In 2018, the couple Letícia Alves, 37, a psychologist, and Dennis Hyde, 42, a financial market economist, were planning a short two-week vacation and decided to visit Serra da Capivara National Park, one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. country, in the state of Piauí. To take advantage of the trip, they decided to study on Google Maps what else they could see in the surroundings — and discovered a huge green mass called Serra das Confusãos National Park, eight times larger than the Capybara area and about which they could not locate any official information. .
“We started researching on blogs, social networks, and little by little we gathered information and decided that the space deserved to be visited”, says Letícia. Arriving there, they hired a woodsman who would accompany them through the park’s trails, and said that they were the only visitors who had arrived there in a long time.
“We went from the good impression of exclusivity to the bad impression of such an important space not being known, and we decided that something had to be done”, adds the psychologist. This is how the Expedition 74 National Parks project began, which has the goal, as the name implies, of registering all PNs in the country by 2024.
“It took three years to reach the format that we consider ideal”, says Letícia. The first step was to buy the most comfortable trailer on the market, instead of a motorhome, which would not be able to enter 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 leave the “house” somewhere in the region, following with the S10 4×4 truck as far as it can get, and then going through the more rustic parts on foot.
Since leaving São Paulo, in June 2021, the couple has visited 32 parks, around 40,000 kilometers on foot and no less than 1,594 kilometers on foot — no, Dennis has not forgotten what he calls his “farialimer” side, in an allusion to the office where he worked on the sophisticated Avenida Faria Lima, in São Paulo, and maintains a detailed updated spreadsheet with all the journeys and discoveries made by the two.
Sustaining the trip with the couple’s own savings, the planning of each segment is essential, and has already led them to exchange the first luxurious trailer for a smaller, simpler, but also more suitable for the difficult paths they find.
“Sometimes we got to dead ends and it was very difficult to get around with a huge trailer, with this smaller one we can even turn it by hand, just by releasing it from the S10”, he explains. In addition to practicality, the exchange allowed them to further capitalize on the couple’s savings, and save on fuel, which Dennis points out represents 30% of all their costs.
“We face this project as if it were a master’s degree in life, that’s how we prepared”, says Letícia, “and our inspiration is the great naturalists of the past, who had in their great expeditions the initial and fundamental part of their learning” .
“Of course, we are very aware of our privilege to be able to do this and we understand this as a responsibility, precisely to take this privilege for the sake of conservation”, he adds.
A unique experience
The challenge of living together 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for an estimated time of three years, is circumvented with the acquired experience of each one proceeding at their own pace. “When we walk, we go in silence to sharpen our senses, we hear birds, we smell animals, something that we thought was something from a movie, and we have a unique, personal experience that you will only have when you are totally alone”, says Dennis. At the end of the day, they exchange each other’s experiences and generally discover “that the perceptions were completely different, and that is very rich”, adds Letícia.
If the trip started in the country’s first national park, Itatiaia, the plan predicts that it will end in Fernando de Noronha (PE), but that could still change. In the second half of next year, they intend to face the difficult paths of the Amazonian parks, starting with Acre and Rondônia. “We purposely left the north for later, to understand the possible paths, we talked a lot with the ICMBio people, who always give us good tips on routes and best times, and so we gather as much information as possible”, says Dennis, who when talked to the blog, I was based in Trancoso, in the south of Bahia, on my way out to visit the Pau Brasil National Park.
It’s not easy, but it’s worth the effort.
To the inevitable question about what they miss the most after 15 straight months on the road, both respond that, in fact, it’s not much.
“We started the trip at a time when the world was very weird, it was one of the critical moments of the pandemic, and we already had a routine of talking to family and friends through the screens”, explains Dennis. “Of course we miss that, the places in São Paulo where we used to go, the house there that we left closed behind, dear people, the spaces of each one, but what do we gain from new friends that we get to know along the way, and the connections between us that we make give meaning to everything”, he adds.
For Letícia, in addition to monitoring the evolution of the treatments of the patients she left behind, she says she misses the vegetable garden she left at her house in São Paulo. “I am in a place where there is a vegetable garden and I remember that it was a delight to follow the growth of the plants that I had in São Paulo, which brings an idea of continuity, because going from one place to another is a delight, and it is important for understanding the reality of the parks, but it is still a photograph, a clipping, and being able to spend more time in a place to see it transform is something that is really needed”, he evaluates.
And what will come after the 74th park? “We have stopped asking ourselves this question, because, while we are attached to it, we stop living the real experience, which is the trajectory”, says Letícia. “What we do know is that we want to bring conservation together in some way, but it’s going to be very different, we’re already very different,” says Dennis.
“Until now we have not visited any park that was not under any danger, from hunting, illegal extractivism, mining, deforestation, the devastation is very great, the threats are numerous and when we left we did not have this clarity, so it is very clear to us today that we need to work on the conservation issue, but always with our luggage, we are very satisfied with our professions, and we like the idea of bringing this knowledge to our journey”, summarizes Letícia.
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