Intro.

On my 18th birthday I will have been alive for 6570 days. Out of those I should have been present in an institutionalized education facility for 2448 days. In 2011 I was given the opportunity to go to Peru on an exchange program. Up until that tender age of 15 I had not travelled out of Africa since ten years before. I expected so much from my experience that I didn't receive, yet was gifted with so much from it that I never could have thought possible. New sights, new smells, new tastes, new sounds, new friends, and most importantly, new knowledge. the travel bug hadn't just bitten me, it had infected me from head to toe and every day that I sat in a classroom it felt like if I didn't get up, run out the door and fly straight away to anywhere else the bug would spread consume me limb by limb. I've learnt so much inside the four walls of a classroom that I will be ever grateful for, but when I think of the amount I learnt and gained in just two and a half months 10 000 km away in another place, I find myself questioning whether or not it was worth it, or the right place for me. The knowledge that so much more to learn lay within travelling and life experience outside of those walls and the hundreds of pages in all the textbooks has become too much for me to bear. This is the main reason that I have decided to spend one year travelling.

I am picking up where I left off almost three years ago: Peru. From there I will go to Colombia and stay in the capital city Bogota for five months, hopefully picking up a lot of Spanish and a reasonsble amount of cash to fund the rest of my trip. From Colombia I will cross the  Darién Gap by boat to Panama, from there I will be catching buses through Costa Rica (a visit to the Sloth sanctuary is definitely in order), Nicaragua, El Salvador, to Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, then on to Cancun, Mexico where I will meet up with my family for a few days. From Cancun I will make my way up to the USA and meet up with a friend and road trip from LA to Seattle, catching a bus from Seattle to Vancouver for two months. Along the way I hope to be staying on organic farms and learning a thing or two about this way of life.

I have 19 days left until I leave the West Coast of South Africa for the West Coast of the Americas. I am writing this more to prove to myself that I can do it and to remember my trip by, but for anyone who reads it I hope I can carry this story across with words and photographs as it means everything to me. And if anyone who does read this has any advice for a young, wide-eyed traveller, please don't hesitate to throw it my way. One more hisory exam and then the journey begins.