Hi! I’m Marie. I live in Ontario and I like to play chess.


Journey with me as I compete in chess tournaments and at the same time travel around the world. Are you ready? Buckle your seatbelt, because to Ecuador we fly!


Ecuador is a country in somewhere South America and is near the equator, so it is very, very hot! I went there for Pan American Youth Chess Championship in 2019. This is me and my team from Canada:


I am in the bottom left corner, beside the tall girl wearing glasses. In that tournament, I got 13th place.
Before the tournament, my dad and I stayed for one night at a hotel with a lizard park across the road. The next day, we visited the park. Here is me feeding and petting some sunbathing lizards:



Around noon, the lizards decided to take a nap in the sunshine. I started to feed the pigeons and soon I gathered a crowd of them. My dad and I stood under a tree for some shade and suddenly, about a hundred pesky birds took off from the top of the tree. Seconds later, stinky bird excrement rained on us and we quickly fled back to our hotel room to take a shower. Looking back, that sure was a funny experience!

Fast forwards to 2022. My family traveled to Panama so I could attend the World School Chess Tournament, in which I placed rather low. We went a week early so we had some great vacation time before it. First we went to a rainforest, Gamboa. We saw many amazing things!

A monkey hops on our boat to eat some nuts! So cute!


We catch a baby crocodile! Did you know that monkeys sometimes eat them? They grab the crocodiles by the tail and skin them with a rock. How brutal!


Isn’t the rainforest beautiful? This is a ride we went on. We could see all sorts of things from monkeys to sloths to berries and more!


Look at this cute sloth in the conservatory! So cute and furry!


We saw a wild capybara! The park rangers said it was really rare.
We saw another funny thing on our Night Ranger. We didn’t capture the photo in time.
There was a family of turtles which we were feeding bread. Suddenly, a big crocodile popped out of the pond! My dad said that it was here for a dinner party with the turtles. We watched for a while, and then some turtles decided to climb on top of the crocodile! Daredevil turtles!

Now follow us to a farm dedicated to growing coffee! The nice people there taught us about the stages of a coffee bean and we even made some coffee ourselves! I made a medium roast and my brother Mark burnt his.

This is a snip from a coffee tree. You can already see tiny beans growing on it! There is a kind of sour red berry around the actual bean. It was so interesting to learn about coffee!

Next up, Banff. Revisit this page in a month to learn all about my amazing journey to Calgary. Until next time, friends!