By Kelsey Montalto, MLML Ichthyology Lab

As kids we all dream of going on a grand adventure. For all of us who too decided to sign up for “Marine Environmental Studies of the Gulf of California”, our grand adventure was setting out to another country with 11 people we had never traveled with for 16 days, knowing that for the majority of the time we’d be living out of small bags, not showering, and with sheets of nylon as our sturdiest barrier to the outside world while we slept.

Before we left, we all had some idea of how things would go on our trip, but I like to imagine that we all had our expectations subverted in the best way possible. Particularly, how in tune we all became with ourselves and the routines of others. It’s really interesting now to reflect on how easily we all left behind the more trivial portions of our modern-age lives, like technology.

In preparation for the trip, we were advised to really be present along our journey as we drove from Moss Landing all the way to El Portugues just north of La Paz, while on the little island of El Pardito, and again on the way back up. And I don’t think any of us took it for granted. Emails, social media, and the like – which are usually integral to our lives – were all distant thoughts as we drove along watching the incredible desert landscape change along the way. Even on the island only roughly the size of two football fields in size, we wanted for not. It was truly a case of back to basics in its truest sense: eat, sleep, “go to the bathroom”, get in the water, rinse and repeat.

And you might be saying to yourself, “Well of course, this isn’t groundbreaking”. The way I see it, there are a few key reasons why we went back to basics, or rather, back to basic needs:

1. We had limited power and internet, so tech use was difficult to accomplish
2. We were physically too far away from our typical schedules/responsibilities back home to worry about them
3. There was only so much we could bring with us and little chance of resupply
4. Frankly, by the time we finished each day, all we could do was stay in tune with what our bodies needed

Each of us had our own method to our madness, whether that be our preferred camping style (tent, hammock, out in the open), “bathroom preference” (bucket or ocean), and even sleep schedules. And how did we entertain ourselves? Through conversation, exploration, jokes, games, and quite a bit of acapella. We even turned putting on lotion into a group activity and brushing our teeth into a game by seeing how far each of us could spit after we finished.

Even as our trip was ending, I think we all realized how special our grand adventure actually had been, and it was exactly that, grand. Now that we’re back, we’ve had to fall back into the hustle and bustle of our busy lives being torn in a million different directions with all the distractions in the world at our fingertips. Even so, we will always know what it was like to feel as if we were living in a scene of a movie at the top of a mountain, wake up earlier than we ever thought we voluntarily would (before even the alarm), have the most people aware of your bodily functions since toddlerhood, push the dinner tables together to eat “family dinner style”, and know what it means to truly get back to our basic needs.