About Me
Welcome to my virtual diary! My name is Megan and I’m a 23-year-old beginning to take on the world post-grad. Follow along with my documentation of past travels and current adventures.
One of my first memories is being carried for miles in my dad’s backpack through a minefield of tuco tuco holes that caved in under our weight. From three years old and into my teen years, my sister and I joined my parents in Antofagasta de la Sierra, Argentina.
It was there I became accustomed to a life spent wandering around my mom’s archaeological site or playing in the unfinished, adobe brick addition to the town’s hostel. A life where Christmas meant sand and strings of paper cranes meticulously folded from small packets of origami paper from the small stand in town. For the first several years, Don Vicente, an old Catamarcan man who traveled by burro, let us stay on his property outside of the pueblo. Our weathered blue tent sat near the shallow winding creek, lined by tall green pampas grass.
At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate it or understand how incredible it was to miss school and be surrounded by bandana-wearing archaeologists, helping sift through buckets of sand and collecting the tiny discarded quartz crystals that I stuffed into orange pill bottles. I mean how many kids can say they were spit on by a vicuña while wandering the Andes Mountains.
Back at school, I led my friends on playground expeditions, pointing out flint stones that popped up here and there. At the dig, a shallow overhanging cave, I was fond of sitting overlooking the valley, trying to spot mummies in the crevices in the cliffs and burying my Polly Pockets as evidence that I too had lived a life there.
My sister and I came up with games to pass the time. Dried pellets of llama poop became the object of our diversions as we used sticks to toss them into a triangle for points— and occasionally at each other. While we were small enough, we sledded down steep sand dunes on potato sacks.
The emptiness of the desert fostered my overactive imagination that kept me believing in the fairies I wrote to until I was ten. My experiences in Antofagasta never seemed extraordinary, but they provided the foundation for my essence, the themes of spontaneity, modesty, adaptability, and a thirst for adventure in my life.
As young teens, we explored the pueblo, befriending locals, decorating their hostel’s dining room, and managing to convince the cooks to let us bake sugar cookies. Everyone was generous, despite the material poverty of the desert.
I attribute my fascination with the world and how people live to my early exposure to a society with such contrasting values from my home in Texas and an anthropological approach to life I picked up from my mom. I am motivated by my endless curiosity about humanity, culture, and the way people view the world. I want to see and experience and understand as much as I can, collecting stories and fostering friendships along the way.
From the highs of a rooftop dinner briefly bathed in the rose gold light of the sun before it dipped below the horizon and ended Ramadan, to the lows of getting spit on by a vicuña, I want life to be an exploration I get to document and share.