Fear & Growing
An American photographer’s 29-day bespoke journey through the heart of Brazil.
I’m an American, from Texas. I’ve been working with photography my whole life, and I’m also a carpenter & an inventor. I wouldn’t call myself a traveler, but I’ve traveled quite a bit, especially in recent years, and especially after my GOGO trip.
We traveled from São Paulo, up through the mountains in Minas, then to the mountains in Bahia, then to the coast, and then back. It was a lot of mileage (laughs). And it was very, very beautiful. Honestly, I had no idea that Brazil was like that. As far as routes & itineraries go, it was definitely an epic.
“The first thing I always tell people is that it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The second thing I tell them is I would do it again tomorrow.”
— Cam cullen
I think one of the hardest parts about traveling the way we did is that you’re doing all of this crazy geographical & cultural exploration while being completely immersed in an entirely foreign culture. It’s kind of like, buckle up! You have to kind of accept this mentality that you don’t have any control. You’re just along for the ride, so you hold on and try to take in as much as you can in. And there’s a lot to take in.
It’s like I was innocent at the beginning of the trip. I’d really only been outside of the country once, almost 20 years before, and while I had some expectations about the country, itself, I really had no idea what the next 30 days would bring in terms of the experience. It was truly transformational for me.
Honestly, there were a lot of hard parts (laughs). So many crazy situations and challenges, both physically & psychologically. The night on the boat (on Day 20, when we traveled to an island off the coast of Bahia) might have been the height of the psychological challenge for me. Everything was new to me again: the people & the culture, our surroundings. We had been in São Paulo for a bit, and then in Minas for a couple of weeks, and then suddenly, in Bahia, nothing was familiar. It was night when we got on the boat, and the town we departed from was complete chaos. The other people on the boat weren’t talking to one another. I was just out of my element to be honest; scared that something bad was going to happen to us. It was a mental thing and I know that now, but sometimes you go through that when you’re put into a foreign situation. (laughs) In the end, everything was awesome. The island was beautiful. But the feelings I had on the boat that night will always stay with me.
I’m grateful.
I called (GOGO co-Founder) Eddie maybe 3 days after the trip; after I’d had some time to decompress (laughs). It’d been a long trip, and I felt like the last couple days of it had really taken a toll on me. I wanted to make sure he knew how truly grateful I was to have had such a profound experience. I felt like I’d gotten a master’s in Brazilian studies & a life-changing experience at the same time, and that was a lot. It was a much more epic trip than I had imagined. Literally, the adventure of a lifetime.
