I’ve always liked to explore. My family often described me as a relentless child, the type that convinces them to hike, bike, and drive much farther than they had intended just so we could see the other side. One of my proudest accomplishments as a budding teenager was biking over the mountains to Santa Cruz from my home in San Jose, California. In fact, I described that escapade in an essay that eventually had me admitted to my alma mater, Archbishop Mitty High School. As I grew older, my desire for adventure found an outlet in circuitous drives with friends around the hills of the Bay Area.

Over the years, I took trips around the country to visit family and attend conferences with my dad; beyond that, unfortunately, my parents, brother, and I found it challenging to block off the time required for excursions beyond a day trip here or there. I had yet to leave the United States by my 20th birthday — not that it particularly bothered me. International travel was something I could always do in the future, and I trusted that one day I’d have a naturally occurring block of time where I could pack my bags and hit the road. Satiating my desire to see the world was a problem for future Charlie. Sometime around this past February, however, I had an epiphany while working on an Anomali project from my desk at USC. If I could work remotely from school, why couldn’t I work remotely from anywhere? I started chatting with my boss about it, and thanks to an incredibly collaborative effort from both him and my employer, it turns out I could.

I bought Rolf Pott’s Vagabonding (an excellent read for anyone who’s even remotely interested in economical and meaningful travel), started perusing reddit’s travel forums, and chatted with friends near and far about their experiences abroad. I looked at maps with a new sense of possibility, and countries on the globe suddenly presented more character than their usual cartography. Unfortunately, the swell of possibilities was simultaneously freeing and drowning. Choosing a specific continent or country would necessarily preclude me from enjoying the culture, cuisine, and lifestyle of elsewhere, and I agonized for weeks about what I truly wanted to get out of my travels.

Ruling out Asia and Africa for later in life, my decision fell to a crossroads between Europe and Latin America. Generally, my older adult friends recommended the more popular European circuit, but my friends in their 20’s and 30’s who had seen Latin America could not more strongly praise it. The jury remained hung until I attended an Argentinian asado at a good friend and mentor’s apartment this past April. Experiencing even a taste (ha) of South American culture sparked a curiosity for the region that has yet to fade. As someone who practiced Spanish for four years in school and had always wanted to speak it fluently, I watched the puzzle pieces fall together perfectly: Latin America it was.

I bought a one way ticket for Buenos Aires as soon as I returned home from college. My family was surprisingly (and unsurprisingly — nothing new here) supportive of my decision, and I spent the next few weeks enjoying home far more than actually preparing to travel. A few days before leaving, we made a trip to REI so I could buy Osprey’s FarPoint 55 Backpack (which has been an absolute gem; I could not recommend it more if you plan to backpack) among other accessories, and my three weeks in the Bay Area seemed to end before they began. May 27th arrived, as did my very much indirect flight from SFO to Toronto to Santiago to Buenos Aires.

I entertained myself on the flight with James Gardner’s Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City, and I spoke in broken Spanish with the Chilean couple to my left. My twenty four hours of airfare and layovers were over before I knew it, and I soon arrived in the Paris of South America! I wasn’t sure what adventures awaited me in this city, country, and continent — my first order of business was simply to get my backpack to my Recoleta hostel without being robbed along the way.

** Though the structure of this travelogue is loosely formed at best, I plan to create a new post for each location I visit. I write this post from the Amazon rainforest, having already traveled a good deal around Argentina and Brazil, but fortunately I’ve already written around one hundred thousand words of notes that I’ll use as a basis for my writings. Thanks for reading this far, and I hope you find something to laugh at or learn from as you hear about my meanderings around this beautiful continent.