Seeds: Germinated

In 1999 I decided to take a break from corporate IT and wanted to travel for a few months. I had good Spanish from living in Barcelona for a while in my 20s, and so, South America was beckoning. It was quite scary heading to this unknown continent and I still remember the fear that grabbed me at the airport in Madrid before I boarded my flight to Santiago in Chile. In hindsight it was one of the best decisions I made in my life - I had a rough itinerary of places I wanted to visit but it all largely went out the window when I got there - I learned a different pace of life, that timetables were just estimates and that you just had to get on board the bus with the chickens and piglets and see where you ended up! But it was here that my love of the outdoors and hunger for hiking and climbing was reignited. The magnificence of Torres del Paine, the scale of the glaciers, the exhilaration of scaling a volcano, the vastness of the Atacama but above all the generosity of the people needs to be experienced to be believed. Four months I spent meandering my way through Chile, Argentina and into Uruguay and Brazil - by foot, train and overnight bus where you were sent to sleep with a game of bingo and a cup of cocoa. One memory still gives me a few shivers - as I hiked alone from El Chaltén to Laguna de Los Tres at the foot of FitzRoy I was stalked by a mountain lion above me to my right - I obviously survived! Arriving back in Ireland just before the millennium was quite a downer but I knew that I needed to continue to get my dopamine fix from the outdoors.