I became a photographer because of my love for travel. The thrill of discovering new places and cultures with my camera is something I cherish and I spent the last two months traveling from Colombia to Nicaragua on my seemingly never-ending quest to learn spanish and to properly capture all the amazing colors and beautiful faces I found along the way.

Talking or writing about these adventures is never easy. How do you put two months of memories in to a few sentences to tell your friends? The trip was full of amazing stories… climbing steaming volcanoes, spotting pink dolphins in the Amazon, swimming through shark infested waters to save the boat (ok, I don’t know if there were sharks but I imagined there were), jungle trekking, volcano boarding, chicken buses, rappelling down waterfalls, paragliding over canyons, hitchhiking, caving, surfing and tons of new friends.

I imagine I’ve taken a few years off of my parents’ lives worrying them with all the crazy adventures I come up with every year. Even my concerned brother got angry when I went “missing” on this trip for a few days. He angrily questioned my mother, “What does she think she has to prove?” and that really got me thinking. Although I like to think I travel all for pleasure, excitement and of course work I realized I am also doing these solo trips to prove something. I want to prove that places like Colombia are not as scary as people like to believe they are. I want to prove that people are people no matter where you go and that predominately kindness prevails. I want to prove that I am alive. That I can be comfortable outside my comfort zone and meet the most amazing people from all over the world who teach me things not only about their cultures but utimately about myself.

At the end of my trips, as I fly home, I always end up wondering how many more of these adventures I will get to go on and I realized at the end of this trip that I will never stop. Traveling is ingrained in me and no matter what life throws at me or what path I walk down I will always wander. That is living to me.