Walking, like scratching, just start – 11/30/2023 – It’s Right There

Almost everyone interviewed by this blog guarantees that it is getting bigger and bigger

the number of people looking for some type of sporting activity in nature, and that groups are now available that organize trails of varying difficulty levels for all interested (and budget) profiles. But the truth is that we are still a long way from being a country that routinely enjoys its exuberant natural beauty.

Last May, the Ministry of Tourism pointed out that trips to nature or ecotourism were the preference of 25.6% of domestic leisure trips recorded in 2019, and 18.6% of international tourists. These percentages were celebrated by the ministry as the “highest index in the last five years”, as Fabiana Oliveira, general coordinator of Tourism Products and Experiences at the ministry, told the blog last May. But the assessment of Abeta (Brazilian Association of Ecotourism and Adventure Tourism Agencies) is that these numbers may not be that accurate, considering that the informality of operators in these segments is estimated at around 70% and the definitions of what is nature trips are somewhat vague and may include a weekend in a beach hotel.

The other day, talking to a friend, she told me with surprise that, traveling the TMB (Tour du Mont Blanc, the trail that goes around the highest mountain in the Alps, with 180 kilometers, and that runs through France, Italy and Switzerland), I met families along the way whose children, “imagine, 5 or 6 years old”, didn’t want to go home, they preferred to stay in the mountain ravines, with all their rabble-rousing, rather than return to the connected comfort of their homes.

If you live close to the Alps, the Pyrenees or the Andes, if you don’t want to go too far, you’re halfway there to feel, at the very least, the curiosity to see and experience what’s up there, go a little further each day high. But why wouldn’t this also apply to those who have at hand masses of forests, mountains and forests of this immense biodiversity that occupies the slices of the 8.5 million square kilometers that have survived deforestation in our country?

Many of those I have spoken to since we started this letter window tell me that they would like to go on a trail but…

…work, family, studies do not leave enough free time;
…they are not physically fit enough to face more rustic paths than the refrigerated boulevards of shopping centers;
…they don’t even know where to start, what equipment or clothes to buy, how to avoid getting into trouble.

So.

Let’s agree: no one needs to queue for Everest’s Hillary Step, that absurd corridor that every year is filled with colorful mountaineers waiting for a selfie at the top of the world, to enjoy the best that the planet has to offer. There is no need to suffer the risk of burns due to extreme cold, pretend that you are finding the lack of air in the death zone (that is, anywhere above 8,000 meters above sea level), blisters on your feet, back pain caused by the weight great. of an impossible backpack, even if only carrying the “indispensable” — water, cereal bar, camera and/or cell phone, those little things that, believe me, seem like random things until they settle on your shoulders.

The obvious fact that few consider is that every great adventure begins with the first step out of the comfort zone. To that same friend up there, for example, I confessed that on a Sunday morning, at some point in prehistory before the advent of cell phones, I managed to get lost inside the tiny Alfredo Volpi park, in the Morumbi neighborhood, in the south zone. of São Paulo, a few meters from where he had left the car parked. All because I wanted to take a walk outside the marked trails and ended up going deep into the forest without any precaution to signpost the path. Of course, I just took a straight line, because I knew that at some point I would bump into the railing that would take me to the exit, and no one would need to know, right?

Wrong. What’s the fun in living an adventure without laughing about it to your friends? Mico, we pay in good company.

This clueless person who got lost in a small enclosure of bushes is the same one who did the Inca Trail, from Cusco to Machu Pichu, who covered half of the Camino de Santiago, who climbed Mount Roraima, and who is, above all, passionate through the Amazon rainforest. Floresta, in fact, which he recommends and recommends again as the best tourism option to every foreign friend who asks what not to miss when visiting Brazil (for natives, I even recommend it too, but let’s face it, air fares don’t help ). Anyone who has never slept (or tried to sleep) in a hammock under a tarpaulin stuck in the trees, while the howler monkeys scream madly and bothered by their presence and all the mosquitoes on the planet come to see what the blood of fresh meat precariously wrapped in a mosquito net tastes like, doesn’t know what it means to be part of nature. And have stories to tell.

What is important to understand is that adventure sports can be for everyone as long as those comfortable sneakers stored in the back of the closet are given a chance. That adventures don’t have to be extreme, they can start in the nearest forest, in that park you haven’t been to in years, even though it’s just a few blocks from your home. And, to those who made this pile of excuses above, what I always answer is: take time for yourself amidst the madness of everyday life, even if some dishes pile up in the sink and the broom screams its indignation at being left unattended. side. Tell the family that you went there and will be back, they will survive your absence. Pretend you are studying botany while breathing in the green of your little adventure. And gradually see how your breath increases, how your legs ask to go further, how good it is to breathe some fresh air and how good, so good it is, to dream about your next goal, be it Everest or the peak of Jaraguá. Trust me, as the poet Fernando Pessoa once warned, “everything is worth it when the soul is not small”. And it is in the soul that your most fun achievements and your worst setbacks will be deposited. Let’s go there?

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