Sertões Rally: my life is to walk around this country...

Since I was a newborn, the road has been present in my life, literally. My parents always traveled with my paternal grandparents during the January holidays to Piçarras, a beach in Santa Catarina. Behold, I was born in January and my father waited 15 days, put me in the Karmann Ghia, with my mother desperate to hit the road with such a young baby, but then began, unconsciously, my love for the road, cars and the sea.

This introduction is just for you to know that one of the biggest personal and professional challenges of my life, faced in 2022, is part of my most unconscious memories as a child.

In March 2022, I received an invitation from a wonderful tourism professional, whom I had known since 2006 when she went to promote the state of Goiás in Madrid, where I worked for EMBRATUR. She simply invited me to take over the management of the Sertões Tourism and Adventure Expeditions of the Sertões Rally, a 30th anniversary commemorative edition. At that time, I went to research about health care operators. Off Road in Brazil and to my surprise, there are several companies that have been operating for many years in the market, both cars and motorcycles.

I accepted the challenge to implement a new model of management of the Expeditions, but the great detail, I will tell you, was that this edition would not be 7 days as usual. It would be 15 days on the road, more than 8,000 km, leaving Foz do Iguaçu in Paraná and arriving in Salinópolis in Pará.

Yes, I did the biggest Rally in the world in 2022!

It was 5 months of intense preparation, like any major event, and my role was to meet the demands of the 9 operators of Offroad approved by Sertões responsible for the operation of the expeditions, coordinate the communication, promotion and logistics of the expeditions, including throughout the Rally. Each operator created its package, some did only the southern section that went from Foz do Iguaçu to Palmas, others did only the northern section, which went from Palmas to Salinópolis and others the complete section, from Foz to Salinópolis. Extremely tiring, but rewarding.

To monitor and check the quality of the service, I did each step with a 4x4 car operator, living the experience as if it were an expeditionary. The professionalism of these operators is incredible, who even worked for Sertões, I did not know.

When I went to study tourism to work in Madrid, I was always interested in socio-cultural issues, I connected with the problem of the impacts caused by tourism in communities, especially the coastal ones of our country. When I accepted this invitation, my heart beat faster because I would have the opportunity to enter the most unknown corners and, some even very well known in Brazil, this time in our hinterlands.

I crossed the 5 Brazilian biomes, leaving the Atlantic Forest, passing through the Pantanal, going up through the Cerrado and Caatinga until reaching the Amazon. I also crossed the 5 regions, there were 8 states and more than 243 cities, towns, municipalities all in 4x4 vehicles, accompanying the groups of expeditionaries and the operators who, under my supervision, were more than 250 people.

The profile of these expeditionaries was very diverse. Despite this, most were between 50 and 59 years old, couples, some already retired. I was positively surprised to see many women traveling alone or with friends, driving their 4x4 cars and even a motorcycle rider from Rio Grande do Sul who, in the middle of several men, did the 15 days on an Africa Twin motorcycle, super heavy and large. It was incredible to see the respect and admiration of all the men on the expedition that the pilot was on, both for being a woman and for her personal challenge.

One of the things that most impressed me in this world of rally was the spirit of cooperation, both between competitors, volunteers and also expeditionaries and operators. Each day we slept in one city, woke up at 4-5 am to take an average of 600km to 800km of road to reach the other city. They were intense days and without this spirit of care and collaboration, we certainly would not have made it.

On this path, many tourist attractions were visited, each one more spectacular than the other, such as the recently opened Campo Grande Aquarium, the fervedouros of Jalapão, the Chapada das Mesas, the Viana Canyons that are in Bom Jesus in Piauí, discovered by the rally years ago, and Salinópolis in Pará.

With each stretch traveled, I was sure of one thing: how wonderful our country is! landscapes were changing along the way, some not so pleasant, such as seeing the agribusiness off-season, all open for miles and miles on end; others impressive, where the Cerrado meets the Caatinga.

The people, ahhh the people. The races passed through farms, communities, indigenous villages and the rally was always received with joy and emotion, especially by the children. And speaking of them, an experience that deserves to be highlighted and that was the one that moved me the most in this trajectory was being able to spend 3 hours with some families from the community of Riachão in Maranhão, while watching the race, talking to three incredible girls, 6-year-old Melissa, 8-year-old Alice and 9-year-old Keila.

What caught the attention of the minor, Melissa, is that I told her that there was a woman driving a UTV, which is a car that looks like a spider and runs a lot. She only talked about wanting to see Heleninha (pilot) pass, she wanted to know if the car was pink, if she did it alone. A lot of curiosity around what is still a taboo: how can women ride?

Alice told me that she liked to play soccer, but that at school the boys didn't let her because she was a girl. And she didn't accept it but, after insisting so much, she managed to create a group of girls who play soccer, because she said that there is no such thing as a boy can and a girl can't. I was moved by this speech of hers, already so small, in a community far from everything and already so aware of its rights.

She did English at school. Yes, in Riachão in Maranhão, a public school teaches English to students. And she was very happy when I called an American expeditionary from our group and she spoke to him, who was also moved. At the end of my three hours of conversation, they hugged me and I left this experience in tears. My desire was to stay there for many days, living with those people who were so kind and generous.

Wherever we went, the children with Brazilian flags and the Sertões flags waiting for us and greeting us. An incredible energy.

I can spend hours, days and pages describing what I experienced in these more than 8,000 km, and it would still be little. The most important thing of all this was to discover that aging is not painful, that yes, you can enjoy life like the expeditionaries I met; that we don't control anything in this life, that the important thing is to live the present moment body and soul; that our country is even more wonderful than they say; that we need to take care of our children, our landscapes, the municipalities, because in some cases the total negligence of the public power was noticed, even with the issue of waste, rivers, basic sanitation for the population; that our hinterlands still need a lot of things focused on social and environmental actions and that we need to "walk" more around our country, get off the couch, the library, Google and live the reality of everyday life.

So much is learned on the road!

I'm glad my father put me in that Karmann Ghia, because today, "my life is to walk around this country to see if one day I can rest happily". Wise men, my father and our eternal Luiz Gonzaga.