About

Welcome to Map Jumper, a place for those passionate about travel. I began this blog in the summer of 2012, to document my adventures in Peru. I called it Peruzing back then, but when I started traveling to other places, I realized it was time to change the name.

I’ve had the travel bug ever since my Junior year in college, when I studied abroad in Sevilla, Spain. To me, travel is not just about seeing new places, taking photos, or checking off points on a bucket list (not that those aren’t thoroughly worthwhile activities). In our increasingly globalized society, an understanding of the world is growing more important than ever. When you travel, you learn things that could never be taught in a classroom, or read in the pages of a book.  You learn about people. And while these people often seem so different from ourselves, it’s sometimes through the differences that we find what’s similar.

When I think of my fondest memories from abroad, it’s not my whirlwind trip to Morocco or my guided tour of Machu Picchu that are called to mind. Instead, I think of riding in a truck bed from a Mayan community in Mexico to the border of Belize, of laughing with my Spanish host family over a botched translation, or of playing soccer with a group of porters on the Inca Trail. I think of the moments outside of the norm, the moments that cannot be recommended in a guide book or captured in a photograph. These moments are what make travel beautiful.

So what is Map Jumper? It’s a place for stories, observations, reflections, and hopefully the occasional amusing anecdote. It’s where I will share the best moments of my travels, or at least the ones I think are most important. I hope you can find something interesting in my amateur pictures and pages of rambling text. And if you’re as passionate about travel as I am, don’t hesitate to share your stories with me. After all, there’s a lot of world out there to explore.