Next stop: Terra Incognita – 05/10/2023 – Zeca Camargo

Ah, how amazing it is to immerse yourself in Persian culture in Tehran. Dancing without commitment at the house of musicians you met on the same day in Havana! And what is the boat trip on Hvar to the blue cave?

Phrases like that easily come out of the mouth of anyone who has been to Iran, Cuba and Croatia. And I could just as easily reproduce them as mine, by the way, as I just did above. But I would be bluffing.

I have never been to any of these three countries. In fact, I don’t know about 80 of them, at least according to the list of nations recognized by the UN. Yes, I know, in my accounting, we are already 114 countries. It’s a lot, but there’s still so much left!

This number may be familiar to anyone following my adventures. For some time now, when someone asks me how many countries I know in an interview, the answer comes quickly: 114.

It turns out that since the pandemic, this score remains fixed. Until 2019, I always had the goal of including two, if possible three, countries per year in it. But then… well, you know what happened.

Since the borders opened, let’s say, slowly (my beloved Thailand, for example, was only fully released to tourists at the end of last year), I have already made several international trips. All of them, however, to destinations already known.

You’ve followed many of these adventures here, like the recent trip to Paris to celebrate my 60th birthday. And, excited as always, I may have hidden my… let’s call it frustration: that of not collecting new stamps in my passport.

Well, the winds will change. In fact, they are already changing! By the time you read this, I’m already stepping into what ancient navigators called “terra incognita”.

Maybe not so unknown, since I’m in a city that isn’t exactly at the ends of the world. (No, I won’t tell you where I am yet!). But everything in the next three weeks will be new to me!

In this list of unexplored countries, in addition to the three I mentioned at the beginning, there are dozens that I dream of visiting. Some of them are difficult to access, it is true, like Iran itself, which, if it is already complicated for a tourist in general, imagine for a journalist!

Severely conflicted nations such as Russia and, more recently, Sudan are out of the question for now. And destinations like North Korea, Yemen and Pakistan, to paraphrase Tolstoy when he writes about unhappy families, are complicated in their own way.

Then you have the most remote places, at least for us here in Brazil, like Nauru, Guam, Palau, names that Oceania’s waves bring to our ears with a mixture of enchantment and curiosity. But this is a region of the planet that I prefer to leave for the end of the list.

Here “from the side”, always looking from Brazilian horizons, we have “the Guianas”: the French, the old Dutch (Suriname) and the old English (which retained the original name, Guiana). As they are close by, I always think I can visit them at any time.

I have gaps in Central America (few) and the Caribbean (many), but I’ll solve that another time. And in Africa, well… I like to say, with pride, that I’ve already visited 16 countries on the continent. But when you remember that there are 54 in total, it makes you feel a bit desperate: are you going to close the account?

Well, I’ll get closer to that by the end of May. And I will tell you. Not now. Not as a spoiler. No, it is not torture, nor is it superstition.

It’s just the desire to, in the next few days, travel like in antiquity, before social networks entered our lives.

I will simply travel.

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