Once upon a time in my YouTuber career I started a channel called The Last Trip. It was about unknown places that are going to disappear, for all sorts of reasons, or that could be great places to develop tourism.
On one of those trips it very nearly was my last. I already think of myself as someone who has no idea how to calculate a risk, but I never imagined that would take me all the way to a near death experience.
The town is called Muçum (Brazil). Leandra and I had gone looking for the highest railway viaduct in the Americas, and more than that, we were curious about the stories around the building of it.
One of those stories is from the construction, which happened during the military dictatorship. A soldier fell into a column and they carried on pouring the concrete. That one got me, and I decided to season it a bit, inventing a few other details, hoping to build a proper myth out of it so that one day somebody would make a great film about the Concreted Soldier.
The view from Viaduct 13, the big one, is astonishing, with an array of tunnels and viaducts crossing the mountains.
I decided to go into one of the tunnels because of the story about the windows halfway in. Luckily, or not, I picked the right tunnel. I found the windows and I also found the near death.
After taking some shots of the windows I started back. I couldn’t see the tunnel mouth because the tunnel curves, so I was in complete darkness and my head torch was a joke. It was fine. I was so pleased about the windows and about the whole trip, and everything was going well up until that moment.
Those tunnels are small and damp and the air in there is heavy, so I was walking slowly to avoid putting a foot down in the wrong place. While I was waiting to see the opening I started to hear a continuous sound with a vibration under it. I froze. A train was coming.
I ran. It was hard because the floor is uneven and one mistake would put me on the ground. What they say about your life flashing in front of you is completely true, and in my case I finally understood why the channel was called The Last Trip.
The sound kept getting louder and I couldn’t tell whether the vibration was my heart or the train behind me. When I finally saw the opening I ran faster than I have ever run, and when I looked up there was Leandra kicking little stones about. She was in danger too and had no idea.
“The train is coming”, I screamed. She didn’t hear me and she didn’t move. That’s it, I thought, I’m going to die and Leandra is going to die too, and what a stupid idea it was to come here, I’m an idiot. My mother always told me to be careful and not do stupid things. My father wanted me to plan my trips and read everything about a place before going. According to my brother I was crazy and would catch some disease out here. Not one of them ever mentioned dying.
A chill went up my spine and my last few steps inside the tunnel felt lighter, so I assume my soul had already started leaving my body to get clear of the disaster. I grabbed Leandra’s hand and jumped off the track, into the small gap between the tunnel and the viaduct. The train was right behind me and moving fast, and when it came out of the tunnel the noise was like an enormous laugh, almost deafening. Possibly it was god laughing.
The train, as it turns out, was not a train. It was a sort of track cleaning machine, there to clean idiots off the face of the earth, or rather to teach me not to play around in railway tunnels, viaducts, soldiers’ souls, and funny names for YouTube channels.