This article was originally published in Dstripped Magazine, October 2011 by JC Davies
People who date people of other races and cultures tend to be risk takers. Not the sky-dive-without-a-parachute or skeezy sex-without-condoms kind of risk takers, but rather, they seem to put love and learning above “fitting in” and doing what society tells them to do. Because they also tend to be interested in other cultures, I thought my experience in a remote Venezuelan jungle might just be to your liking.
I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to go to the jungles of Venezuela. I know I wasn’t afraid; it simply was not a country that I had ever thought about before. In the US, the only “news” we get about Venezuela is something bad. We are told it’s dangerous and that the government is to be feared and so people cross it off their lists of tourist destinations and opt for Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. And if we never go, we never know the truth. (Much like interracial dating. See the parallels here?)
I went on the trip because I needed to get the hell out of NYC for a while. As a writer on all things cultural, it was definitely going to be a worthwhile experience. What I found there exceeded any expectations.