Three hundred days ago, I – 21, Australian, and a girl who thought she knew a thing or two – took a one-way ticket out of Sydney bound for Mexico City. Technically it was Sydney to Hawaii to Los Angeles to Mexico City, but after a breezy 40 hours in transit, I stepped onto Mexican soil and started the long, loose descent toward Argentina.

Since then, my clothes have thinned and faded, my Vegemite keychain is hanging on by a rusted thread, my hair’s gone blonder, my freckles darker, and the squint lines between my brows feel more or less permanent. I’ve surfed every known and some unknown waves along the Pacific coast from Mexico to Costa Rica, found trouble more often than it found me, made a handful of friends, picked up smoking (properly), sunk a heroic number of local beers, and seen a shit-ton of life I wasn’t expecting.

My time in Costa Rica marked the halfway point of my South American odyssey.

Nestled on the sun-kissed western tip of the Nicoya Peninsula, Santa Teresa sits at the end of a long, bone-rattling dirt road – the kind that feels like it’s shaking loose everything you thought you knew about pace and purpose. Then, there it is: a ribbon of gold pressed against the Pacific, where jungle fingers reach down to meet the tide. The hills behind shimmer in green heat, tangled with vines, mango trees, and the slow-moving shadows of spider monkeys. Parrots flash overhead like living brushstrokes, and iguanas sunbathe on the gravel shoulders, blinking slow approval at anyone passing through, like guardians of some lazy tropical realm.

The air tastes of salt and ripe fruit, thick with the hum of cicadas and the faint buzz of a world content to idle. Out past the reef, ...