A little more of a personal story today as I sit in my office struck with wanderlust. It’s got me thinking about why I started Ecovoyager in the first place. Starting a travel company, helping people see extraordinary places, meet extraordinary people, do extraordinary things has long been a dream of mine. Ecovoyager is still young, but I am proud of the work my small team and I have so far accomplished.
It hasn’t come without hard work and sacrifice. I quit a well-paying consulting job to do this full time, diving straight into the unknown. The reality of running a travel company is far from the ideal dream. It’s a lot of website coding, phone calls, long nights, and early mornings. Yet I’m still driven to succeed. Every setback, large or small, reminds me why I started in the first place.
That reason goes back further than I sometimes realize. I started traveling very young. My parents were fairly adamant about getting my sisters and I out of the country to see the world. I guess I was lucky in that regard compared to a lot of people. Eighty or so countries on, I can still vividly remember my first foreign country ever: Costa Rica, when I was ten years old.
I still have memories of driving around the lush jungle mountains, ziplining in Monteverde, seeing the red lava glowing at night at La Fortuna. The volcano is no longer active, I hear, but back then it was mesmerizing. The whole trip was unlike anything I had experienced growing up in small town New Hampshire.
The Homestay
But the most important part, the memory that shaped everything that came after, was the homestay we did with a local family.
This was no ordinary homestay. My parents stayed with one family and my sister and I stayed with another, separate from them. They were close by, where my parents felt comfortable enough to leave us but far enough to make it feel like 100 miles to a young child. We would see each other every day for the few days we were there. But still, staying with a random, non-English-speaking family without my parents was, at first, horrifying.
Details are sparse from my ten-year-old memory, but I distinctly remember being so scared to even try to communicate with everyone, let alone in Spanish, a language I had only just started learning at my parents’ insistence. The family was a large one with lots of children, and they lived on an active farm in a typical open-air house in the countryside. The sights, the sounds, the smells were all foreign to me. Every moment felt uncertain.
Alejandro
One of the children, though, soon started to warm up to me. Strangely enough, his name was Alejandro. My name is Alex, for the record. That small coincidence felt like a sign, even to a child who didn’t believe in signs. He became my guide through a world I didn’t understand.
I remember playing soccer on the dusty, pot-hole ridden field next to the house. I remember helping with farm chores I had never done before. And I remember the food. Meals prepared by the mother, eaten together on a wooden table while geckos climbed the walls. The taste of freshly made fried plantains is a hard one to forget.
But most of all, I remember laughing and talking deep into the warm, humid night with my new friend. Me trying to speak the best Spanish a ten-year-old from New Hampshire could, and Alejandro doing his best to help me along. We communicated through gestures, through patience, through the universal language of kids who want to play. By the end of those few days, the fear had melted into something I didn’t have words for yet.
I never saw Alejandro again. I don’t know what happened to him, whether he still lives on that farm, whether he remembers the American kid who butchered his language and laughed too loud at dinner. But I think about him sometimes. I think about what he gave me without knowing it.
Why It Matters
As I sit here in my office, far from the ever-traveling business owner I envisioned myself being, this memory hits hard for me. It reminds me why I love traveling so much in the first place. It’s not about the destinations themselves, as stunning as they can be. It’s the feeling of being uncomfortable and discovering that you can handle it. It’s finding something new you didn’t know about the world, and in the process, learning something new about yourself.
Travel has a way of stripping away the familiar. It puts you in situations where your normal tools don’t work, where you have to adapt, where you have to rely on strangers who become, if only briefly, friends. Those moments change you. They stay with you in ways that comfortable experiences never do.
My goal with Ecovoyager is to give that same feeling to those who are gracious enough to put their trust in my team and me to plan their journeys. To help them push their own boundaries. To experience the beauty this world has to offer in places most people will never see. Not because those places are better than famous landmarks, but because finding them requires the kind of intention that transforms a trip into something meaningful.
For that I say thank you. And I will not give up on my dream of showing as many people as many beautiful and unknown corners of this earth as I possibly can. Somewhere out there, another ten-year-old is about to be terrified and transformed. I hope I can play a small part in making that happen.
Alex