Carioca

Our home on wheels is a custom-built, fully self-contained, off-grid, four-season habitat box mounted on a modified off-road, four-wheel-drive Kenworth K370 truck chassis.

We named it Carioca, after a word rooted in Tupi-Guaraní — the language of one of the main Indigenous peoples who lived along the coast and across the plateau of pre-Columbian Brazil.

The origin of the word is debated. It may come from the Tupi-Guaraní kari’oka, a blend of kara’iwa (“white man”) and oka (“house”); a name once used for the cluster of European settlers’ houses around Rio de Janeiro. It may instead come from kariîó oka, joining kariîó (the Carijó, a Guaraní tribe who lived in Rio between what are now the Glória and Flamengo neighbourhoods) with oka, “house.” Or it may trace back to akari, a species of catfish known to inhabit the local waters, again paired with oka. Today the word simply means anything, or anyone, belonging to the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were both born there, so we are Cariocas, and now our truck is too.

The wavy pattern along the habitat box skirt is a tribute to home: the black-and-white Portuguese stonework of the Copacabana Beach promenade in Rio.

On the cab doors, a parrot stands on that same sidewalk, between the beaches of Copacabana and Leme. He is José Carioca or “Joe Carioca”, Donald Duck’s Brazilian friend from the Disney films Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944), created by Brazilian cartoonist José Carlos de Brito after Walt Disney visited Brazil in 1941..

Each side of the habitat box carries a world map. On the driver’s side is Tobias Young’s map drawn in the Grieger Triptychial projection; a striking view that renders the world’s landmasses as one great archipelago, and makes you realise how nearly continuous the land is from South America through Central and North America, Europe, Asia, southern Africa, India and Australia.

On the passenger’s side is Massimo Pietrobon’s artistic reconstruction of the Earth around 300 million years ago, in the late Paleozoic, when every landmass was fused into the supercontinent Pangaea. Roughly 200 million years ago, in the early Mesozoic, Pangaea began to break apart into the continents we know today.

Curupira

Our motorcycle is named Curupira; kuru’pir in Tupi-Guaraní, meaning “covered in blisters.”

In legend, the Curupira is a guardian of the forest and its animals. He has bright red or orange hair that can burst into flame, and his feet are turned backwards; so the footprints he leaves run the wrong way, confusing hunters, woodcutters, and anyone who would harm the forest. He rides a peccary through the trees and preys on poachers, on those who take more than they need, and on anyone who hunts animals still caring for their young. It felt like the right name for the machine that carries us deepest into wild places.

The rest of our gear carries Tupi-Guaraní names too. Our mountain bikes are Curumin (“boy”) and Cunhatã (“girl”).

Our board is Pororoca, after the Amazon tidal bore whose waves can rise to thirteen feet and travel as much as five hundred miles upriver.

Our kayak is Yara — a blend of y (“water”) and îara (“lady”).

And our raft is Ypupîara, a mythological water-creature of the Amazon whose legend has inspired more than a few horror films about things that live in the river.

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