Disclaimer: I have never fancied myself as a writer. I hope my first attempts at travel writing will not be too embarrassing for myself in the future.
Prologue: For many of those who may not know, I participated in the TVL (travel, volunteer, learning) program at La Hesperia at the tender age of 17 with three other friends. La Hesperia is a privately owned nature reserve dedicated to ecological conservation, sustainability, and community development. In the TVL program we spent lots of our time hiking, planting trees, growing vegetables, and other fun activities like making chocolate and milking cows. You can check out their cool website here: www.lahesperia.com and be impressed.
Of course like most 17 year olds, I was very impressionable, and my 2 week volunteer experience was nothing short of life changing. Life-changing in the sort of stereotypical coming-of-age way. I learned that there are bigger things in world other than me, and sometimes it’s hard to feel it, but we do have the power to affect change (the little soccer bench at La Hesperia? I MADE it. With my hands. With mud and straw and bamboo).
Through all the stupid giggles, mosquito bites, and fervent hiking, I believe we all emerged with a newly found piece of wisdom. When it was time to leave, we collectively decided to hike down the mountain to bid our final farewells to La Hesperia. Hiking down the mountain, tears streaming down my face, I thought to myself “I can come back”.
Figure 1. Us volunteers taking a super cool photo while atop the mountain.
Pre-departure:
Now, almost five years later I am returning to the reserve as the Assistant Project Manager and will stay for approximately seven months. It is days before I leave for Ecuador, and I still have trouble wrapping my head around the fact. I am obviously very excited for this adventure, but at the same time there is an overwhelming sense nervous anxiety. This is the real world, not a perfectly, pre-planned vacation.
Unlike many other travel blogs, I don’t just want to brag about how much fun I am having in Ecuador (Mostly because I can’t help but feel a stinging jealousy when I hear about other people’s travel experiences. I don’t want to inflict that upon my readers.), but give the true experience, the good and the bad, and hopefully find something more meaningful that we can all relate to.
Reflecting back to one of my favourite books from my teenage coming-of-age period, Looking for Alaska (written by John Green, internet celebrity and author of The Fault in Our Stars) the dying words of playwright Francois Rabelais come to mind: I go to seek a Great Perhaps.
Perhaps this is the source of my nervous anxiety: I feel myself standing over the edge, staring down into the Mysterious Unknown and wondering what awaits me in the Great Perhaps. My hope is to leave behind the mundanity of my comfortable first world lifestyle and shed the pressures of society to find something bigger than my small world. And that is why I have this blog. To share the very real adventures I will be having in Ecuador and find the larger scope of things that we all are a part of.
Cloud Mountain 