I was a seven-year-old in Stockholm when my primary school led a one-day excursion to the nearby Åland Islands. Upon learning that the islands belonged to Finland, I had to count the number of countries I had visited until then. The year was 1962 — the exact occasion I started to count countries!
My father was Swedish, but my mother was Spanish. Our family would go to Spain to visit relatives a few times by car, train and plane. Now I could see on a map that I had already been to seven countries.
Every summer at the beginning of school vacation, I was sent to my grandparents in Tarragona by plane. I left the day after school ended and returned the day before school started. In those years, there were no direct flights between Stockholm and Barcelona, so I always tried to negotiate a route to change planes in a different country. The negotiation usually failed since my parents preferred the cheapest option. While this was usually Swissair, I did fly via Amsterdam once with KLM and once via Paris with Air France. I liked the change in Zürich because Swissair took care of small kids. This included meeting the pilots and giving them a plastic badge that said “Pilot.” They also had a nice room in the Zürich airport full of toys and kids’ magazines in many languages.
When I turned 19, I moved away from home to study at Uppsala University and learn even more about the world. I was a fan of the Renaissance ideal so I tried to study an eclectic mix of both science and humanities, which would eventually culminate in five degrees as I could continue to learn forever.
Summer breaks changed as I took factory worker positions in Poland and Italy through the international student organization IASTE. I remember a factory in communist Poland where we were issued a big glass of vodka every morning before starting work, and it had to be downed in one go! Bleh… I pity the clients of that factory.
One summer, my girlfriend and I took two months to explore Europe using an Interrail ticket. We slept in our tent on beaches and parks and when we could, we took night trains to travel while sleeping. In those 60 days, we explored most of southern Europe from Istanbul to Oporto. I remember the beautiful Douro Valley where the trains were still pulled by steam engines.
In 1979, I celebrated my first university degree in nuclear engineering by traveling around the world with my Spanish cousin. We met in Paris, took a ferry to England and then flew to New York on the cheapest flight we could find (Laker). We hitchhiked, slept in tents and cooked food on a Trangia alcohol stove. We also took cheap buses and trains through much of the USA and parts of Canada.
This was an adventure! Another cheap air ticket led us to the big islands of the Caribbean from Miami to Nassau, Port-au-Prince, Kingston, Havana and Merida. In those years Spain had recently got rid of Franco and my Spanish cousin needed a visa to Cuba. In the Cuban Embassy in Kingston, my cousin could only afford a one-day visa because he was required to stay in a luxury hotel every night. Upon landing in Havana, he was met by a hostess to take him to the hotel. He just told her that the hotel was too expensive for him and he would prefer to travel around with me and sleep in a tent. She agreed that it was a good idea for a young student and with a visit to the immigration authority, his visa was changed from one day to one month at no cost and no hassle!
Following our trip through Cuba, four months were spent visiting pre-Columbian ruins in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. We bought archaeology handbooks with detailed maps of each ruin and, like real buffs, we studied the cultures of the Olmecs, Teotihuacan, Mixtecs, Huastecs, Totonacans, Toltecs, Mayan, Aztecs and Zapotecs. There were no beach visits or cities except for a long visit to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico and some of the Aztec ruins. The Yaxchilan ruins were not accessible, but it did not stop us. We hitch-hiked with canoes along the Usumacinta River through the jungle until we were dropped off where there was nothing but thick vegetation. The naive are often lucky—pushing through the dense growth of bushes and trees, we found a group of Mexican archaeologists who were happy to show us around and fly us back to civilization on their small Cessna plane!
We continued south through Central America to Panama. Following a short plane ride to Quito, we repeated the archeology exploration in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. This time, carrying thick books about the Incas, Chimu, Tiwanaku and Nazca, we stayed west of the Andes and eventually reached Santiago de Chile. Continuing our expedition west, we bought a ticket from Santiago to Easter Island, Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, and New Zealand and eventually made it to Sydney. We were lucky on Easter Island. The mayor of Hangaroa issued us permission to plant our tent in the national park, so for a week, we lived among the moai, cooking our porridge and just being amazed by the landscape and the statues. Once a day, some tourists showed up on horseback or in a LandRover, but we were mostly alone! People were so friendly on the other islands. On Niue, we were the only tourists who stepped out of the weekly plane and were more or less adopted by the inhabitants, welcomed to pitch our tent in their gardens and invited to Polynesian feasts. We hitchhiked on both islands of New Zealand and were invited to the homes of the people picking us up. So friendly! The same in Australia. On Christmas Eve, an old lady picked us up somewhere near Wagga Wagga, invited us to spend the festivities with them and arranged a job for us to pick oranges!
To close out our trip, we hitchhiked across the Nullarbor Plain, flew to Bali, Java and Sumatra and continued to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Two years passed, and my cousin returned to his job in Spain as a primary school teacher. I went back to Uppsala University to pursue four more degrees. One was my PhD in elementary particle physics, and I became a researcher at CERN in Geneva for seven years but only a few trips to new places!
My degree as a digital librarian enabled me to get a job as an executive officer at the National Library of Sweden. Coordinating the digital development of Sweden’s research libraries, I traveled to the National Library of Bhutan to study the preservation of old Buddhist texts. A nice spinoff!
Eventually, I “settled down,” married and got jobs at scientific publishers responsible for many countries. That is my present life. Now as the global sales director for a publisher, I visit offices worldwide and take advantage of the proximity to other new destinations by taking side trips to visit them. For instance, Sinai was close to Egypt, Socotra was manageable from Dubai and Victoria Falls seemed closer when I was in Luanda.
This has allowed me to move to my two favourite places, Tarragona and Barcelona, where my son was born in 2002. When he was about two years old, I took my wife and him to a conference in Almaty. While I attended meetings, my wife took him down to a playground near the hotel. To our amazement, after one week, our son conversed in Kazakh with the local kids and we could see the benefit of travel for him.
Before I joined the TCC, I became a member of the Hakluyt Society, where one can travel in time without moving! Combined with the TCC, this has cemented my love of travel and the importance of connecting with my friends at TCC—learning how to balance travel with our personal lives. All found their tricks in creative and interesting ways. Pamela Barrus told us about hers recently, and many of us in the Mediterranean chapter know the ways of Miguelangel Julian, Martin Garrido, Agustin Chaler, Juan Pons, Juan Lopez and Jorge Sanchez! We learn so much from each other.
In diversity lies our richness!
