Most people would ask me: why backpacking? Couldn’t you go to a nice hotel? and my answer was; “we chose to do this, we weren’t there for vacation, we traveled for the experience.” The unique side of backpacking is the fact that you get to be extremely close to the life of people from a wide range of social groups in the countries we visited. You get to see what no one else could, you can observe and experience everyday life from the simplest form in villages found in the middle of mountain ranges, to the complex life of the capital cities we went through. And by not being attached to any tour or guide, etc., you get the chance and the challenge of living close to all the culture moving around you.
Backpacking simplifies every single little thing, by doing this you let yourself experience the simplest thing with strong emotion, a type of feeling you couldn't get otherwise. These feelings made me appreciate my lifestyle and opportunities I've had throughout my life in a deeper, more connected way.
Traveling like this at 15 without parents isn’t exactly common so I had to do a lot of paperwork to get my permission for traveling from one country to another, and the best way of doing this was to put my best friend Jose as my legal representative, which to me sounded like having an ‘extra parent’ -he became part of the family ever since.
When I returned from the trip my perspective on everything that surrounded me changed completely, I was an alien to a place I used to call home. The experience was so strong that I couldn’t help it, I just had to share it with the world, I decided I had to find a way of spreading this to other people as a different perspective on life. After a lot of thinking and planning I ended up making an exposition in Quito, my home city. The exposition lasted an entire week, the opening day I gave a presentation explaining the whole experience and the stories behind the pictures, I answered some questions and then stayed to guide everyone through the images and stories behind them.
