damien

For me, it's seems, life can only go downhill. I've scuba dived the Great Barrier Reef, ate pan-fried cockroaches off a street cart in Bangkok, survived bicycling down the World's Most Dangerous Road in Bolivia(it was the first time bicycling in over 10 years, a little bit perturbed by the nob thingees on my handles, my girlfriend had to tell me that it was 2006, all bikes nowadays have gear shifts. uh,fuck), went to the Tokyo fish market at 4 in the morning, heard the Dalai Lama speak in Dharmasala, India, scuba-dived WWII shipwrecks in Truk, Micronesia, went to Berlin's Love Parade, trekked to Machu Pichu, did an 11 day trek in the Cordillera Huayhuash in Peru, got interrogated by paramilitaries on an overnight bus in Colombia, sky-dived over glaciers in New Zealand, etc. I've lived life as free as one possibly can...to roam from country to country alone with everything you need on your back and the only responsibility you have is to take care of yourself and your belongings (this one's a little more difficult, my shit got stolen twice); to do exactly what you want to do without compromise and fully engage yourself in new realities. this is living. and now i'm back in Los Angeles,interning for the human-rights organization Amnesty International and working part-time on the side trying to figure out how I can turn this passion, my experiences into a career.
the essence of backpacking can be summed up by one image: being in a foreign country where you don't speak the language, completely lost in the middle of nowhere, yourself and everything on your back completely drenched from an incessant downpour, but standing there unfazed with a gigantic smile on your face.