At first glance, the red-haired paulistana Thais Cavicchioli Dias, 34, may even seem like a fragile person, with her girlish smile, long flowery dress and her trademark pearl necklace.
But it is this 1.65m woman who, at the age of 25, already had a degree in Public Relations from USP (University of São Paulo), a postgraduate degree in Marketing from ESPM (Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing) and an MBA from FGV. She has just returned from Nepal after carrying out the project she had planned for more than five years: traveling completely alone and carrying her own 16-kilogram backpack, over 208 kilometers, crossing three passes and three base camps above 5,000 meters of altitude, in the Himalayan Mountains.
No, her goal was not to climb Everest, she assures, who has some climbing experience, but not enough — not yet, at least. She didn’t even travel to the other side of the world for any of the reasons that traditional mountaineers invoke to explain why they get into trouble at the highest points on the planet, such as the challenge of reaching higher, reaching summit goals or something similar. . Asked what exactly she was looking for on her journey, she only responds: “I wanted to know how it would feel to be there.”
And what did you feel back from this intense journey? “Actually, I didn’t go back, because the person who went is no longer the one who is here”, he explains with a smile, admitting that, although he is not a religious person, he returned highly spiritualized and convinced that “in other lives” he was a Buddhist monk.
If the spiritual side was stimulated, the pragmatic and detail-oriented manager side was not left behind. With no sponsorship other than her savings and with only a month’s vacation at the company she worked for, she planned every step down to the smallest detail and with lots of spreadsheets. From end to end of his journey, he says, the total investment was R$ 30 thousand. By way of comparison, hiring a package to climb Pico da Neblina, in Brazil, does not cost less than R$20,000, not counting the airfare to Manaus.
A good part of the economy, she explains, came precisely from having made a point of not traveling in groups, with one of the thousands of agencies that take tourists from all over the world annually to the region. “I got tired of seeing people having physical problems because they had a tight deadline to meet at the pace of the group, which didn’t adapt to their capacity, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to go alone, make my personal journey, at my limit, at the that could be done”, he says.
The first step in this journey was to ensure that he would have the physical conditions to face the task. “This goes far beyond getting a checkup, as some agencies that specialize in adventures ask for,” she explains, “because the checkup only measures the moment.” During prep, she discovered that she had high blood pressure and an imbalance in her hip.
She prepared, then, over the last few years with the help of a multidisciplinary team with mountain knowledge that included the sports general clinic Cristina Casagrande, the dentist specialized in barodontalgia (a problem caused by extreme atmospheric changes, such as high altitudes). Maria Helena Zucaro and nutritionist Homero Munaretti. She even took courses in first aid in remote areas, high mountain medicine and even sports gynecology.
“When you are going to go 14 days without showering, being advised to avoid urinary infections is very important, and it was the doctor Fernanda Silveira de Carvalho, who also goes hiking, who advised me to wear antibacterial panties, for example, which reduce the risk this problem as common as it is crippling in this type of trip”, he says.
Thais had previous experience with sports medicine, after “a stupid fall on a sidewalk in São Paulo” tore the ligaments in her knee, forcing her to leave aside the Brazilian trails, which she was already walking independently. since 2015. At the time, it took 8 months of intense recovery work.
“Because of that accident, I decided to motivate myself by setting a goal for my recovery”, he says. The goal that set itself was to complete the TMB (Tour de Mont Blanc), a traditional route of 170 kilometers and wide variation in altitude that crosses the borders of three countries (France, Italy and Switzerland) around the iconic mountain of the Alps.
Goal given, goal accomplished, with a lot of muscle strengthening work and, once again, a lot of planning. “I read so much of everything I could find about the trip that I would have been able to tell the whole story without leaving my house,” she exaggerates.
Back in Brazil, he began to think about what he could do differently. It was there that the idea of going to the Himalayas began to mature, and especially to a mountain that was very special to him: Ama Dablan, a name that means “Mother and Pearl Necklace”, one of the three most sought after by climbers in the Himalayas. , at an altitude of 6,812 meters.
The enchantment of Ama Dablan has to do with the first expedition that Thais made through the challenging Travessia Serra Fina, in Mantiqueira. Asking a group of young men who crossed the path if they were heading in the right direction, the answer was a sexist joke about being on the mountain with a string of pearls peeking through the dust of your hiking gear.
“From then on, among mountaineers, I became known as the girl with the pearls, and many just call me Pearl”, she explains, who has not taken off her ornament since then, almost a talisman. Hence wanting to know the mountain linked to her nickname would be a matter of time.
“One of the goals of going to Nepal was to see Ama Dablan from afar, but I’ll still go back to, then, go to the summit and leave a pebble there that I picked up in her base camp when I managed to see her coming out of the clouds. one day when I thought everything had been a waste of time, I had the flu, exhausted, I hadn’t seen anything on the horizon for six days, and suddenly time opened up just for an hour, but revealing the mountain as I had dreamed it, with its pearl necklace formed by the ice just below the summit”, she says, moved.
That day, the journey took on a new lease of life, and Thais completed her circuit, stretching the trip to Everest base camp, which had been cut from her plans when she felt sick and thought about giving up, almost triggering the rescue. She escaped to the camp to take her mountaineer friend Tiago Toricelli, who is preparing to go to Everest, a pebble of motivation. What she remembers most is that she didn’t get to say goodbye to Nepal — but see you later. “I’ll still train to climb and walk more on the ice, so maybe I’ll come back.”
It is better not to doubt.
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