Emily Goodheart Kautz

Girl in Positano, Italy

Emily wandering the cliffside village of Positano on the Amalfi Coast of Italy.

During her childhood in Seattle, Washington, Emily developed a deep love for the natural world while camping in the temperate rain forest, horseback riding through wildflower meadows in the Cascades, and building fairy houses in her backyard. After writing an essay on green sea turtles in 5th grade and coming face to face with one in Hawaii later that year, Emily discovered the wonder of travel and has since explored 18 countries.

At 16, she traveled to Ecuador and the Galapagos for a wildlife conservation and photography student expedition with National Geographic. Eager to continue studying animals and world cultures, she spent a gap semester focused on wildlife photography and lion conservation in South Africa and Zimbabwe. She then traveled through five countries in Southeast Asia, exploring the wonders of Angkor Wat and thousands of golden stupas in Myanmar while staying with local Hill Tribe people and in floating villages.

Emily graduated from Colorado College with a degree in anthropology. She spent a month with the Colville Confederated Tribes in Eastern Washington pursuing research for her thesis on traditional foodways and indigenous environmental education. She took courses in Italy and India where she wrote about culture, cuisine and mythology, studied primate behavior at the Lemur Conservation Foundation, and completed a wildlife rehabilitation internship in Costa Rica. While a student, she traveled with her family to France, England and Japan. Following graduation in 2017, Emily spent a summer as an environmental educator at the Denver Zoo before landing her dream job as a Marketing Coordinator at Natural Habitat Adventures, the perfect workplace in which to combine her passions for animals, writing and travel. She has traveled with Nat Hab to the subarctic in search of polar bears and recently to Tanzania, where she met the Maasai, explored the Ngorongoro Crater and encountered leopards, cheetah kills and Great Migration river crossings in the vast Serengeti. When she’s not writing or exploring the world, you can find Emily immersed in a fantasy book, performing in musicals and horseback riding.

Read Emily’s posts from around the world:

Africa:

Asia & The Pacific:

Central & South America:

North America:

Europe:

And check out her series of travel quizzes: