How the time has passed...

After our 8 months abroad, we boarded a plane from Quito, Ecuador, touching down briefly in Atlanta (and getting to see Jameson's dad, granny and granddaddy, making the 5 hour layover pass all too quickly), and ending ultimately in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We're readjusting to having technology and modern conveniences at our fingertips, for better or worse. It's pretty nice having toilet seats on all the toilets. It was strange speaking only English the first couple of days, disappointing that one needs a car to get anywhere, and has been incredibly comfortable relaxing here (thanks, guys!).

The last two months volunteering provided us with insights into Ecuador: its people, its floristic diversity, its conservation practices; we made some good friends, learned about orchid morphology and pollination, and about tropical dry tropical forest ecosystems. We ate more verdes (green plantains) and arroz (rice) than you can imagine, lived in a little bamboo hut, and ventured into the jungle. We spoke only Spanish for a month and gained an appreciation for Ecuadorian pop music and musica liquida.

Now it's time to figure out the next steps in life. After an adventure like we shared, we return with more photographs than we can count, new ideas about the world and ways of living, and a clean slate for moving forward. Our minds our full but lucid as we begin to process the reality of our experiences. As we recount them to family and friends they at the same time become more real and more abstract, in some ways fantastical - did those things really happen? Did we really collect a rare plant in Bolivia? Did we really walk from Argentina to Chile? How did we travel so far using only public transportation through the wild and remote places that we now know? As we review and show our photos we see how the photos and the stories are not the same thing: the hallucinogenic landscapes of the Uyuni Salt Flats have a story, but it is not embedded in the photos; and we have few images of the places which were most extreme because we were living them.

We fell off the bandwagon of recounting stories towards the end of the trip, and have caught some slack from that. I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this - if you are and you want to read more let us know, there is lots more to tell; and as we begin to incorporate these experiences into our frame of knowledge back here, I think there will be new layers of meaning in the things that we were immersed in while traveling. But I don't want to write to an absent audience.