Effort, bravery and experience

About 2 months ago, my Dad and I had the wonderful opportunity to reconnect to ourselves and to one another by doing a 3 day long 75km walk.





Scenario: São Miguel das Missões, where Spanish Jesuits built with the indigenous people 30 religious commutes which influenced importantly the culture of Southern Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.

Remembering where we came from:
- the gaucho culture is amazingly simple, genuine and hospitable
- the liaison to the land and nature is an essential part of who we are
- redemption and learning come with effort, bravery and experience

At our last night on the road, musician and poet Claudino de Lucca met us and dedicated a very sensitive poem. A part of it says:

The finish line doesn’t matter
Nor does our own salvation
What matters is to water again our predecessors’ land
With tears, sweat and blood

Living / Dying Planet

In the last week of October, WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network released the 2008 Living Planet Report.

Amongst other warning data, the report reveals that we are currently using 130% of the planet's renovation capacity and that, by the early 2030s, we will need two planets to keep up with humanity’s demand for goods and services.

Check the whole report here. And spread the word.

Ilha Bela - a beautiful island

Last weekend, 9 friends and I had the pleasure to meet Galeno e reconnect to nature.

Galeno has been living in a place called Santa Seiva for 32 years now. In those years, he transformed an abandoned cattle raising land in a diverse, beautiful and thriving natural place. On top of cultivating all sorts of trees, flowers and organic vegetables, he has adopted principles of bio-architecture in all the constructions, so they would fit harmoniously with the natural whole.

As if the place wasn't enough, Galeno made sure we had a profound experience reconnecting to nature. We felt part of a loose rock being "played" by him, drank different teas, walked on a magma trail, climbed beach facing rocks, swam in cold transparent waterfalls, took part in a fire ceremony and had amazing conversations.

Hope you feel a little bit of the experience through the pictures below.

Galeno, the dedicated host

The place

Bio-architecture

Some of the reconnection experiences

Into the Wild

Definitely one of the best movies I've seen lately! And I'm not talking about the technical aspects (though they are really good), but about what it meant to me.

A young guy, searching for truth, leaves behind the theories from school, all the hypocritical relationships, his old car and all the money. He opens up himself completely, meets simple and diverse people along the way, builds a deep and trusting relationship with nature, keeps being free and grows fantastically in wisdom.

"So now, after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure.
The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution.
No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost... in the wild."


The soundtrack, written and sung by Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam leader), also freaked me out with parts such as:

"It's a mystery to me
we have a greed
with which we have agreed

You think you have to want
more than you need
until you have it all you won't be free

Society, you're a crazy breed
I hope you're not lonely without me"

More? Check out the Into the Wild official website and/or the clip below. And please leave your comments once you watch it.

Perfect Easter

If Easter is about resurrection, I had the perfect long weekend.

It all started with the idea of visiting a charming town called Paraty (meaning "river fish" in the indigenous language tupi), 350km far from São Paulo.

As we started to read about the region, we realised there were a lot of nice beaches, waterfalls and hiking tracks around. So, why not staying at a guesthouse in the middle of the Atlantic Forest, 6 km from indigenous communities and close to desert waveless beaches?

Our guesthouse


The view from our room

Trekking

Wide smile after a refreshing swim at a waterfall

Family, friends, sun and sea

A little bit more of the pleasures of being back: family, old friends, beautiful nature, sports and happiness. What a hard life!


Waiting for the fireworks with Mum and Dad, by the beach

Back to Floripa to meet great friends and breath the Paradise's air

Getting ready to swim a couple of km to the island in the background

Uh, açaí!!!!



Mum and Dad celebrating their 32th anniversary

Anybody up for some diving?

After 4 days in paradisiac Koh Tao, in Thailand - 2 sunny, 2 rainy, because even the paradise needs some rain ;o) - filled with theoretical classes, swimming pool skills building and 4 open water dives (yes, in the rainy days!), I'm officially a PADI certified open water diver. AEEHH! That means I'll want to travel to really nice beaches, meet people with cool diving stories and appreciate life underwater as often as possible. Wanna join me?

Paradise



View from my room, 10 steps from the beach

Certified diver!!!

Back to the Essence

Some days ago, I had the incommensurable pleasure of reconnecting to the essence of life, taking a 2 days trek north of Luang Namtha, Laos.

The nature was exuberant, and showed us its beauty and power. The rain was pouring down, the terrain was super slippery and the greenest sights, forest-like smells and gentle touches from life in the mountains were breathtaking.

In the evening of the first day, after 7 hours walk and many falls on the mud, we arrived to the harmonious Akha village. Its 175 inhabitants were pretty excited to see us (they only see visitors about once a month) and taught us simplicity stands hand by hand with happiness. The dwellings were really basic, but everybody was always welcome. The rice based food was yummy, children had a lot of attention, romantic love was encouraged, and gates and ceremonies kept the bad spirits outside (as well as the community united, I must say). No wonder the Akha people go to the town every week, but always come back to the village.

A big thanks to Green Discovery (who promotes low impact eco tourism), to our amazing guy (who knew all about the forest and connected us to the culture of the village) and to my 3 fellow trekkers (the best company I could wish!)


The Akha village



In our sleeping hut



Yummy mountains food

World Heritage in Northeast Australia

According to the Lonely Planet, locals from Cairns “speak reverently about their region and will look at you with undisguised pity if you’re form ‘down south’”. That was exactly what happened in the first hours of our 3,5 days long weekend in Cairns, when we talked to some authentic Australian blokes in a local pub.

In our 3 days, we had the chance to:

- Stay in a $19 backpackers’ place (with dinner included ;o))
- Drive through the beautiful sinuous road of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, in the middle of the rainforest, headed to Cape Tribulation
- Do a short walk and see where the rainforest meets the see
- Take a boat in the Daintree River and see 3,5 meters crocodiles
- And most importantly: snorkel and dive in the exuberant Great Barrier Reef! (I saw all sorts of corals, molluscs, fish and even sea turtles, crown fish - Nemos! - and a shark!)

The Reef totally deserves to be called World Heritage, as it has so much to teach to humanity with its interrelations, uniqueness and beauty. More than the colours, shapes, dimensions and features, the incredibly intricate harmony of life under the water is really impressive. Camouflage, fluorescent, tiny, gigantic, funny and odd fish are host by hard or flexible (but always gentle) nurturing corals. When the water current is strong, they all pulse in the same rhythm, as if they were guided by the best of the orchestra’s maestros.

At the end of the weekend, I got a jellyfish scarf, felt a lot of “saudade” from Brazil and shared the Cairns citizens’ pride for living in the paradise.

Life in the Great Barrier Reef

In 2003, I went scuba diving for the first time in Arraial do Cabo (RJ, Brazil). Marcos, my diving partner, was absolutely in love with the sport and used to say there's nothing richer and more revealing than life under the water. He was absolutely right! Look at what his statement means in the Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef system in the world, which:
- stretches for 2,600 km;
- covers an area of approximately 344,400 square kilometres;
- began growing 20,000 years ago;
- hosts 700 species of corals, 30 of whales, 6 of sea turtles, 125 of sharks, 200 of birds, 5000 of molluscs and 1500 of fish;
- is breathtaking!

Oxfam Training - getting serious

Hey everyone,

Our training for the 100 km Oxfam Trailwalk in getting serious. We’ve been bush walking at least 30 km every second weekend, so that we can finish this challenge and reward our efforts, the donors of the campaign and the various poor people helped by Oxfam around the world.

This time we did the Convict Trail part of the old Great North Road in Hawkesbury, northwest of Sydney. We also walk into the night for the first time. Exciting times...

More info about the Trailwalk? Click here!

Wanna donate? Click here!





This weekend I won't be able to train. But it's for a good cause. I'm going to Cairns and the Barrier Reed. Oh, yeah! So be attuned for stories and pictures of tropical and exuberant Queensland!

Presents from nature

We were certainly more sensitive and appreciative during the trip. But nature really did its part, rewarding us with amazing blue skies, birds announced sunrises, colourful sunsets and uncountable stars.

Here, you can use one of your senses and your imagination to feel a little bit of that magic. Enjoy!

Sacred landscape

"After leaving Adelaide, seeing some white terrain with bushes, passing through some green bushes and stopping for lunch in Port Augusta - where Salma said G`day to the gas station attendant ;o) - something cool happened: I slept for almost 40 min and feel that I woke up in the desert. Landscape has turned redder, air drier and there's a big isolation feeling. Trip has just started!"
Gabi, trip journal, 1st of April



Throughout the whole trip, nature was absolutely breathtaking. And how much have I learnt!
We’ve seen that the desert can have an exuberant chain of life, in an absolute delicate balance, dynamically changing.

The area where the current desert is located used to be a big sea 200 million years ago (nowadays a good part of it continue being below the sea level) and, although it’s extremely dry at the surface, it hosts an underground water reserve that covers 22% of the Australian territory.

Therefore, we could find palm trees growing from rocks in an area called Palm Valley (!!!), which is still reminiscent of the times where the ocean was in that area (just to emphasize, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of years), as well as frogs who “hibernate” when the weather is too dry, maintaining the water in their bodies and coming back to live when it rains.

We’ve also seen live many sorts of gum trees and animals like kangaroos, camels, lizards, emus, many different kind of birds and dingos.

But I think what touched me the most is the landscape itself. The mixture between flat terrains and impressive rock formations, with gorges, canyons, cliffs and waterholes – result of millions of years of meteors falling, tectonic movements and erosion – transmits an energy that the same time fills us with a fantastic spirit and shows us how small and recent we are. No wonder the aboriginal people considered most of those places sacred.

Aboriginal Conceptual Beliefs

Getting prepared for the desert trip we’re taking in 2 weeks time, I started reading about Aboriginal history and myths.

Talking about conception, Aborigines believed that in the beginning the world was an immense featureless flat floating disc. On tjukurita times, mythical giant creatures appeared. They had many similarities with aboriginal rituals and life style and planted an inexhaustible number of eternal spirit children .

Tjukurita era finished and the giant creatures died, but natural features stand where they’ve performed any tasks. This way, the mythical snake man became a watercourse, the camps of mythical creatures are now mountain ranges, and so on.

The spirit children – independent beings, about the size of a sand grain, who will became the children – o continued living in some welcoming spot, until they choose their mother and enter her body to develop into a child.

I found this story amazing because it, at the same time, sees humans as part of nature, children as community blessings and the individual as an independent decision capable being, since early times. I guess our scientific society has a lot to learn with the native inhabitants of this planet.

Learning from nature

Last weekend I had the opportunity to go to the Blue Mountains, which beautiful and just one hour and a half drive from Sydney. I went with 4 other people, each one from a different country: Priscilla (China), Albert (Romania), Roy (Canada) and Jake (Australia, our driver and scout guide).

Arriving there, I noticed a few trees have marks of fire on the bottom of their trunks. Commenting with Jake, he explained me some trees actually need fire to reproduce, an amazing adaptation to the Australian dry environment and frequent droughts.

Twelve Apostles

On Boxing Day (Dec 26th – no clear explanation why it’s called Boxing Day), Michelle and Simon drove us in the Great Ocean’s Road, one of the most beautiful and famous roads in the world. It’s really, really beautiful!

After almost 5 hours we arrived in the Twelve Apostles, these huge rocks in the middle of the ocean, formed by thousands of years of erosion. It’s absolutely breath taking!

The feeling is that nature is powerful, patient and peaceful. And the will is to stay there for hours, just observing, meditating, re-equalising our internal energy.

Koala Park

Time for re-unions and more exploration of the Sydney surroundings. This week I had the pleasure to host Marjana and Nina in my house, 2 Slovenian friends who took part in the Peace Project in Poland with me in 2003. Isn’t that cool?

Well, cool meetings deserve cool Australian programs. So we went to the Koala Park, a kind of open zoo, where you can see and touch some very typical Australian animals: peacocks, many kinds of birds, emus, wombats, echidnas, dingos and obviously koalas and kangaroos.

The koalas are really cute! But they are quite boring, as they sleep 19 (!!!) hours a day, eat, get high with the eucalyptus leaves and sleep again.

So, I completely fell in love with the kangaroos. They are friendly, play a lot and are extremely original. I sure they wouldn’t be as sweet in a wild environment, though.

Long lasting sunrise

Do you know the book “The Little Prince”, by Saint Exupery? In the book, Saint Exupery imagines himself in the middle of the Sahara desert, after his small plane broke down. There, he meets the Little Prince, who comes from a very small planet, and they have a number of meaningful conversations about life and love.

All this introduction is to say that I remembered quite a lot of the book recently. That’s because in his planet the Little Prince just needed to carry his chair some steps away to be able to see a sunrise at any time, for how long he wished.

Coming from Buenos Aires to Sydney, I had the longest sunrise of my life – I can precise how long it was, but it was massive! Our flight route passed quite close to the South Pole, so you can imagine. Beautiful!

Brisbane - natural program

I arrived in Brisbane before 7 in the morning. And Anh and her boyfriend were waiting for me in the train station. We drove 2 hours to the north, to Cooloola National Park, just after Noosa, in the Sunshine cost.

In the middle of our way, we stopped at a local fair, completely “Small is beautiful” (reference to Schumacher’s book). Built integrated with a green area, the fair stores sell organic food, artistic objects and general goods. Lots of families with kids, live music and some tourists present. Awesome!

Once we arrived in the natural park, we rent a canoe and a kayak, paddled one hour and a half and arrived in a quite isolated place, where we camped. Tent set up, we canoed down the river for around 4 hours, taking advantage of the perfect weather, having good conversations, enjoying the contact with nature and appreciating the rich views, fauna and flora. I was especially amazed by the sight of the trees reflected in the river. If you take our pictures, you almost can’t say what side is up.

At night, we were completely exhausted! Cooked dinner, played cards, told more stories and went to sleep. I was so tired that I didn’t hear the heavy rain and thunders during the night.

I enjoyed soooo much! I think I forgot how much I like this contact with nature, especially to re-equalise my energy and check what’s really necessary to live well.

More pictures and information about the place, check http://www.cooloola.org.au/content_gallery.php?CategoryID=56.

More pictures at: http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?Uc=7hoqpfht.87o8vnrh&Uy=e3s84q&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0&mode=fromshare&conn_speed=1

Watson’s Bay

In a beautiful, beautiful Saturday, a crew formed by people from all continents – 1 Nigerian, 1 Indian, 2 Lithuanians, 1 Norwegian, 1 Italian, 1 Australian and 1 Brazilian (;-P) – did a very special program, aligned with the beauty of the day. We took a ferry and went to Watson’s Bay, which is one of the places in the harbour cost.

The beach is very nice, there is a small nudity beach as well, some fish and chips bars and a big cliff facing the sea. We tried to play some cricket there, but I lost the ball in 2 seconds. It happens…

Beach - oh yeah babe!

Today (20/08) was my first lonelier day. It was very good to “re-equalize” the batteries, spending some time on my own.

As I’m fanatic about sea, guess what I did? Beach! Bondi Beach. Although it wasn’t hot, many people were there, including some old surfers (it was fantastic to see an old lady leaving the sea in her neoprene clothes), some Brazilians and other foreigners, with whom I obviously talked to.

As you can see, it’s very beautiful. And look at the swimming pool of a fancy hotel by the beach!