Everything started with a simple and ambitious idea:
There is a need for real travel content!
People don’t care about resorts anymore.
They want to know how it feels to be actually exploring different worlds and different cultures.
The internet is full of beautiful images, but lacks real stories.
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The idea of doing something bigger and lasting was building up in my mind. I knew from experience that people are starving for real content. My community on Instagram grew because of that. But Instagram stories last 24 hours and feed posts are easily forgotten after a few days. I wanted to make something bigger.
When Pedro invited me, in 2019, to go to Saudi Arabia, I knew that that was the perfect opportunity for investing everything in this idea. I convinced him and together we partnered with _finalversion, a local film production company to bring a filmmaker with us and produce a film about our trip. The idea was simple: no script, no guidelines, simply to document our trip, the way we travel, the way we interact with people, hoping to be able to show the Saudi culture, change mentalities and bring our cultures closer together.
“Insha’Allah – Lost in the Cradle of Islam” was born!
click here for direct access to the full film
This film was a success! We premiered it to sold out and nearly sold out crowds, even during the actual pandemic scenario, sold thousands of views through my website, sold it to “TAP Air Portugal” for them to have it on their airplanes and opened doors to an actual ongoing negotiation to do a series of trips on one of the Portuguese main TV stations. In one month we paid our investment and in three months we made roughly 15 000 euros in sales.
All this proved that my initial idea was right: There is a need for real travel content!
We wanted to do more.
And then we met Cebaldo.
CEBALDO,
HIS STORY, HIS DREAM
At sixty-eight years old, Cebaldo doesn’t necessarily feel like time is running out. But how many opportunities will he have to fulfill his dreams?
The oldest of six siblings, Cebaldo was born in Ustupo, an island in the province of Kuna Yala, in what we would call Panama. For him, Panama is something else, an invention by the United States of America and a few greedy people. He rests on my couch, glass of white wine in his hand, his gaze shifting between me and the camera, and he starts telling me about his father. “Back in the thirties” he says “my father was taken to Panama as a child. We’d just had the Kuna Revolution, fighting against the westernization of our people, and he was sent there to be educated there… kind of as a sign that they were willing to concede some ground…”
His father lost the language that he, himself, keeps, but eventually found himself back at Ustupo, where he met Cebaldo’s mother, the first teacher in the island. “My mother is ninety-two, now…” he says. “Can we meet her when we’re there?” I ask. “Of course, of course” he acquiesces. He tells me how his mother used to write letters for her friends to send to Panama, or how the people from his island used to record K7s and send them via post to their loved ones. “Now we use this” he says, showing me his phone and playing a Whatsapp message his sister just sent him, in Kuna.
Cebaldo is the only one of his siblings that made a LIFE outside of Panama. He studied in his island and left for the city at nine years old, where he lived in a church, hoping to become a priest. But he found out that, according to Marx, “(…) religion is the opium of the people”, so he became a communist instead, much to the disappointment, one can imagine, of his first teacher, who was a nun.
“Because I wanted to be a priest… but I also wanted to see other worlds…” he tells me. “The sentimental geography grew…” he adds, quite poetically. These “other worlds” took him away, step by step from his tribe and his people, as he enrolled in university in Panama to study biology and pre-medicine. “But gradually I became seduced with social sciences, you know?” he tells me. So, with a full scholarship from Universidade Católica, Cebaldo went to study sociology. “And eventually I had an opportunity that I couldn’t miss” he adds, his eyes glistening. “What was it?”
What it was, was that the same way communism had robbed Cebaldo from the church, it would rob him from Panama. Being a member of the People’s Party in his country gave him the opportunity to go away on a full scholarship and really, really, see those “other worlds” for real, this time. He had a few options… Studying to be a mining engineer, in Romania, or in Guiné-Bissau… or anthropology in Russia. And so, without telling barely anyone of his departure, including his girlfriend at the time and his mother, Cebaldo landed, in 1979, in Soviet Russia, to study sociology.
Alice was the daughter of a member of the Portuguese Communist Party and, when given the opportunity, much like Cebaldo, didn’t think twice before accepting a scholarship to go and study in Russia. And so, in 1979, after a year dedicated exclusively to learning Russian, our beloved Kuna character and Alice, started dating. Marx put them in the same place, love brought them together and Inayaili, born in Russia in 1982, united them forever. “So you never went back to Panama?” I ask him. “Oh, no… I have…”
After Russia, Cebaldo tried his luck back home. Alice and their daughter met him there, they even had another daughter in Central America but, eventually, they had to leave. Alice’s brother had had a tragic accident and the Panamanian government started pursuing political opponents, and although Cebaldo didn’t feel particularly endangered, he had to go.
Cebaldo left his tribe behind, while carrying them with himself wherever he goes. He visits often but is often left with a pressing feeling like time is running out and after all these years, he still has some unfinished business.
He ended up, and lived most of his LIFE in the smallest Portuguese municipality, São João da Madeira, precisely where Pedro and João, two intrepid friends, live.
We met Cebaldo for the first time in May 2021. João had met a French guy in Gerês, Northern Portugal, who told him about the Kuna tribe and he remembered exchanging some messages with a Kuna man that lived in his small city.
It was cold, but we sat outside. We asked for a beer, leaned back and listened to Cebaldo, as he told us about himself. Turned out he had a list of things to do before he died. We leaned forward. “Is he thinking what I’m thinking?” Pedro and João thought about each other. It became clear he saw in us one of his last chances, if not the last, to go and fulfil his list, and it became clear we saw in him the opportunity to do something remarkable, truly beautiful. LIFE had put the three of us in the same tiny city, in the same tiny country in the corner of Europe, and we wouldn’t waste this coincidence. We had lived separate LIVES, in separate countries, but now there we were, sitting at the same table, talking about dreams and how they could be achieved. We saw ourselves going from island to island in the cayucos, the traditional boats, led by the old man; interviewing the sages that kept alive their oral tradition; climbing up the two highest mountains in Kuna Yala and, most importantly, visiting the two most sacred places for the Kuna Tribe, Pucuro and Paya, which Cebaldo never saw.
We saw it all. And now we want to do it all.
