What was the first thing to spark your passion for traversing the globe searching for medicinal remedies?

At age fifteen I traveled to the interior jungle part of Puerto Rico on a school project. There I hiked in a small rainforest, experienced tropical life, and pretty much lost my marbles over it. I knew right then and there that I wanted to travel heavily. A couple of years later I went on an herb walk with a somewhat popular herbalist named Ben Charles Harris. We wandered in the next town from where I grew up, and he identified about fifty or more medicinal plants and told us what they were for. These were plants I had seen my whole life, running around in the fields and forests of New England. I was hooked after that.