The story of Cabeza, the man from Córdoba who travels the country on a motorcycle with his dog to interview Argentine Olympic athletes

“I’m going to travel by motorcycle with my dog ​​Malca throughout Argentina, documenting different Olympic athletes because in July the 2024 Olympic Games will be held in Paris. I’m going to share the stories of the athletes and show the sacrifice they make every day in every training session to achieve their goals and make their dreams come true.

This is how the traveler, content creator and YouTuber Matías Virrarruel Vercesi (31) introduces himself, whom everyone knows as Cabeza, who left Córdoba on March 1 and stopped in Rosario, Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata, Puerto Madryn, Trelew… The objective is to tour the country on two wheels with his dog Malca, interviewing classified Argentine athletes and sportsmen (or representatives of the disciplines that participate in France), get sponsors and travel to Paris.

With a travel blog called “Viajá con Cabeza”, he uploads photos and videos on his networks (Instagram: @viaja_con_cambio) and YouTube (Viaja con Cabeza). These days, he carries a camera, a gimbal, a drone, a GoPro and a 360, as well as tie-on and helmet microphones.

He immediately clarifies that the name is “a play on words between my nickname and the way I travel because I always say: ‘When you travel, do it thinking.” However, he recognizes that most of his decisions are made guided more by his intuition because of the logic.

Every year, Cabeza proposed a challenge, from making a documentary in a favela in Rio de Janeiro to cycling from Egypt to Qatar to see Lionel Messi in 2022, to the current motorcycle tour through Argentina, accompanied by Malca in search of stories of Olympic athletes. “Lately I’ve been linking travel with sport,” he reflects.

Born in Córdoba capitalCabeza played rugby for 20 years and studied film and television at the National University of Córdoba, a passion that has accompanied him since he was a child when he played making films with a camera that was in his house.

Inspired by films such as “The Motorcycle Diaries”, “Into the Wild” and “El Dorado”, in 2014 he was encouraged to travel for the first time by motorcycle to the Argentine Northwest, protected by the “angels of the road”.

In 2017 he settled for a time in Key West (Florida, USA) and worked as a dishwasher and pedicab: “I took people on bicycles from one side of the island to the other. And with the money I raised I was able to buy a camera, a drone and a computer with the idea of travel the world and have my own blog.

In 2019, his intuition guided him to Rio de Janeiro. He lived eight months in a favela near Ipanema to film “Rugby is our passion”, where he showed how they taught boys and girls from the Cantagalo community to play rugby, trying to keep them away from drug trafficking and showing them the values ​​of the sport. To pay your expenses, Cabeza sold 110 Argentine empanadas per day on the beach, walking on the hot sand.

That year one of his best friends died and, faced with the pain, he decided to undertake another motorcycle trip through Latin America to “cry and heal, kilometer by kilometer.”

“Happens the coldest night of my life in the Jama Pass, at 4,200 meters above sea level on the border of Argentina and Chile, where the temperature in winter drops to 20 degrees below zero,” he recalls among a thousand anecdotes of his adventures through Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil.

Then he returned to Rio on a motorcycle, but The pandemic began and we returned to Córdoba: “If the end of the world was coming, I wanted me to meet my family,” he thought.

And the motorcycle? The ’92 Honda Nighthawk 250 – which belonged to his grandfather – was left in a public shed without a chain for three years, and the day he decided to go look for it, he was waiting for him there.

Cabeza stayed in Córdoba for seven months, and at the end of 2020 He left for Tulum (Mexico) with 143 dollars in his pocket. He worked generating audiovisual content for six months, hitchhiked through part of Guatemala with a friend and returned to Mexico.

His traveling companion was waiting for him there.: the dog Malca, just two months old. And in a backpack, on the motorcycle’s gas tank, Malca adapted to traveling. He is now two and a half years old.

In 2022, after several failed attempts to cross his motorcycle from Argentina to South Africa to reach the Soccer World Cup in Qatar, he contacted the guys from “Todo a Pedal”, who had crossed the African continent by bicycle with the aim of going to see Messi.

They were already cycling through Egypt, so Cabeza bought a bike and flew to Cairo. And Malca? She stayed with her mother in Córdoba.

Cabeza joined the group and started pedaling with them: heat, horns, headwind. From Egypt they went to Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, all without stopping for three months.

They pedaled more than 150 km per day because they had little money left and they wanted to get to Qatar first, to tell their story, join a banner and see if they could get accommodation and tickets. It cost a lot, but they did it: they entered all the games, some with invitations and others paying.

They gave notes to the cap (in reality, they were passing the bike helmet) and “it was all magical”, but he admits that they moved around a lot and some nights they slept in tents very far away and without air conditioning in the oppressive heat.

“The ‘Inmortals’ project is a series of videos that I upload to YouTube every Sunday and the idea is to film and document the different Olympic athletes that we have in Argentina because the Olympic Games start in Paris in July,” explains Cabeza.

Cabeza highlights: “It is not the same to excel in soccer as in another sport in which perhaps you are a champion but you have to work on something else in parallel.”

It must be taken into account that Argentina has more than 100 athletes classified in 14 disciplines for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, a list that may be extended. The event will take place from July 26 to August 11 in the French capital, with more than 10,500 athletes.

The idea is to work and create good quality content and I would love to go to Paris. Among others, he interviewed Analía Zacarías (she does BMX), the pentathlete Franco Serrano (fencing, swimming, equestrian jumping, pistol type and running), Gastón Revol (rugby 7) and Chiara Ferreti (windsurfing).

What is the itinerary like? Cabeza left Córdoba to reach Puerto Madryn, with the idea of ​​going down to Trelew and turning towards Esquel, always in search of Olympic athletes. He will then travel to Mendoza, return to Buenos Aires, go up to Misiones, go to Jujuy and finish in Córdoba, his starting point.

“Tomorrow I don’t know where I’m going to sleep,” says Cabeza, who always carries the tent everywhere. But also, many people approach him to talk to him and, upon learning his story and seeing that he travels with Malca, they usually offer him accommodation or food.

At the same time, Cabeza is organizing a series of talks in schools to tell their story and spread the effort made by Olympic athletes.

Although you would like to interview a representative of each discipline, the map changes as you advance with the bike.

How does Malca travel? Two and a half years old, the dog is comfortable on a support on the seat, specially designed to travel behind Cabeza and they make technical stops every 70 km.

“It’s like a double bed where you can stand, sit or lie down. She is tied and safe, He wears large goggles for the wind, a collar to also cover his earsa sweatshirt, a jacket, scarves… The wind on the route is freezing and even more so in the South,” he explains.

Before continuing his journey, the Cordoban traveler maintains that “the body always holds up, what sometimes can’t hold up is the head. Today I know that my purpose is to be of service as a messenger, to take care of and transmit the message that everything can be achieved and that we have the power to create our reality.