It took me the entirety of my freshman year in college to find out that our school offered credited classes overseas. After hearing this told from an informed fellow student, I picked up my hung-over head from the page it had been holding, and wondered aloud where I should go. My college offered all the usual haunts: Spain, Italy, Germany, Australia, England. Fun, but overdone. It also included countries I had never taken a notice of: Kenya, Tanzania, Russia, China, and Ecuador. I weighed my options.

“Actually, that’s E.C.U.A.D.O.R,” came the voice of the overseas coordinator at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. I was enduring my second week of a finals infused flu, and the wheels of my mind were turning much less freely than usual. In accordance with my drop in IQ, I had substituted a “Q” with the required “C” in the word “Ecuador.” It seemed logical enough to me. All I knew about E”c”uador at the time was that it was in South America, they probably spoke Spanish, and the Equatorial line ran through it at some point. The latter point being surmised from the fact that the word “equator” made up the country's name. Einstein I wasn’t, but neither was I Sling Blade, uh-huh.

The editing woman before me was in charge of all the school's overseas trips, an envious vocation. She was not only in charge of creating and keeping contacts in the foreign countries, she was also judge, jury, and executioner in the overseas application process. In my clouded stupor my first impression for her seemed to be less than exemplary for my desire to travel overseas. Perhaps my daze was adequate in describing my knowledge of the country I was applying for, but not of my keen desire to travel.

Picking a relatively obscure country like Ecuador is fertilizing fodder for questions as to why I chose that as my destination. I came up with a number of creative answers to the inevitable and varying questions of “why?”, none of which were completely true. There was, however, one answer that I considered the closest to accuracy, and which summed up my overall life drive. When queried I usually replied, “I want to go someplace I would never have considered going, unless it was thrust into my perception. When I retire, and I again have the freedom to travel, my body won’t produce enough self sufficiency to properly explore a third world country. So why not go now?” (Of course I don’t really sound like that, but let’s just pretend). In answer to my rhetorical question, a torrent of acceptable answers as to why I shouldn’t go would flow from those that purported to fear for my safety.

Honestly, Ecuador was not my first choice. My heart lay in the darkness of a different continent, however in the same hemisphere: Kenya. Perhaps it was the omnipresent force that acts upon all things with futures that had decided otherwise: fate. I am a convenient fatalist, believing in it when the romance of the idea suits. Fate’s antithesis, chance, an oxymoronic idea, which finds its power in doing nothing, may instead have apathetically played its hand. Whatever the reason, my decision to apply for the Kenya program dissipated with the realization that the opportunity had been trumped by the actualized deadline. That is, I missed the deadline by a day. By the time I realized the country was there on the map, and study there was offered for the same price as college admission, minus the books, (debt is accruing anyway, why not have some fun with the money? I’d already have to trade in my first born son to pay off a few of the loans), the application deadline had passed by two days. “Perfect!” came my sickly sarcastic wheeze in acknowledgment of my late attempt at adventure. “What’s left? Where else would I never think to go? Where are the political borders that obscurity lies within?” That same day I found myself misspelling “Ecuador” under the critical eye of the one person that would decide whether or not I deserved to attend the trip.

I would come to find out that it would be a trip that created the most vivid memories and strongest friendships I have yet experienced. That same trip that would set the foundation for my current opportunity to cut my teeth as a travel writer on the ruggedness of the Andes.