not having access to the most basic of human needs, water, he had to abandon the introspection that he says always dominates his first days of travel.
He was embraced by the unbridled hospitality of the Mongols, who still live in a semi-nomadic way, in collective tents where privacy does not exist. The lack of a common language was not a problem.
Carlos Dias, 52, each year also invents an expedition in which he walks and runs slowly for thousands of kilometers. The entire length of the Transamazônica has just been completed, this clumsy road-metaphor of a country trying to “civilize itself”, dominate nature, a dystopian utopia, a vision of a future born old.
Since landing in Lábrea, an 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 total 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 trips out of necessity for survival, in this case perhaps even for subsistence, but there are teachings in their experiences that, apart from the will of the two, men who do not see themselves as fabulists or authors of moralistic books, can be absorbed by all of us.
The main thing about these teachings, I believe, is that it is possible to derail, to use an image dear to Guilherme, taking life out of the linearity in which it was supposed to be based, whether 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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