From Baja to the Land of Fire: Bio

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Six Months Over Land & Water

From Tijuana, Mexico to Ushuaia, Argentina

I am lucky to be living in my favorite city in the world: Amsterdam, Holland. But it was not always so. One year after being born in Portland, Oregon, US, we moved to Puerto Rico. When I was 4-years-old my parents separated, and me and my younger brother moved with my (Dutch) father to Holland. When I was 12 I moved again to Portland, living there with my American-Italian mother and going to high school until I was 17. The next 20 years I would be living in Holland, interrupted only by one year in Germany and one year in Switzerland. The last 13 years I have been living in Amsterdam, of which the last 3 years were alone with my cats.

After high school I studied psychology for 2 years and discovered this would not make me happy in the long-term. I then decided to become a famous writer and to be one, I felt that besides imagination I would need to have some real life experiences. I made plans to travel around the world for 2 years. I would work along the way as a cook (somewhere in-between I also became a certified cook). However, I fell madly in love with a woman named Jacqueline and, this also being a real life experience, I dropped my travel plans immediately.

Following my creative and artistic desires I tried to enroll at the national film academy. After rejecting my application 2 years in a row I started looking for something new.

For a while I worked on plans on setting up my own business (something to do with tea), but nothing really worked out. Another old wish now came floating to the top, and soon I was working in my father's health food company at the bottom of the sales department. After a couple of years my father urged me to start studying again and also to work at other companies to get more experience on my own. After 4 years I received my degree in business finance and was already moving very quickly upwards. In the next years I would be working as a director of finance, IT and logistics at two different companies. Somehow I was at the right place at the right time and meeting the right people.

In the meantime I separated from Jacqueline, my father sold his company and I am just starting on my trip (see Intro).

Travel experience: I have done some traveling but never longer than 6 weeks and never alone. When I was still studying I bought an old Renault 4 together with 3 friends and traveled for 5 weeks through Portugal and Morocco. It was in Morocco I experienced my first real culture shock. With Jacqueline I made 3 big trips (and many, many small trips or vacations). In the beginning of our relationship we hitch-hiked to Turkey and back in 6 weeks. Later we made a cross-country trip through the US, New York-New Orleans-Los Angeles-Portland, OR. In the third trip we traveled in Indonesia Singapore-Sumatra-Java-Bali-Lombok. It was at the end of this trip I really felt the addictive pull of long-term traveling after meeting many other travelers who kept going on while we had to stop.


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