Growing up fishing, camping and riding bikes, I’ve always considered myself a pretty outdoorsy person. There is no place I’d rather be than sitting by the lake or running at the beach. So when I heard about Wake Forest’s summer study abroad program in Peru, I jumped at the chance to explore somewhere exciting and new.
After returning home from a week-long frolic in Myrtle Beach, I began to prepare for my month-long Peruvian trek by watching The Emperor’s New Groove on repeat and browsing the REI website like it was my job. Just a few days later, I found myself standing in the Lima airport armed with a backpack, binoculars and brand-spankin’-new hiking boots, ready to embark on my biggest adventure to date.
Our small group spent the next month exploring the deserts on the coast and the cloud forest of the highlands. After a pretty tough 8-hour hike from the mountains down into the Amazonian basin, we then spent two weeks camping in the rainforest. Bear Grylls has nothing on us.
We sweated, we froze, we learned to improvise and we learned to lean on each other. Our definition of clean laundry changed drastically, and collectively, we probably donated enough blood to mosquitos to rival a Red Cross drive.
Real life in the field is not glamorous. But as the trip went on, I began to realize that Discovery Channel does not fully prepare you for spiders crawling across your feet or jaguars prowling around your tent in the night. Our view of nature back home is not real. This was the real deal. It was real nature, real experiences, real people concerned with the same environmental issues that concern me, and having real, intelligent conversations about the sources of and solutions to these issues.
Heated candlelight debates in the late-night jungle made me want to be in that real, aware environment for the rest of my life.
Three days after getting back I found myself sitting in Turner Field at a Braves game with some friends. I couldn’t get over how loud it was, loud and open. I could see for miles, and I could see the skyscrapers of Atlanta in the distance. For weeks before, all I had seen was green.
*Photography by Mary Alyce McCullough and Allie Gruber
Check out our group’s blog!