Can you imagine walking among all that history?
From there, we’ll head to Iquitos, deep in the heart of the Amazon River Basin. This is the part I’m most excited about! The Amazon River Basin is the most biodiverse (meaning it has more kinds of living things) ecosystem (all the living and non-living things in an area) on the planet.
As I mentioned in my biography, my background is in biology. I’ve worked as a coral reef ecologist, conservationist and oceanographer, and I’ve also taught high school science. My passion is ecology, which is the study of how different species interact with one another. There are so many incredible connections between plants and animals in ecosystems. The Amazon is like one big web of life, full of unknowns and surprises!
My career has taken me on some amazing adventures. I lived in a straw hut on a remote island in Fiji for seven months studying coral reefs, and I’ve done conservation work in places like the Bahamas, Seychelles and Indonesia. I even lived on a boat for six years, sailing over 40,000 nautical miles around the world while teaching marine biology and oceanography to college students. The Amazon has long been on my bucket list, and I almost made it there in 2010 while working on a boat, but a last-minute change of plans kept us from going.
Scientists estimate that only a small fraction of the species (a group of animals or plants that have common characteristics and can breed with each other) that live in the Amazon have been discovered. In fact, many of the plants and animals here could hold the key to curing diseases like cancer—there's still so much to learn about this incredible place!
