Hammocks, E-Coli, and Liquados #1: Introduction

I am not Kelli, the infamous writer. My photography has yet to reach National Geographic. My mother shunned the idea of me becoming a professional skydiver and I attempted drawing Ritz boxes after watching Regarding Henry, but that too became a career option not considered. But for reasons unknown I walk down the street, invisible to my own “ideal”, unique to the given clich� and longing to be soaking beans on the stove for the balleadas I could eat three meals a day, I did eat three meals a day.

At one point in my life, after my sophomore year of university, I woke up with a shameless vitality, knowing that I must be somewhere else in the world besides the monotony and mediocrity of my college town in Provo, UT. I have always survived on adrenaline and believed myself to have some sort of tenacious strength (maybe powered by the yellow terrycloth and Spider Man velcro shoes my mother dressed me in during my early stages of life) which has allowed me to realize that knowing and creating my personal legend is my only real responsibility in life. I was searching for something that I couldn’t find growing up in the hostile enormity of Europe. So after the rabies shot and research on guerilla warfare, I marked myself fearless, bought the mosquito net and iodine tablets and convinced my mother to allow me resolve my perpetual thirst for travel and adventure and culture. Two weeks later I showed up at the airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, volunteering for Accion Contra La Pobreza.

I boast at the fact that a third-world Central American airport did not provoke fear, or at least I attempt to convince myself of such; any girl would watch her bags, Leatherman pocket knife in hand as if it could shun bullets from a prejudiced machine gun. No matter how humble I desired this adventure to be, I still found comfort in the Victoria Secret underwear and the Dove deodorant. I never expected a vacation. I was prepared for cockroach invested dirt floors, and forever remained grateful for that rabies shot I was swayed into subjecting myself to, but would not have guessed that I had the capacity to love a people, so foreign to the posh white world I lived among, in the manner I could never deny I do. I became a catracha at heart; I belong in the hammocks, I am of the banana republic, I am driven by the precipitous change of character as of that I experienced among them.

Travel touches something fundamental to my being. Picasso said, “Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.” The lonely planet is the master to which I have become an apprentice. Honduras severed true hope from my expectations. For the first time, life was real.

So…in an attempt to relate these crazy travel journeys…I boldly begin.

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