An adventure
Senior Liam O'Sullivan vlogs about his two weeks in Ecuador.
“The Hobbit” is a foundational text for me. It’s shaped how I view media beyond novels and films and, for me, gives a good sense of a journey over its relative brevity for a Tolkien text.
In the films, “The Hobbit” is a novel that exists in-universe and is used as a framing device for the trilogy, showing Bilbo reflecting years later on events that shaped his past and future. In the same way, these blog posts have been more than just a catalogue of my travels, but a chapter of my life in themselves.
In the hero’s journey, the protagonist can never go home again, not because his home has changed, but because he has. Settling in even after such a brief excursion is difficult given the beauty and grandeur of my time abroad. Two weeks have had more meaning packed into them than multiple months of my life, and as we begin the long process of hammering the documentary into a workable shape, it’s still hard to believe everything I saw.
We visited snow-capped peaks, stared into the ocean depths and tread on sacred ground. I met people like none I’d seen before and likely will never see again. I’ve forged friendships I hope to continue for the rest of my life.
Any given place we visited, no matter how small, could have been the subject of hours of filmmaking, and condensing our experience into a half-hour will be no easy task. The sarcastic side of me wants to say, “Yeah, I went to Ecuador and all I got was dengue fever and labeled a flight risk,” but that feels reductive, even in jest.
Looking forward, Ecuador is a place I hope to visit again. There’s obviously more to see, and it’s amazing for a country I scarcely thought about before registering for this course.
