The Marco to my Polo

“How very odd that one bends one’s own twig and it stays bent. Who could have foreseen the permanent effect of childhood journeys on streetcars? No other manner of living would have interested me so much and so long and I will surely go on until I drop trying to see more of the world and what’s happening in it.”

Martha Gellhorn
“Travels with Myself and Another”

Someone told me the other night, that most of your life is shaped by the first memory you have from your childhood. Supposedly Jimi Hendrix ‘s first memory was of a firework display, explaining much of his music and performance style as an adult.

To be entirely honest I cannot recall an early childhood memory of mine, which was not constructed with the aid of someone else’s account of events or an old photo; but my first flight was when I was 4 months old crossing from Hong Kong to Italy and that must have left a mark.

As Martha says, once you’ve been bitten by the travel bug, you’ll be hooked forever. So imagine my delight when I met someone who said, “the coolest thing would be to go from Brussels to China by land.” A kindred spirit, the Marco to my Polo, my adventuring sidekick, you get it.

Nico and I could both be diagnosed with what I call “itchy-feet” syndrome, no, not the Athelete’s Foot kind, but the kind where even when you are content in a place, the time comes to move, to discover somewhere else, to get onto a train, plane or automobile and be transported to another world.

Individually we have backpacked in our teens, lived on different continents and travelled for work and fun across different cultures and flavours. While my childhood was infused by cultures from two different continents and frequent travel with my family, Nico never left Europe until he was 16. His mother had moved to Rabat in Morocco for work and he followed, leaving his comfort zone of Brussels for the first time.  At 16, he found freedom through travelling, exploring Morocco with his friends, discovering new people and new places; before taking the time to go back towards Europe by train. This experience at an age where you crave adventure completely opened his mind to another type of life, a new sense of belonging and a tolerance for diversity. At the same age, I was backpacking through South East Asia, trying every type of street food I could get my hands on in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Our early travels shaped our characters and since then all our choices in life have been defined by curiosity. Curiosity of the “other”, of the “foreign”, of the “unknown”. This passion also influenced our studies – as an anthropologist and a tropical agronomist we continued exploring the world on paper and in person.

When we first started planning and plotting our future adventures together, I drew up our great adventure list (above). This list is by no means exhaustive, but represents our most immediate travel wishes, excluding the spur of the moment weekend trips or birthday/wedding visits. So far we have been able to kitesurf in various places as well as go trekking in beautiful Iceland, but the biggest challenge now lies ahead of us. 2014 is the year we cross off number 4, our journey to the East. I count my lucky stars every day that I have found someone who has the same thirst for travel as I do and is ready to change their life from time to time to taste more of what the world has to offer. I am looking forward to crossing off all the adventures on our list one at a time.