How travel shaped my life 🥾
Growing up, travel wasn’t a luxury—it was a way of life. My father’s job meant a steady stream of airline miles, and my mother, a travel agent in the golden age of the industry, had the know-how to turn those miles into experiences on a limited budget in an era when we thought less about the environmental impact of travel.
We went to the conventional places for middle class Americans of that era—Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite. But we also ventured far beyond, to Ecuador, Venezuela, Trinidad, and Zimbabwe. These weren’t just vacations. They were windows into different cultures, landscapes, and ways of thinking.
While many kids my age might have been drawn to roller coasters, I was more interested in flipping over rocks to find lizards, scouring tree trunks for hidden insects, and wading through creeks in search of frogs and fish. My parents probably wondered why their son preferred destinations where the spiders were bigger, the snakes more venomous, and the mosquitoes more abundant. But I couldn’t get enough of the tropics—especially rainforests.
Then, reality hit.
I was 12 when I first saw the Amazon rainforest, staying in an Indigenous community along Ecuador’s Rio Napo. The place was alive—multicolored butterflies, caimans lurking in the shallows, parrots filling the sky with sound. It felt magical. A few months later, I read that a massive oil spill had coated that very river in black sludge. I couldn’t stop thinking about the families I had met there—where would they get fresh water? How would they fish? And what happened to the animals?
Later, in Borneo, I watched a lone orangutan move through the canopy, framed by sunlight filtering through the trees. It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever been. Several weeks later, I learned that the forest was going to be cleared for paper pulp.
Seeing these places disappear before my eyes changed me. It made me want to do something.
Most people don’t get the chance to witness these places before they’re lost. That realization led me to start writing—first a book, then a website, which I named Mongabay after a place in Madagascar.
I didn’t have a master plan. I just wanted to tell people what was happening.
Sometimes, the most important decisions don’t start as decisions at all. They start as an instinct—a pull toward something that won’t let go.
