Back in the far-away time of 2010, fortune smiled upon me and granted me an opportunity to travel to the small Caribbean island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. This was especially significant to me at the time in that I had never traveled abroad (or even flown, for that matter), nor had I ever been anywhere with such astounding biodiversity. As a teen who had always had a love for wildlife nurtured since early childhood, I was understandably thrilled by the prospect of going. The opportunity came to me during the earlier half of my college years, an especially reclusive period in my life during which I was much more comfortable behind the late-night glow of a monitor than than in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people. And while that may still be the case today, it was even more nerve-racking for me then.

Among the travel party were my mother, my brother, and our "guide," a family friend and Trinidad-native-turned-American-citizen Wendy (and her then nine-month-old daughter Jade), whose family we would be staying with for the duration of our trip. This greatly reduced the cost of our stay, and, also importantly ensured that we were able to experience the local culture to a much more authentic degree. In my packing, I made a point to bring along a special token from home — a small bean I had painted to look like my very beloved dog, Mert, who would accompany me in spirit on many future endeavors, even long after his passing.

In retrospect a decade later, I'm surprised by and regret how few photos I took on this trip, and how poorly I journaled the events at the time, which fell in the midst of the most difficult years of my depression. As such, this account will be riddled with gaps and ambiguity, albeit pieced together to the best of my ability after so long a delay.

We left Houston via Hobby Airport. It ended up being far less expensive to make our way all the way across the country to New Jersey and then depart for Trinidad from there, rather than to fly there directly from Houston, so the process of leaving the United States ended up being rather lengthy in total.

As a first-time flier, I had expected business at the airport to be more of a hassle than it ended up being, although I was extremely uneasy at the prospect of checking (and being separated from) luggage. Flying, though... that was something else entirely. My heart raced with exhilaration as the aircraft gained speed on the runway. I had been told that watching the world shrink had a somehow illusory effect beyond simple logic, and this held true; cars suddenly looked like miniature models on miniature roads, and the setting sun turned winding rivers into liquid gold. I couldn't help but shed a tear at the sheer beauty of it. Soon after the novelty wore off, I was greeted by the constant pressurizing of my ears, which would clear somewhat with swallowing or yawning, but returned shortly after and persisted most of the flight.

We connected in Jackson, Mississippi and were carried to Baltimore, then LaGuardia Airport in New York. From there we took a taxi to New Jersey. I have little memory of this leg of the journey, as I was struggling to stay awake, but I remember that our taxi driver was incredibly skilled in the art of fitting seemingly infinite luggage into a finite space. The few flashes of imagery that I recall from the drive depicted a very different kind of city than I was familiar with — one far less spacious and far more... upward, with everything seeming busier and more chaotic.

We arrived safely at Newark, at some point meeting up with Wendy's aunt who was also making the flight down, and there we awaited our last flight into the late hours of the night. The airport was unusually quiet and calm, and walking around the unlit passages in my socks lent a feeling of surreality and timelessness, which was further enhanced when my brother and I found and purchased Fruitopia, which we had likely not seen or tasted in a decade.

It was just before midnight that our flight departed, and we started our long, dark journey over the water.