South America is a continent forgotten. Rarely in the news for anything positive and hardly studied in American schools, our neighbors to the south seem shrouded in mystery. So what happens when three 20-somethings quit their regular jobs and set off there? “What’s the difference between exploring and being lost?” Dan Eldon said, “The journey is the destination.” This is the guiding principle behind La Aventura Project: the story of a journey.
In October 2011, Zach, Melissa, and I (Carrie) will fly from Ohio to Colombia and begin the adventure of a lifetime. With three backpacks, one Spanish-English dictionary, and one video camera between us, we will attempt to travel south overland to the very tip of Patagonia and then back north through the Amazon to arrive back where we started one year later. With a budget of $17 a day each, we will volunteer in orphanages and on farms in exchange for lodging, live on street food, and rely on the kindness of strangers. It is our hope that while we work and explore our way through a brand new continent we can make personal connections with extraordinary cultures and glimpse a different way of life. We are going to learn and to help, but we know that we stand to gain far more than we can give. Wandering thousands of miles across some of the wildest places left on earth, who knows what we will discover about our world and ourselves?
