This was December 2019. It wasn't covid yet.
And I was about to go on a very wild weekend.
I had recently come out of a rocky relationship, my uncle had died on June 2019 and I was feeling depressed. So what a better thing to do than go on a wild adventure?
Saturday
So I was in Rio de Janeiro again and looking for trouble. I decided to go into the woods with an ex-almost-girlfriend and take LSD. At first we just sat on a huge rock over the river and looked at the threes, gosh I still remember how the threes looked magical, the sun heating the leaves, you could get lost in it.
I kissed her and she was surprised, she didn't think we would hook up again. Anyway it was good, we had arrived by bus and it was in a poorer part of Rio. But the vibes were good so why worry?
But then, the sun started setting, the once clear and angelic leaves started turning darker, she started getting scared and seeing some old entities in the wood. And it wasn't like we were in a safe place either, we were on top of a rock in a gushing river, it was difficult to climb it and it was gonna be difficult to get off of it with the increased current after sunset. The water was cold, we were in the woods in a sketchy forest that people tend to go missing.
I was in for an adventure but then I started seeing people in the woods too, I got scared so I decided to leave.
I slowly got down from the rock into the river, when earlier the river only hit my waist, now it was almost at the top of my head.
I helped her get down from the rock and we put all our stuff on top of our heads.
We crossed the river and that's where the real danger started.
We had to cross a huge part of the woods from where we came. It's funny how just the lack of sunlight turned pretty woods into an unwelcoming place.
We reached a crossroads, I had never been here before that day and I didn't pay much attention to the path we took since "she knew it". Turns out while she was still very high on LSD, she forgot which path we took to get there. And we made the mistake to do a 360º turn looking into the different paths. I legit brainfucked us right there and suddenly I didn't even know where we came from now.
I then trusted my instinct and that "the woods are calling from this direction" and so we went and didn't look back.
Then, after a while we got to a more open space, still surrounded by trees but looked less like a small corridor.
There was a cabin but no one there, we just kept walking past it.
There was a huge bush near the end of this open space, as we walked near it a man jumped out of it and started following us closely. We sped up and he did too, then a bunch of people started walking in front of us, so I decided to stop and pretend I was drinking water, so the man would continue walking forward.
Luckily he did, and went on a separate route.
We then reached the edge of the forest, and into a huge ass corridor made of cement to reach the street and if God willed it, a bus stop with no further problems.
I remember while we were walking that huge corridor, that the light from the street lights was hitting it differently, and I suddenly felt like the walls themselves morphed into a movie of the entire human race, I saw humans discovering fire, building farms, cities, wars, heard gunshots as we reached the end of the corridor and the movie reached nazi germany.
The gunshots might have been real tho haha. It was a dangerous neighborhood after all.
We reached the bus stop.
We got on the bus and could finally catch my breath, I just tried to act normal and not to melt in the seat.
And then a very weird fella got on the bus, sat right next to me and his head was almost reaching my pockets. I started holding on to my stuff really hard, trying to play it cool but according to my friend I looked freaked out haha.
Then the bus stopped, the driver came up and threw that man out Uncle Phil style.
The rest of the trip was uneventful. The danger had passed. We weren't gonna be another missing couple in the woods, and we didn't get robbed leaving it.
We stopped by a bar and ordered a couple of drinks and decided to just chill while the LSD was wearing off.
It's a very bad idea to take LSD while your need to act normal.
Then, because I didn't want to go to my grandma's house while still high I decided to go with my friend to her house.
I met her mom, she was a nice woman, sadly she passed a couple of years later in the middle of the pandemic with cancer.
We reached her room, I don't remember if we ate anything but we fucked there, and then slept.
Sunday
I wake up with a kind of a reverse hangover. I was feeling very good and with a calm mind. I get a text from my cousin, her friend is having a birthday today and she wants to know if I wanna go.
Since she is also my friend, I decided to go.
I don't remember much before actually getting to my grandma's house. I think I said goodbye to my friend's mom before heading out.
Well I arrive at my grandma's, take a shower, brush, get dressed and hop on the car with my cousin.
Giovanna, my cousin, orders an Uber, so it's me, her, and our friend Antonio.
In Rio it's common sense to take a screenshot of the path the Uber is gonna take, send to the person we are going to, to see if we aren't getting into any "dangerous areas".
We were going to Belford Roxo. Oh man, if you know you know.
Our birthday friend told us that the path was A-OK.
Little did we know this was going to be the most dangerous ride of our lives.
So we got in the Uber. The driver felt more at ease since our friend had vetoed the path. We just had to make sure we stuck to that path or we would be going into some dangerous favelas(illegally constructed neighborhoods).
I didn't pay much attention to most of the path, I kept daydreaming. I was still pretty tired from the day before. I had long blond hair, a buddha bracelet on my right hand, a deep v white t-shirt and some John Lennon glasses. I looked like a gringo.
I was in the passenger seat in the front. My cousin sat behind me with a huge ass present with fancy packaging, and Antonio sat behind the driver.
Things were going well, until we found a flooded street. The Uber was like "oh I think we can just take this other road and we will be on our way". My cousin was nervous, she said "maybe we should head back", but I was stupid enough to think it would be alright and so I argued it was "just a minor detour".
So we took the minor detour, but lo and behold, the other road was also flooded. So we took another detour, kinda little bit further ahead but no worries. We were just 10 min away anyways.
So we just started driving on this adjacent road to the one my friend had vetoed.
Suddenly we were in an one way road, and diverging from the map, but we weren't too worried yet. The road was long and we could see lots of gated communities on our left side, and on the right there were a couple of buildings very spaced in between, and lots of bare land as far as the eye could see.
The driver kept telling me all sorts of things regarding crime in Rio.
"You see these gated communities here? They are the Militia owned places" - for non Brazilian people, Militia in Rio are ex cops, ex-firefighters and the such that operate like a mafia in many communities, they are the "alternative" to criminal factions but they are just as bad.
"And these barricades are the areas controlled by criminal factions".
It just so happens that on this one way road to what appeared to be more rural area, there was a barricade at the end of it, and no way to turn back.
The driver started getting more anxious at this point. The road had 2 lines but the left one was barricaded with dirt, about 3 meters tall, so all cars would need to go on the right lane to go in.
We got inside. And we kept going for 10 more minutes or so in that direction. The gated communities were no more and we started going deeper into the favela controlled by the criminal faction.
After going on that road we started going really deep into the favela, we knew there was no government or police or anything inside, no one to look for help, and it was huge. On our right side we could see the favela's houses up the hill, on the left side there was this huge grass land and the horizon was hid behind a bunch of tall trees.
this was all we saw on our right(illustrative, I didn't take a picture then lol)
The road eventually led us further right to go inside the roads around the housing areas uphill. No cell signal there.
We then took a turn to the right into the housing area. The Uber driver was almost shaking, and he hit my left leg and told me to "greet your family members in the street". I took the hint, and started saying "Hi Claudia, hi Felipe how you doing, long time no see". I always find this bit funny, I was laughing then too, at the ridiculousness, I looked as gringo as I could, but still pretending to know people on the street haha.
Then we hit a very deserted road. I turned back and Antonio was red almost passing out, my cousin was also petrified. I was weirdly enough extremely calm, I almost felt at home.
The Uber stopped midway through the street and went back. Then we talked to someone at the beginning of the street and asked if we could safely cross it. The person stopped to think, asked us where we were trying to go - "out" we said.
They yelled at someone we couldn't see on the other side "they are with me let them pass". I believe if we hadn't come back we would have been shot dead.
We did this a couple more times, I honestly don't remember, but we were on this routine of "talk to people at the beginning of the street, ask if we could cross to the other end and if we couldn't, which path we would need to take". The Uber kept telling me "I wanna go home to my wife and kids".
On one of those streets, the person we asked said "oh yeah you can cross it, you will just need to go through the boys".
The boys, as it turned out, were 13-14 year old boys with eyes blood shot, holding rifles and machine guns on top of bicycles that were charged to not let anyone unknown to them pass.
I remember we went next to them. Stopped the car. Two boys came and stood in front of the car, looked at us with those red eyes, pointed the guns at us, and then after a brief pause let us pass.
Afterwards I don't quite remember all of it, we did meet other roads filled with "the boys" this time older, I just remember the younger boys mostly, they were the ones that shocked me the most.
Eventually the path brought us to another tall barricade of dirt, this time we were finally leaving. It turns out we had to pass in another 3 other barricades, apparently we were in that deep in.
After another 30 minutes or so, we passed the final barricade and were finally out and just next to our friend's birthday house.
Everyone in the car just felt a huge pressure be lifted off.
We were alive. We didn't really know how much danger we were in tho.
But the birthday girl knew. She later told us "this favela is one of the most dangerous ones, no one who isn't from it ever gets out, most people get killed inside it, we hear stories all the times, gringos getting lost and then they find the bodies". She said she thought we were dead since we were so long without a cell signal.
What was supposed to be a 40 min Uber trip ended up taking us 2 hours. Most of it inside the favela.
As we were dropping off the Uber, I gave him a generous tip, he fucking deserved it, helped us through like a champ, and his instincts led us to safety. Thank God for him.
But we arrived at the party, had our survival story and ended up getting drunk that night.
Now, as I was writing this, I could feel all those emotions again, it's not easy. And I don't understand for the life of me how I get anxious at a party where I don't know anyone, but I wasn't anxious when my life was on the line in that favela. To be fair, I was far more nervous on Saturday, but I think it was because I was still high.
I don't see myself as a brave person, in fact I feel a lot of fear. And I tend to over estimate my fears vs my capacity to handle them.
Hopefully I don't need to go through something like this again, but if I ever do, I hope to be able to face it head on, and if death finds me, let it find me in bravery, and may it be in service of someone else.
I would not have regretted to die then if it meant my cousin and friend could live.
Thankfully it didn't come to that.