Between one trip and another I also have this hobby of presenting programs. And, this week, I debuted in charge of another one, a kind of quiz show, with different types of questions. Including travel.
More specifically, at a certain point in the competition, I launch a challenge for people to guess the distance between a certain point on the planet and the door of the station where I work now, Bandeirantes.
Participants choose the categories: palaces, parks, churches, squares — and even ghost towns! I give some hints for the guess (and it is a guess, unless you have a GPS implanted in your brain) and wait for the answers.
They range from reasonable approximations to several round-the-world trips. We always have fun with the absurd guesses, but we are also surprised with almost accurate hits.
More than anything, and this, of course, I don’t reveal on camera, I am amazed at how much my own kicks (which I calculate only for myself) fall off target.
Someone who has already circled the world four times should have a little more experience to hit distances between two places on our planet, right? However, revisiting my adventures, some of which have already been narrated in this space, I realized that, if I participated in my program, I would not have the slightest chance of winning the prize.
When we travel, we are always concerned with these routes or even with the time it will take to reach a certain destination. Our anxiety overwhelms us with this precision and leads us to inevitable frustrations.
We want to arrive. We know where. But when? If you’ve ever left home on vacation, you know what I’m talking about. But do we need to suffer because of it?
I remembered a boat crossing I once took between Phnom Phen and Siam Reap, Cambodia. Leaving through the Tonlé Sap River and ending up in the lake with the same name, I didn’t even feel the journey of almost nine hours pass, such was the beauty of what I saw. Apart from the expectation of arriving in Angkor for the first time!
When I went on a 75km trek through the interior of Papua New Guinea, I got so delirious in the middle of the jungle that, when I threw my backpack on the ground and yelled at the guide that I wouldn’t take another step, I had to come back to reality taking face a slap from him (episode already told in detail in this column).
Psychologically, perhaps the longest trip I’ve taken in my life was by bus between Asunción, Paraguay, and Ponta Porã (MS). And the shortest, from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Auckland, New Zealand: 15 hours of flight time, a day I haven’t lived in my life (June 16, 2004, when I crossed the International Date Line), and paradise waiting at the final destination.
Driving back from Brussels to Paris after the bombings I witnessed in the Belgian capital in 2016 took forever. A honeymoon on Easter Island was just “a little hop”! Nine hours on a dirt road through the interior of Mali, on the way to Timbuktu so… I didn’t even feel it!
The great secret of an unforgettable trip is not to torture yourself with these distances. A train in India. A balloon in the Loire Valley. A walk in Chapada Diamantina (BA). A tuktuk in Bangkok. A motorbike through the rice paddies of Bali. A walk hand in hand in CaraÃva (BA). A teco-teco flying over Namibia. A van looking for Northern Lights across Norway.
Sorry, my geometry teachers, but when we travel, the shortest distance between two points isn’t quite a straight line: it’s your will to get there.
Here’s a piece of wisdom that won’t help you much to win a quiz show…
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