The Journey is the world’s first podcast on the power of travel. Listen to stories about unique people who experienced a journey that changed their lives forever.
In each of the following seven episodes, you will hear the story of a unique individual and a journey that changed his or her life.
It is now more than one hundred years since Albert Plesman dreamed of transporting people by air. This was a revolutionary idea that would ultimately lead to the establishment of KLM. But before this could happen, Plesman had a difficult challenge to overcome: organising KLM’s very first flight.
Travelling by dog sled he travels across the vast empty plains that are home to polar bears, arctic foxes and musk oxen. Here, at this desolate location, Morten has an epiphany on what will become his life's destiny once he returns to civilization.
In the 70s he travels with his wife from Great Britain to Australia over land. Once they arrive Down Under, everyone wants to know how they did it. After filling pages and pages with travel tips, they wondered if there wasn't a better way to share their knowledge.
Together with his three brothers and sisters, Paul has the time of his life. But when tragedy hits and threatens to tear the family apart, they become closer than ever. Together with his brother, Paul comes up with a brand that can both conquer and help the world.
She is responsible for major investments and has everything perfectly under control. But then, during a business trip, she’s kidnapped. Emma’s life is flipped completely upside down, but this turns out to be the start of an incredible journey that ends far from the fast-paced financial world.
Whenever she can, she’s on the beach in California. While travelling, she meets the love of her life, Sean. They settle down on an idyllic island in Thailand. There her dream turns into a nightmare. Everything that matters to her is taken away in a few seconds - by the sea.
The shipwreck of former naval officer Victor Clark made headlines in the 1950s. He washes up on tiny Palmerston Island in the Pacific Ocean. Who could have imagined that decades later this place would also play a crucial role in his daughter's life?
Todd Leeloy is on a business trip in Argentina. An unknown woman who walks by makes an indelible impression on him, and he never forgets this image. She becomes his imaginary muse who whispers to him to quit his job and change his life.
Dina Kaplan works at the White House and leads a start-up in New York. Despite her success, she is plagued by her fears. When she no longer dares to cross the street, she makes a drastic decision: to leave everything behind and go on a journey.
During an internship, Samba Schutte finds himself in a dusty little village deep in the heart of Kenya. Here he discovers his talent as a comedian. In his mud hut, he plots an ambitious plan: to make it big as a stand-up comedian in Hollywood.
Have you been on a journey that has turned your life upside down and want to share it? We’d love to hear from you. Who knows? Maybe your story will end up here, as well.
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Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
M.J. van den Biggelaar
It was a dreary morning. The rain was falling in buckets from the blackened sky in which billowing clouds were being driven along by the punishing west wind. We would therefore have headwind all the way..
Jonathan Groubert
This is how a journalist, KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines’ very first Dutch passenger, described Tuesday the 18th of May 1920, as a rented single-engine biplane takes on its passengers on a wet, grassy field just outside Amsterdam.
M.J.
This is how a journalist, KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines’ very first Dutch passenger, described Tuesday the 18th of May 1920, as a rented single-engine biplane takes on its passengers on a wet, grassy field just outside Amsterdam.
Jonathan
This a KLM bi-plane is straining against the wind to take off and complete its first passenger crossing to London. This was to be a pioneering moment that helped lay the foundation for the entire industry of passenger aviation as we know it today.
And...it almost didn’t happen.
This show is not just the trip that changed everything, but the flight that changed everything!
Hi, I'm Jonathan Groubert and this is The Journey. The Journey is an original podcast by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Usually we meet people whose lives are transformed by travel. But in this special edition, we celebrate 100 years of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
Let me take you back to that dreary May morning in 1920. The flight was the culmination of months of preparation. And, now, finally, the moment had come: a KLM-airplane would transport passengers to another part of the world - faster than ever before! This happens nearly every minute nowadays, but that wasn’t the case in 1920.
100 years ago, Europe was still recovering from the horrors of World War 1. But it was a time where you could feel the world changing, both socially and technologically.
Horses and carriages were quickly being replaced by cars and trucks. Railways could now take you anywhere across the continent and beyond. And airplanes had advanced tremendously since the Wright Brothers took their first flight in just the previous decade.
Indeed, airplanes had found their purpose. And that purpose... was war!
Marc Dierikx
Well, Europe in the first year after the first world war, 1918 to 1920 a was a place that was scarred.
Jonathan
This is Marc Dierikx a historian at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the author of “Blue in the Sky”, a history of KLM.
Marc
Europe was scarred by what the war had brought in even a for people then imaginable destruction and most countries involved in the war. They were very much trying to rebuild whatever was rebuildable.
Jonathan
Back in 1919, where our story starts, The Treaty of Versailles had just been signed. The Netherlands was neutral in WW1 and was faring economically much better than the countries around it. But when it came to aviation, Holland was far behind.
Their most modern planes had accidentally flown over the border during the war. Marc Diericks says Holland was, well, a backwater...
Marc
But not backwards in the economic sense of the word. There were quite a few, entrepreneurs in the Netherlands, uh, around this time who were very much, uh, well engaged in the modern era and we're trying to invest in, in industries and services that would take the country into the 20th century basically.
Jonathan
And one of those entrepreneurs, is Albert Plesman. Plesman was one of seven children born to a Protestant egg-dealer and bread delivery man in The Hague.
He grew up to be a large man, with big hands, shoulders and a stubborn, determined character. At college he had a clear talent for math, science and sports and almost no talent for languages.
He enlisted in the royal Dutch marines as an officer and, as a Lt, was put in charge of that most Dutch of military detachments: the bicycle corps! And there he probably would have remained, had fate not intervened...
Marc
He went to a demonstration of an airplane in The Hague in 1909, and that sort of captivated his imagination. Wouldn't it be fantastic if I could join the armed forces in the sky somehow and really fly these machines. But of course the number of airplanes that the Dutch have military airplanes had, was with very small, it was maybe about 10 for the whole air force. And in the summer of 1917, Albert Plesman made his flying license, although people later describe them as a rather poor pilot, but at least it caught him his opportunity to do something in the air and the fulfillment of a dream.
Jonathan
A dream that saw Plesman circling endlessly around the Dutch border in unarmed, obsolete planes. Around and around and around.
In his boredom, Plesman began to dream of creating a modern military air force. He brought his idea to his superior, General Snijders.
Ron Wunderink
General Snijders said, okay. I think it's a good idea because I love aviation as well, and I think it has a great future.
Jonathan
This is Ron Wunderink. Mr. Wunderink is retired now, but he was KLM’s director of communications for 43 years and recently wrote a book about KLM’s earliest years.
He says General Snijders was more than a military man. He was well-connected and drummed up enthusiasm for the idea of a modern air fleet amongst politicians, the merchant classes and even the royal family.
There was just one problem: the public. Most people didn’t really like planes. They didn’t trust them. Planes were a marvel, yes. But they were also weapons. They shoot. They drop bombs. Or worse, they crash.
Ron
They thought it was dangerous. But on the other hand, it gives also sort of an adventure.
Marc
In the early days of aviation, people flocked to air shows just to see somebody die. That was a very common occurrence. The attraction was there's the airplanes around and maybe if you were lucky, lucky is not quite the right expression of course, but maybe somebody would actually crash and die. And this fascination with sudden death also made pilots into heroic people because they dared the elements.
Jonathan
Plesman and Snijders realized they needed to convince the public that planes were fun and safe! And so he created the ELTA, a Dutch acronym for the First Aviation Exhibition Amsterdam. The idea was to build a spectacular airshow.
Plesman got plane builders from Italy, France and Germany to send over their most advanced models. The British were in too.
So, a muddy field in the north of Amsterdam was dried out. Airstrips were laid down. Catering facilities were set up. And the ELTA was on!
Ron
A person coming to the show could see lots of different airplanes from all over the place from Germany, England, France. They could see demonstrations by foreign and Dutch pilots. And they could also fly themselves. You could pay 40 Dutch guilders, which was a lot of money at that time. And then you can go up with a plane and hundreds of people did because they were enormous enthusiastic about what they saw there as a new generation of transport.
Marc
It's more than an air show because it lasted for a month. So it opened in August 1919 and went on till mid September, 1919. And attracted in that in the period in between a couple of hundred thousand spectators who arrived from all over the country just to witness something of this new and magical thing called aeroplanes.
Jonathan
The ELTA was a massive success. A half a million people had witnessed the spectacle of zooming airplanes that did not crash! Hundreds of them had flown in an airplane and loved it!
Plesman had managed to convince the Dutch public about the safety, value and wonder of this amazing new technology. But this was all in the service of creating a modern air force, remember?
Marc Dierikx says that idea transformed into something else... altogether.
Marc
It got started because a group of entrepreneurs chairmans one of the larger banking companies in the country and a few of the larger trading companies, got together and decided that the moment had come to grab the opportunity that the technological state of aviation offered in 1919 by founding a company that would offer passenger and particularly postal services.
Jonathan
The original concept of air power turned into air commerce. And prominent Dutch businessmen set about to explore the creation of one of the world’s first commercial airlines.
And so, on the 7th of October, on a sunny autumn morning, 8 bankers, shipping company owners and other captains of industry met in a lawyer’s office in the Hague to sign a certificate of incorporation for the creation of KLM, the Royal Dutch Airlines for the Netherlands and Colonies.
They even convinced Queen Wihelmina to allow the new company to call itself “Royal”. Normally a company has to be in business for a century before they get to say that.
A board of directors was formed and one of the first things they did was to hire someone to manage it all. Their eyes fell on the young, daring Lt. who so successfully helmed the ELTA Air Show.
Ron
Mr. Albert Plesman was not only a pilot, but he also could organize things. And that was the reason that general Snyders and his friends from banks and shipping companies said, if we form now an aviation company, this guy must run the show.
Jonathan
So, they had an airline. They had an airline director. And you’d think that all they needed now was an airplane.
But actually, they had a bigger problem. A massive problem. They weren’t allowed to fly.
Marc
The idea was that because flying was dangerous, you could, you can drop things from an airplane, like, like a bomb and therefore you would, you want it to stop airplanes crossing the border because that it's difficult to control airplanes once in the air. And therefore, air transportation in the treaty negotiated the 1919 was reserved for the allied and associated powers in the first world war. So the British were to fly, the French were allowed to fly, the Belgians were allowed to fly. But the Dutch being neutral had remained outside the scope of the war and also remained outside the scope of the treaty.
Jonathan
So let’s say that again. A treaty signed in Paris after WW1 limited all international European air travel to allied powers only. Because the Netherlands had been neutral in the war, they had no right to fly a plane outside their borders.
Marc
This was a huge problem. And the way around the problem was, the treaty providers for special incidental, exclusions or allowances to operate a flight outside the normal treaty treaty rules. There was just one route that they could go to under the treaty provisions. And that was London because the British were the only ones who allowed this strange, neutral airline to operate to their country.
Jonathan
And the British government made this exception because not only would the first flight be to Britain, but the airplane, well, that would be British too. KLM paid 37 pounds sterling to rent an Airco DH 16. The DH stands for Geoffrey de Havilland.
Ronald Dijkstra
De Havilland was a famous airplane designer. You start in the military and very quickly he was enrolled in the aircraft manufacturing company to design aircraft.
Jonathan
This is Ronald Dijkstra. Ronald is a veteran KLM pilot. He’s retired now and has devoted himself to the history of aviation. His home office is covered in books and drawings of flying machines from the last century. He pulled out some schematics of the DH 16.
Ronald
De Havilland made two civil versions of the de Havilland nine. And the pilot was seated where he was, but the two passengers were placed at the in the open air.
And with the de Havilland 16 they said we have two enclose the passengers. So the fuselage was widened and I, they put a glazing on top. They call it a glazed cockpit.
Jonathan
The enclosed glass glazing was an early attempt at making passengers feel comfortable, although it would be a while before anybody got heating and plush seats, let alone coffee and peanuts. As for the pilot, things were much worse.
Ronald
You can compare it driving in a cabriolet without the windshield shield and only a small windshields a in front of your head on. If you move your head to the left, you feel the wind. If you move your head to the right, you feel the wind and flying for two to four hours, no heating, you don't have, anything to protect you. It's cold. And I think when you are landing or in Amsterdam or in London, you would say, ah, like a warm drink. And also it's exhausting flying 100 meters above the earth looking where are you? And then flying over the channel for 30 kilometers only water, where am I? Amazement.
Jonathan
The DH 16 had four interlaced passenger seats. As for the engine, well, Ronald Dijkstra says it was only just okay.
Ronald
The first engine was a Rolls Royce Eagle, and that had 320 horse powers.
Jonathan
Was it enough for the job?
Ronald
What's enough for the job? If you compare it to nowadays? Well, it was underpowered.
Jonathan
Anton Plesman understood that a bi-plane with an open cockpit should probably skip the winter. Instead the fledgling airline went looking for a good place to land a plane. Eventually they settled on a small military airport called Schiphol. Back then, Europe’s second biggest airport was really just a soggy, grassy field. But it was suitably close to Amsterdam.
And so Plesman scheduled the first commercial flight. Roundtrip: from London to Amsterdam and back again. KLM had a partner back then. The London to Amsterdam route was conducted by the British carrier Aircraft Transport and Travel on May the 17th, 1920. And KLM ran the show on the flight back on the 18th. This was to be the first regularly scheduled intercity, international airline service, ever!
Fast forward to the first leg of the roundtrip flight from London to Amsterdam on the 17th of May, 1920. An Airco DH16, piloted by British war veteran, Jerry Shaw, takes off from Croydon Aerodrome outside London and flew across the English channel. A little over two hours later, under low-hanging clouds, the black dot of the DH16 appeared 10 minutes early, above Schiphol airport. The DH16 circled, then came down, bounded a few times on the grass and finally came to a stop. The airport may have been small, but the reception was great.
Marc
On board are two journalists from British, newspapers, and they have a stack of newspapers with them. And a letter from the Lord Mayor of London to the mayor of Amsterdam congratulating him on this wonderful occasion of this new air connection between the two capital cities. And there's at Amsterdam Schiphol airport, there's a group of about 15 people waiting for, for the plane to land.
Jonathan
Albert Plesman arranged for much fanfare and celebration at the arrival of KLM’s first flight. Jerry Shaw springs out of the cockpit dressed in a leather cap, goggles and long leather coat, looking very much the dashing aviator of the era. Albert Plesman, in a black bowler hat, greets him with an outstretched arm. Shaw is shaking hands all around with the many dignitaries present, including the head of the Dutch postal service. The two British journalists crawl unsteadily out of the cabin and climb down the four step ladder hanging from the fuselage. They look up at the clouds and hope that the next day will bring sunny skies and fair winds. It was not to be.
The weather on the day itself was much worse. Wind and rain. Mist reported all over London, including the landing site Croydon aerodrome. More frighteningly, visibility was poor clear across the channel. Ron Wunderink says it was a bad day to fly.
Ron
Yes, it was dangerous. And um, you see especially the route between Amsterdam and London because if you fly to Hamburg or Paris or Brussels, if they've got some engine trouble, you could easily find a place to make a landing, uh, either in some of the meadows or whatever. But at sea, it's difficult.
Jonathan
Despite the danger, Plesman gave the green light. Around midday, on the 18th of May, the plane was led out of the hangar.
Marc
And it takes the same two British journalists who arrived the day before and who'd spent the night in a hotel in Amsterdam plus one Dutch journalist brave enough to get on board.
Jonathan
The passengers were chosen to drum up publicity. And their first Dutch passenger was named M.J. van den Biggelaar, a writer for de Maasbode, at the time the country’s biggest daily newspaper. Van den Biggelaar wrote a detailed account of the trip that has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood epic.
M.J.
At a quarter past eleven we drove into Schiphol in the torrential rain. In the hanger… we found Mr Tellegen, Mayor of Amsterdam, present in the company of the Councillor for Public Works…there to personally hand over a letter to the pilot for the Lord Mayor of London.
It was a dreary morning. The rain was falling in buckets from the blackened sky in which billowing clouds were being driven along by the punishing west wind. We would therefore have headwind all the way...
The passengers were dressed for the flight by the gloves and goggles and heavy coats because it was very cold outside and even in a cabin, it was very cold.
Jonathan
Van den Biggelaar and the other passengers walk towards the frail looking bi-plane, bundled up against the elements. The 4-step ladder is hanging from the open cabin door.
M.J.
We posed briefly for the film, the engine started and revved up.
It worked! ‘Passengers go in!’ yelled Shaw, our pilot. I got in, my heart racing. We turned into the wind and the engine increased its speed. The machine bounced once and then came away from the ground. We were flying! We rode into the black sky on a rough wind, chasing the clouds!
The engine heaved in a paroxysm of frenzy against the punishing wind and frantically bored into the air. The rain was torrential, it lashed through the open windows of our covered cabin, into which a trickle of water soon dripped down from above.
Jonathan
Shaw brings the DH16 to around 100 meters, just under the clouds, so he can see the ground.
M.J.
We approached the outskirts of The Hague: the wet asphalt squares shone up at us like moist eyes, the yellow spots of the trams crawled over them. A terribly neat and proper city…especially now we were looking at it from above.
Marc
It's really pouring all the way. And the airplane follows the coast right up to Calais before crossing over to the channel at this shortest, stretch and it's pouring rain all the way to Calais.
M.J.
At some distance, billowing grey clouds hastened straight towards our aircraft, they approached and then we were in the middle of them. The machine reared up like a ship on the waves and stuck up its nose. A bump or should I say a fall of a dozen metres followed and caused a disgusting feeling, as if your stomach was rising up into your throat. I was smart to neutralise the effect of the bump and started on my first peppermint that provided the welcome opportunity to chew and swallow.
The weather was getting increasingly worse: the growing wind tugged our machine back and forth, crying under the tension between the wings, the rain was still torrential. I was overcome with a feeling of unease, which was also significantly increased by the impossibility of being able to stand up or stretch.
Marc
The pilot had to rely on visual marks. They flew relatively low altitudes that the pilot could not lose the coastline out of his view.
M.J.
As we arrived at the border of Belgium and France we have two hours and five minutes flying time behind us.
Ron
They had no weather reports. They had no radio in the beginning and the instruments were not very accurate.
M.J.
Our Channel flight was about to start and thereby the most dangerous part of the trip: an emergency landing for our land aircraft here would have meant sinking to the bottom like a brick.
In the wall of mist, in the distance, lights appeared to go on every so often, but it was the waves breaking on the English coast. After a flight of about fifteen minutes, we saw the glistening chalk cliffs of the English coast ahead of us.
…and behind them lay the joyful openness of the English country now struck by the brightness of the sun. The green English landscape, with a tree still in festive attire here and there, slowly glided away beneath us. From Dover, where we reached the English coast, the journey continued to Folkestone and then took a direct route to Croydon.
Ron
He flew alongside to the coasts to the shortest cross over the channel. And then he crossed to Dover, and what's the easiest way to get to London? And that is they used to follow the railway to London.
M.J.
The last part of the trip was far from pleasant. The machine swayed again like a drunken marksman, fell time and time again, climbed up against the wind only to be smacked down once more. The aircraft’s horizontal stabilisers were in constant motion. Shaw was surely hard at work now!
Marc
To everybody's surprise and a great relief of those onboard. They didn’t not only manage to cross the channel where they were supposed to, but it also managed to find London.
London was covered in ground mist and it took the pilot a bit of extra flying and an extra turn around the airport to make sure that what they were seeing was actually Croydon airport in London.
M.J.
…We breathed more easily when we could suddenly point out to each other the large white letters stating ‘Croydon’ that we could read on a beautiful field. We circled over wonderful hangers, another gust, the circle got smaller, then the aircraft straightened up again, declined in a gliding flight and it only took a few more seconds before the first bump on the ground followed, and another and another one, followed by slight uplifts and then the aircraft rolled along until just in front of the customs warehouse.
The Management…warmly welcomed us as the first travellers from Holland. We shook Shaw’s hand and thanked him for his valiant work. “It was rough before Folkestone, eh?” he laughed.
Our passports and luggage were quickly inspected and there was a taxi ready to take us to London. I went through the city as if I were in a dream, about four hours after my departure from Amsterdam. After all, this was the success of the new air service, the latest development in modern air transport; the triumph of aviation!
Jonathan
The bad weather meant KLM’s first flight to London took four and a half hours. Primitive, long, cold and dangerous as it was, this was a towering achievement.
We live in a world where you can be in Amsterdam today and Los Angeles tomorrow. It was the pioneering spirit of people like Albert Plesman that made this possible.
KLM’s 1920 flight to London was a giant step towards making our huge world just a little bit smaller. Historian Marc Dierikx and Ron Wunderink agree you cannot understate how important this moment was.
Marc
Then that was a really a sort of immediate belief that this new technology was going to create and completely new sort of world in which people would feel really connected.
Ron
I certainly believe that this first flight, under difficult circumstances, with people almost frozen, while they're crossing the channel between London and Amsterdam with this flight aviation started and is now, so common that millions of people are traveling around the world every day. And almost every city is connected to is every other city in the world. And it can be reached in 24 hours. And that day is absolutely the start of that.
Jonathan
KLM began regular return flights to London on the 28th of June 1920 followed by a second daily flight to Hamburg in September. By the winter break, KLM had conducted 548 flights and transported 345 passengers. Plesman went from KLM’s administrator to becoming its first and longest serving president director.
This is Albert Plesman himself speaking in Dutch to KLM personnel at the opening of a new KLM headquarters in The Hague.
Here he says, “this building was not constructed for today’s aviation, think in terms of 8 or 10 years ahead, and then look again. We have earned a reputation for the future.”
When Albert Plesman died in 1953 at the age of 64, he was internationally recognized as a trailblazer who managed to realize a grand dream. He said, “The ocean of the air unites all people.”
One wonders what KLM’s first passenger, M.J. van den Biggelaar, would think to hear that KLM now transports more than 20 million people a year to 161 destinations worldwide. He’d probably put it down to Albert Plesman’s pioneering spirit, something still deeply anchored in the way KLM looks at the skies, the ocean of the air that unites all people.
You’ve been listening to a special editon of KLM’s The Journey entitled: KLM at 100 years, The Flight that Changed everything.
Our guests were Marc Diericks, historian at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and the author of Anthony Fokker: The Flying Dutchman who Shaped American Aviation.
Ron Wunderink, KLM’s communications director, now retired, and the author of “Around the World with KLM”.
And Ronald Dijkstra, a former KLM pilot turned aviation historian, who has provided us with schematics, including the DH16 aircraft. You can see this and many more pictures from that time on our website: podcast.klm.com
You've been listening to The Journey, an original podcast brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
For more background on this story and to hear more stories about the trip that changed everything, go to podcast.klm.com.
And why not review us on Apple Podcasts... it helps other listeners find this podcast.
Thank you for listening. I'm Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
It is now more than one hundred years since Albert Plesman dreamed of transporting people by air. This was a revolutionary idea that would ultimately lead to the establishment of KLM. But before this could happen, Plesman had a difficult challenge to overcome: organising KLM’s very first flight.
This special episode of The Journey is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines in 2019. More information can be found at klm100.com.
The First Aviation Expedition Amsterdam, abbreviated as ELTA, was organised in the summer of 1919. The driving force behind this large-scale event was Albert Plesman. His goal was to promote aviation and, above all, to show the general public the possibilities offered by this form of transport.
The ELTA succeeded in introducing a large number of visitors to the world of aviation. The exhibition was held in Amsterdam for six weeks and more than a half a million people attended. Over 3,000 visitors went on a sightseeing flight over Amsterdam for the price of 40 guilders – equivalent to half of an average monthly salary.
Enthusiasm for this new form of transport resulted in the establishment of the Dutch Royal Airlines for the Netherlands and its Colonies (Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij voor Nederland en Koloniën) on 7 October 1919. Eight Dutch entrepreneurs pooled 1.2 million guilders in start-up capital.
Albert Plesman saw his first airplane demonstration in 1909 and, from that moment on, fantasised about the possibilities of flying. He initially envisioned this as a military operation since he was in the military at the time, but he later began to realise the potential of aviation for everyday citizens.
On 17 May 1920, the first Airco DH 16 arrived from London and the aircraft that KLM would operate a day later to fly to London. It is the first roundtrip flight for KLM.
The welcoming committee at Schiphol, with pilot Jerry Shaw at the far right.
Dutch journalist M.J. van den Biggelaar travelled from Amsterdam to London on 18 May 1920 and is considered the very first official KLM passenger. He shared his experience down to the very last detail in this report in the Maasbode, the largest newspaper in the Netherlands at the time. Within a few hours, he travelled from Amsterdam to London. He wrote, “This was, after all, the success of the new air service, the latest development of modern air transport, the triumph of aviation!”
The logbook kept by pilot Jerry Shaw on his flights. On 17 and 18 May 1920, he referred to the round-trip flight between Amsterdam and London as the “opening of a new service”. (Source: Pictorial History of KLM, page 84).
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Morten Hilmer
I've seen many polar bears and in general, I'm not afraid of them. They're beautiful creatures.
But it was attacking us in a small cabin and it was very close. It was a actually at the door scratching the door. I was a shitty situation, because we were definitely live danger at that point.
The door couldn't close because there was a lot of snow in it. And our rifles were out there at a sled and we had shot many warning shots, I have hit it directly with a Flash Bang, massive caliber, 12 flash bang. And it just continued. So we figured out that the bear was extremely thin and sick. So there has been something wrong with a bear It wanted to come in. It was desperate. And so where we, when we were standing on the other side of the thin door.
Jonathan Groubert
Morten Hilmer spends a lot of time in the North. It's a place he's dreamed of spending time in since his childhood, AND once he got there, it altered the course of his life forever.
Did you actually have to shoot a polar bear?
Morten Hilmer
Yeah, unfortunately. it was not me, but my colleague who did it.
Jonathan Groubert
This is a story about the trip that changed everything.
Hi, I'm Jonathan Groubert and this is The Journey. The Journey is an original podcast by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel.
Morten Hilmer is definitely NOT a city person. He never was. His preferred mode of transportation? A dog sled.
His fascination with the outdoors - and with the North - started at a young age.
Morten Hilmer
I grew up in Denmark in the countryside on a small farm with my mom and dad. Beautiful area surrounded by forest and meadows and perfect playground. I really liked being out in the forest, also alone. And I had all these always these fantasies in my head about like, either I was Robin hood or I was a native American or a soldier or something.
Jonathan Groubert
Morten shared these dreams with a friend, named Frank.
Morton Hilmer
And he told me about this dog sled patrol in Greenland, the Sirius dogsled patrol and, and we, we went out there in the weekend, in the winter on our little sled..
Jonathan Groubert
The Sirius Dog Sled patrol is an elite unit in the Danish military. It protects Denmark's interests in the Arctic, and operates in northeastern Greenland, which used to be a Danish colony.
Frank and Morten were so fascinated by it, that they would go on their own "dog sled trips" - without dogs, but still pulling a sled behind them.
Morton Hilmer
He was always talking about, yeah in the Sirius dog sled patrol they have like minus 40 degrees Celsius and they are going out for a month. So we just have to go out. We went to my grand mom's, summer house and that would be our base camp and then we went maybe five kilometers out on a frozen field and put up our tent out there.
And I was like, oh, it's cold and stuff. And he was like, yeah, but that's how it is in their dog sled teams. So we imagined us being them.
Jonathan Groubert
Morten's father had also spent 3 years in Greenland, before Morten was born, working at a weather station.
Morton Hilmer
So he always told stories about Greenland and the great adventures. And I also think that was what kind of later on, uh, made me make a decision about going north because I was good in school, but I never figured out what I wanted to be because there was nothing in that big book that I really liked and I just had the feeling that I wanted to do something different.
I didn't like going to school because it was just like teaching something everyone else knew before you. But I knew I wanted to do something in nature.
Jonathan Groubert
School really wasn't Morten's thing. Nothing 'normal' was...
Morton Hilmer
All the time in school, when I woke up in the morning, I looked at the dog. I was really jealous because the dog could just lie there without any worries, just spend the day as he wanted. And I had to go to school at eight o'clock and I'd be home at three o'clock and people would tell me what to do and they would have expectations to me.
And I had so many ideas, so much things I wanted to try. I just felt in school that every day they just taught me to fit into a box. I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life and I didn't want to work for anyone. I wanted to see if it was possible to just be like the dog: wake up in the morning, spend the life, like I'll spend the day as I wanted to and just take me where, where my heart meant me to go.
Jonathan Groubert
But when Morten was 14, he discovered another passion.
Morton Hilmer
I picked up my first camera when I was 14 and immediately it was nature who was interesting. And then I started to photograph everything from horses to people.I experimented with everything in photography. But I could feel that was only one thing that, that I really wanted to do and that was photographing in nature.
Jonathan Groubert
As passionate as he was though, the people around him weren't that encouraging.
Morten Hilmer
I would say. want to become a wildlife photographer or photographer
Jonathan: And they would say?
Oh, that sounds very exciting, but I could see in their eyes they thought, I hope this kid will talk to his parents and they will make him change his mind because this is not realistic. I was told it was not possible because you could be like a commercial photographer, you could be a portrait photographer, but you couldn't really get any education on being a wildlife and nature photographer. I didn't really think about it that way. I just thought I love photographing. I just wanted to go out and explore things with my camera.
Jonathan Groubert
But all of Morten's friends were taking a more traditional route. Right out of high school they were going on to university to continue their studies. Morten knew that he wanted to be a wildlife photographer, but how?
And then one day he heard about an organization in Ecuador that was looking for volunteers to help plant trees. And that seemed like a way in.
Morten Hilmer
I didn't know what to do. I'd been told for 10 years what to do and now suddenly I was there on my own. everyone was going straight ahead with our lives and I was faffing around with my camera. And I thought, Whoa, I want to get down there with my camera. I can go around there making a lot of nice photos and see the rainforest and help doing this volunteer work. And then I could come home and start my career as a wildlife photographer with all these wonderful photos I'll get down there. So I didn't have a choice. I had to follow this dream and go to South America and Ecuador and try to become a wildlife photographer.
I went to the rainforest, photographed in the Amazon swimmed in the, underneath the waterfalls and did what I thought was the most amazing thing. It was an adventure and I came home with all these photos and thought, now I'm a wildlife photographer and I became a member of a, a stock agency and I made a small exhibition and I think I sold two photos, one to my mom and one to my aunt.
So that was pathetic. So it was, that was it. I thought now, now I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in the game, but I was definitely not in the game. I had no idea about what it would take to be a wildlife photographer.
Jonathan Groubert
Fortunately, Morten's mom could see that he really wanted to do this.
But she could see that he wasn't happy with how it was going - after all, Morten was striking out on his own - naive, inexperienced and unknown in the photography world. But then she heard about a school that combined journalism and photography. And it was there that Morten met someone else who was on his side - another wildlife photographer named Bert Wiklund.
Bert: Hello, this is Bert.
Jonathan: Hi Bert, this is Jonathan. Nice to speak with you. How are you?
Bert: Oh, I'm fine.
Jonathan Groubert
Bert Wiklund is Swedish, but he lives in Denmark. He's the one who encouraged Morten to pursue his dream. And he knew the going would be tough.
Bert: Everybody wants to be a nature photographer, but then I tell them, okay, how many years can you be doing this without earning a penny? Well, maybe half a year. Okay. Try that half year and see what you get out of it. And most of them never starts.
Jonathan: But Morten was different.
Bert: Yes. He really got things moving. There are a lot of people taking a lot of pictures, but that's just for fun. You have to make a living of it.
Jonathan Groubert
Bert taught Morten something critical to good nature photography… looking. Really looking.
Bert: You can take... anywhere, you can take 1000 different pictures of a motive or a landscape or everything. How does the different subject in this totally big area compare to each other, with the light, what is the sky, what is everything? So you just go around and look and when you find the point, here, the point where I'll take that picture, just looking and being very conscious about looking.
Jonathan Groubert
After finishing school, Morten's dream hadn't changed. But he also wasn't sure how he could make a living out of it. So instead, he chose a temporary diversion that would lead him down a seemingly very different path...
Morten Hilmer
I like adventures and I like to do things that turned my life upside down. And I was a young man, strong, a lot of confidence, at that point. I thought, I want to test myself in the army.
Jonathan Groubert
It was the end of the 20th century, and in Denmark, joining the army then was more about survival training than it was about preparing for war.
Morten Hilmer
And for me I was excited. I like being in nature. I like going on these survival trips. I like to going on hiking trips to Norway and I thought, okay, military, why not? It's a good place to give you get, it's kind of an education in being outdoors, taking care of yourself. And also at that time I really like to challenge myself a little bit. I thought like I could still do wildlife photography in the weekend because you are in the army, Monday to Friday and then you're home in the weekend and it's only for 10 months. it was like an adventure. It's not like a career at all.
Jonathan Groubert
Morten joined the army in service of his dream. He planned to stay only 10 months. But remember the Sirius dog sled patrol he’d heard and dreamed of as a kid? It was an elite force of the Danish army, in the very place he’d heard his father talk about all his life: Greenland. He decided to apply for it.
Morten Hilmer
It's more like a park ranger because you are driving around in the national park on a dog sled, looking for activities, counting birds, all that kind of stuff. But the reason why I wanted to go so bad was because of the adventure, the thought about going in these extreme conditions, being insulated in Greenland for 26 month, driving 10,000 kilometer on dogsled on your own, trust in your own mind and your own hands and your ability to work together with other people, just being pushed to your limit and all that kind of stuff. And then the beautiful nature up there, I want to go there and I want to bring my camera. 50% or more of the reason why I went was to take my camera and explore this land with my camera.
And I was like training like a maniac to, to, to be able to do it. And, but I still knew that the chances were not that great because there are about 50 people applying every year and they'd take out between six or seven.
Jonathan Groubert
Morten didn't make it in the first time. But he spent the next 2 years training harder. And tried again.
Morten Hilmer
I was physically and mentally 100% ready and at that time I was lucky. I was selected as one of the seven person who started on the dog sled patrol.
I knew that it would change my life.
When I actually got to Greenland and I opened the door in the airplane and stepped out for the first time, put my feet on Greenlandic ground with the snow-covered mountains and huge landscapes, the first thing I noticed was this crystal clear air into my lungs. And I saw some sled dogs and I saw everything was so different. And at that point I kind of knew this is going to be a crazy adventure. What the hell have I started here?
Jonathan Groubert
The Sirius dog sled patrol serves as a Danish presence in the Arctic. But on the ground, its job is to maintain and supply a series of hunting cabins scattered throughout the park during winter expeditions using dogsleds. For Morten, being part of the patrol was everything he’d hoped for... and much more.
Morten Hilmer
When you stand there, it's totally white out. You're surrounded by nothing. No landscape. No smells, no sound, nothing. Only the only the sound off the dogs paws, tik tik tik tik and your skis (makes noise). Having your, your, your 12 dogs and the sled and just going about 30 kilometer all day through the most amazing landscape with only the sound of the paws towards the hard surface and, and the dogs like you know heh, heh, heh, and they are all happy. They all have their own little personality. So instead of traveling with a machine, you are traveling with 12 friends. And then you go on an adventure together. It's, it's priceless. It's impossible to describe how nice that is. I love that.
Jonathan Groubert
And of course, this wilderness was the perfect place to capture the landscape and its animals on camera.
Morten Hilmer
I had a high priority in bringing my camera. I knew from the beginning, from when I was applying for that dog sled patrol, I knew this was a part of the rest of my life. I knew the pictures I will get there, the stories I'd get there would be the best possible start I could ever get to do wildlife photography.
Jonathan Groubert
But it took considerable effort, and negotiating... after all, dogsleds only have so much space.
Morten Hilmer
You wear the same pair of underwear for about three weeks. You'll have like two suits of clothes for four months. Just to save weight and volume. So if you have 15 kilo of camera equipment, I can tell you that's pretty hard to convince your colleagues that you have to bring that.
I actually already started there sending letters home, got in contact with some businesses. I wrote long articles in the, tent in the cabins I want to publish when I come home. So I was 100%, focused on that part of it.
I would say I was a wildlife photographer back then. I just didn't know.
And I had this game changing moment that kind of sums up the way I want to, to do my photography now. I was out with my pole and my tent having, a cup of coffee there and I saw this arctic fox that was running around and my thought was oh, I want to get close to it. So I was photographing it for a while and it went to sleep on a little iceberg. I then sneaked in on it, with my camera and I got closer and closer and it was rolling together with, a little nose under the tail, the bushy tail. I was about to move even closer to see how close I could get.
Then suddenly, I realized that I'm not sneaking in on the fox. This fox can spot a little lemming underneath the snow, on a five meter distance. So the chance of it being able to discover a two meter high and 100 kilo heavy photographer trying to sneak... it would probably have seen me. So I realized that it's not because I'm good at sneaking, it's because the animal is allowing me to get close into its sphere and at that moment I realized how beautiful this is. Right now I'm not a photographer photographing a fox, right now we are two mammals out here and the one mammal is a fox and the other mammal is a human being.
Jonathan Groubert
The dog sled patrol operated in a national park, a place that's home to a lot of animals, including dangerous ones they encountered regularly, like muskox, and the polar bear that tried to get into Morten’s cabin.
Morten Hilmer
Being out there with, with the other animals. I can judge the situation where the polar bear, when it's dangerous, when is it not dangerous. I am realistic when I'm out there, but I'm also very eager to, capture some of these moments and I think and believe that sometimes you just have to trust that these animals are not going to kill you.
Jonathan Groubert
Morten's tour was year-round, for 26 months straight. It was intense, but he was getting some good photographs. On the other hand, it wasn't always ideal - it was incredibly remote, and the conditions were extreme.
Morten Hilmer
When you're so high up north you have a dark season as well as you have the midnight sun, meaning that we have almost three months of where the sun doesn't rise, like a three-month long winter.
The sun doesn't rise for the first time until like the end of February.
There was a deadline where I was going home, back to normal life, and what then?
I was not so certain about my life and what should I do when I come home and watch the rest of my life be. And I wanted to be a wildlife photographer, but it was just becoming something I said to myself without believing 100% in it.
I remember this day we knew the sun was about to rise, we could see clear sky, we could see the horizon, standing next to the dogsled, me and my colleague and the sun was about to rise up there. And I just remember when it came over the horizon, it was like, it was just unbelievable, crazy to get that sunlight in my face for the first time. And I had that feeling, I thought, okay, life is actually pretty nice right now. I'm here in the middle of the world's biggest national park surrounded by ice and snow. Good dog. A nice friend and when I come home I'm going to be a wildlife photographer. That was like, one of these moments I'll never forget.
Jonathan Groubert
After his 26-month long tour ended, Morten returned to Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city. He bought a small apartment there, as an investment.
It was an abrupt change from the solitude of the Arctic!
Morten Hilmer
It was so hard to get back home. I was ripped out of this simple world where you chop off a piece of ice and melt it when you want water and suddenly you come back to to Denmark with cars and Facebook and everything was going mental. I kind of felt that the whole thing had changed when I was there because I had changed so much. But when I came back, the only thing that had changed was they have built a new parking place behind the supermarket and people were not talking that much together.
Up there, we were 12 people in the station, and everyone that passed the station you have in relation to, and then you come home to Aarhus, and no one talked together. I came from being surrounded by the most fantastic nature to being in a small 30 square meter apartment I had this little window where I could see a lake and some trees and I had a terrible time there.
Jonathan Groubert
And then there was the work side of things...
Morten Hilmer
I started out and I sent out 130 letters to people or schools about doing my lectures and I got one answer and I called them all up after a week I'd say, Oh, have you got my letter? And I got one lecture and then I thought, wow, this is going to be hard. But I believed in it.
Jonathan Groubert
If there was one thing Morten knew how to do, it was to stick with his dream. And eventually he did start publishing articles with his photos, and giving lectures and photography courses.
But he missed the North. It was much too expensive for him to go up there on his own dime, but as luck would have it, he heard about a job near the headquarters for the dogsled patrol.
It was for a chef, and even though he wasn't a cook, Morten was determined to do it. Somehow - he got the job.
Morten Hilmer
I was a master of slow cooking because I found a way to put all on the meat so it was ready for the dinner and then go out and photograph during the day.
And the boss up there said that I was an above average cook, but an excellent photographer. That said everything about where I put my priorities.
I think the pictures from the dog sled patrol and the true pictures from this trip kind of created the, fundament, for, getting my name out because after this trip, I got an award in the wildlife photographer of the year competition.
Jonathan Groubert
In 2009, Morten submitted a photo of some arctic hares boxing with each other to the Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. He won runner up in the mammals category.
Morten Hilmer
Then it all started. Then the wildlife photographer adventure really started.
Jonathan Groubert
But even after winning the award, the going was tough. His friends and family had been right. It WAS really difficult to earn a living being a wildlife photographer.
Morten Hilmer
The bank was calling me and saying, it's red numbers all over the lines. When is some money coming in? And I looked at my schedule and I saw no money is coming in. What am I doing? And I sold one of my big lenses and paid the bank and knew that now they wouldn't bother me for the next three months and then I thought to myself, what am I doing now? I'm just teaching photography. I'm making photo courses, photo travels and lectures, but I'm not photographing anymore. Not as I did used to do.
Jonathan Groubert
Instead of figuring out how to make money, Morten decided to figure out how to spend more time doing the thing he loved: taking pictures.
He even stopped giving courses for a whole year.
Morten Hilmer
And then the bank went mental again and I had to sell some other equipment and then I like could, could relax a little again. So I sold a lot of my things too to make that year possible and rethink how I wanted to spend my time. And I'm so grateful I did it. My passion is to be out in nature. Having that fox or that deer in front of my camera, capturing the spirit of the moment and share that with people through my photos.
Jonathan Groubert
For Morten, though, there's really only one place to do that. The North.
Morten Hilmer
When I'm out there in the cold, it just feels right. I'm there.
it's the feeling of a great combination of solitude and a beautiful, unspoiled nature. A place where you can go for weeks and months without any kind of connection to the world and just, be present.
When you get to the Arctic in the winter, everything is covered with snow. All the sound has been dammed by ice. The river, the streams, the waterfall is all frozen. No sound there. All the birds has migrated to the south so you only have the raven left and some of the mammals. you have a colour pattern in blue and white and gray. You wish you had some colors but you only get white. you wish you had a smell but you have nothing but clean air. my eyes and my brain get more creative when I'm surrounded just by whiteness and snow.
Because suddenly with all of these distracting things away, it's suddenly easy to focus on a little straw of grass coming up from the ice with a, with a little snow on top. Suddenly that becomes the only thing that is, and you can concentrate fully on that. Or that little bird or the little fox that comes running, suddenly it's just you and the fox. Nothing else. No sounds, no smells, no colours. And I like that simplicity in my photography and also in my brain. It's like a clean desk. Yeah.
Jonathan Groubert
Morten's persistence, patience and stubbornness have helped him to survive in extreme conditions, but those are also the qualities that define his photographs, and make them unique.
Bert: He can taught me something now. So it's absolutely not the teacher pupil today. He's on his own feet. I'm proud because Morton has done what he's doing and what he's done. He should be proud.
Morton Hilmer
For me it's not a question about making a perfect portrait or a nice action-packed photo of an eagle gripping a fish in its claw with uh, with a water drops like diamonds around it. For me, a perfect photo, if that even exists, is a photo that captures the mood or feeling or an emotion.
The perfect photo for me is the photo that brings the viewer or myself into a little the same mood as when I took the photo or even better a photo that doesn't show everything so clear and nice, that can like trigger the viewer's imagination and fantasy.
The day before yesterday when I was out and it was heavy rain and I was standing there soaked in water and I had a smile on my face when it was dripping down my, my shoes because it was such an awesome feeling. And then the rain stopped, the thunder stopped and this bird started to sing. That can never be boring.
Jonathan Groubert
For those of us who are not aficionados of the lens, or for whom the prospect of months in the Arctic wilderness... surrounded by ice, snow and, er, polar bears, does not seem particularly attractive, all is not lost.
Morton Hilmer
I feel it's easier to take uh, a civilized man from the city and make him feel comfortable around the fireplace or in the forest than it is to take a wild man and make them feel comfortable in Copenhagen and I have not once in my life had a trip to the forest or the middle or the beach, I have never come home in a bad mood. I've always been happy. No matter if you live in New York or if you live in London, just don't forget that we are still mammals. We are not some kind of subspecies, we are still mammals with a beating heart.
And like all of the mammals, we just belong in nature. Leave your phone at home, go out in nature, spend a few hours there unconnected. Try to do that. Make that a part of life. Experience the beauty of being present right here and right now in nature and let the nature touch you and come to you. I genuinely believe that everyone without exception would be more happy and get a little the same feeling as when I saw the sun for the first time.
Jonathan Groubert
Morten Hilmer.
We'll put links up to his website and his nature conservancy work on our website: podcast.klm.com
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
Morten Hilmer’s job is to protect the borders of Greenland. He travels by dog sled across vast empty plains, home to polar bears, arctic foxes and musk oxen. Here, at this desolate location, Morten has an epiphany on what will become his life's destiny once he returns to civilisation.
As a child, Morten is jealous of his dog, who could spend the entire day doing whatever he pleased. The idea of going to school and living a life along well-trodden paths horrifies him. What makes him truly happy is being out in nature. When he discovers photography as a teenager, he knows exactly what he wants to become: a nature photographer. But before he can achieve that goal, he goes on a journey that takes him from the jungles of Ecuador to the vast emptiness of Greenland.
Read more about Morten Hilmer and his work .
After his time in Greenland, Morten needs to work hard to continue pursuing his dream, but he ultimately succeeds in doing what he loves most: being outdoors and photographing nature.
Even though Morten currently lives in Denmark, he travels often to the most inhospitable places on the planet. It is this extreme emptiness without any colours, shapes or sound that inspires his photographic work most.
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Tony Wheeler
What's that childlike boys thing, you know, I want to collect all the toy cars and I, I wanted to collect all the countries... Sort of compulsive, I guess. I've always been a compulsive record keeper. It's useful. Fortunately I kept records of where we went and where we stayed because it turned into a book. Although that wasn't the plan. I hadn't set out thinking "keep good records because you're going to make a book out of this."
Jonathan Groubert
Meet Tony Wheeler. If his name is familiar to you, it's because he and his wife Maureen started a little guide book called... Lonely Planet. You may have heard of it? Well, it all started with a trip they took nearly 50 years ago.
A trip that changed everything!
Hi, I'm Jonathan Groubert and this is The Journey. The Journey is an original podcast by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel.
Tony Wheeler grew up born to travel. His father worked for a British airline in the 1940s and 50s. So in an era when most people were still travelling long distances by boat, Tony went by plane. First stop, when he was a year and a half old, was... Pakistan.
Tony
It took three days to fly to Pakistan. Because you only flew in daytime and you stopped at night. You flew down to Marseille from Poole. You spent the night in Marseille, got on the plane again the next day, flew to somewhere else to refuel and then somewhere else and ended up, I think in Cairo or something. And then another day you flew on to the Gulf and refueled again. And eventually on day three, you got to Karachi.
Jonathan
Travel, shall we say, was a bit different in those days. And so was doing business, especially at the airline Tony's father worked for.
Tony
Now, everywhere an airline goes, everything is outsourced of course. If you have staff, you have them locally, whereas in those days they sent staff out from Britain. So he was sent to work in Pakistan, in The Bahamas and in America.
Jonathan
Tony counted 4 different countries as home by the time he returned to Britain at 16.
Tony
Although actually I was always at home everywhere,, they were all good. But we did sort of come back to Britain every year, even if only briefly. So in a way England was home, your grandparents lived there. So I finished school here, then I went to university. So that's three years. And then I worked for two years and then I, went back to university for two years and then I left Britain then never came back.
Jonathan
At 72, Tony Wheeler still rarely spends more than a few weeks in one place before hitting the road - or the skies - again. He has a place in Melbourne, and in London, which is where we caught up with him, but the journey that led him to where he is today all started back when he was still in school, studying business. He was strolling one afternoon through London’s Regent's Park.
Tony
The Sun is still out. It's October, but it's still a little bit sunny. I'll sit down on a park bench and read this magazine I've just bought and sat down on this park bench and had been reading for 15 minutes and this woman came and sat on the other end of the park bench. Here I am reading a car magazine and she's reading Tolstoy.
Jonathan
That woman was Maureen. And it turned out she was interested in other places too.
Tony
That first summer that we traveled together. We went to Czechoslovakia and then we went down into Austria and into Yugoslavia and then back to London at the end of that month or so. During my last year at university, we started talking about doing a big trip it was the era for that sort of trip. And we were both very enthusiastic about doing that. Carpe diem, you know, seize the day. You only live once. All those things.
Jonathan
You realize how unusual that is.
Tony
No, it's not unusual at all. A lot of people are living their life as full a fashion as they can. They should be, if they're not.
Jonathan
The year was 1972. Flower Power had had its heyday, but the anti-establishment sentiment was still strong. Lots of young people were setting out to discover the world... on their own terms.
Tony
It was the era of the hippie trail, you know, the hippie trail was the, the one of the things to do the Beatles were in India and lots of people were traveling across Asia and coming back with these smelly coats from Afghanistan and buying and selling things and looking for the meaning of life and heading down to the beach and taking their clothes off in Goa and heading up to Nepal.
Jonathan
Travelling the hippie trail was different. Especially if you grew up regularly using planes as a mode of transport.
Tony
We called it the Asia overland trip. And the idea was you went to Asia and you didn't fly there. You went overland. You definitely went through Istanbul. You went across Turkey, or you might've gone down into Syria and Iraq, but Turkey was the usual route. You went into Iran. You certainly went to Tehran, you probably went down to Isfahan and Shiraz and so on. You went into Afghanistan to Herat, to Kandahar. Everybody went to Kabul. And then you carried on to Pakistan, India, and Katmandu and Katmandu was sort of the destination. That was the place you headed to.
Jonathan
Tony and Maureen started planning their trip. There was just one problem.
Tony
There wasn't all the information there is today. Now you couldn't go on the internet and Google for "Hippie Trail" and find out all about it. You couldn't go into a bookshop, and find a, a dozen books about all the countries that you are going to go through and read people's accounts of, of doing this or doing that there. That information just was not there.
Jonathan
Back then, travel guides for that part of the world didn't really exist, so you more or less went into your travels blind. But that didn't stop Maureen and Tony.
Tony
We bought an old car in London with the intention that we're just drive it as far as far as it would go. The intention was we'd go somewhere where we could sell it and you couldn't sell it just anywhere. So we sort of thought, well, you go to Katmandu and sell it in Kathmandu. Our aim was to get to Australia, because at that time, if you were British, you didn't need a visa, you could just turn up.
Jonathan
And so, when the school year finished Maureen and Tony filled their car with spare parts, a tent, maps, sleeping bags, a stove and food. They set off from Tony's parents' place, shouting "We'll be back in a year!"
They crossed the English Channel by boat, and then the drive began. From Amsterdam they drove via Switzerland, Italy and Greece to Istanbul. They took another ferry across the Bosphorus into Asia, travelling through Turkey. So far everything had gone to plan. Well... most of the time...
Tony
Somebody turned up with a gun, but he, I'm sure he was there to look after us rather than-
Jonathan
How can you be sure?
Tony
I'm still here today...
Jonathan
Well, when they turned up with guns, what did you think?
Tony
What do you do? They didn't shoot us and they said, "would you like some tea?"
Jonathan
After that, it was onto Iran - where they encountered the Shah's motorcade - and then to Afghanistan. It was a tour of highlights: Isfahan, the Caspian Sea, Mashhad, Herat... When they got to Kabul, they sold their car and took a bus from Jalalabad over the Khyber Pass into Pakistan. After that, it was more busses, from Peshawar to Lahore, and then to Amritsar, in northern India. They stopped in Varanasi, the holy city where India's Hindus cremate their dead. From there, they took a train to the Nepalese border, and the dawn bus to the end of the hippie trail - Kathmandu.
Tony
In some ways Kathmandu was the high point of the trip because, it was cheap. The food was good to me, the, everything about it was, and it was exotic and wonderful, wonderful.
Jonathan
Everything you'd hoped.
Tony
Everything I'd hoped. Yeah.
Katmandu wasn't the end of the road for us. Australia was, and the plan was, we'll work in Australia. The original plan was we'll arrive there penniless, three months work. That'll be enough money to fly back to London.
Jonathan
In the meantime, though, they had to get from Kathmandu to Australia. So they left the well-trodden Hippie Trail and ventured off on their own. They started by going to Calcutta, and then crossed into Southeast Asia.
Travelling off-the-beaten-path was novel, but not easy.
Tony
Southeast Asia was much more a sort of a mystery. We didn't know so much about it. There were hardly any tourists in Bangkok tourism. In Bangkok at that time it meant GIs and R&R from the Vietnam war basically. And then, we went down to Indonesia and we really, we knew nothing about Indonesia. We got to Jakarta and we just didn't have any information. We didn't know which way to turn. We didn't know where to find a hotel and we spent hours walking around trying to find a cheaper hotel and found a terrible place in the end. If I had known there was this particular area to go to, which was already in a small way, starting to develop as the sort of backpacker's center of Jakarta.
Jonathan
Only you'd have to find it yourself.
Tony
Yeah. The Lonely Planet guide hadn't been published at that point.
Jonathan
But Tony was a compulsive record keeper, remember, and he was taking notes.
Tony
We got up this morning, visited this museum and that temple and something else got on the bus. The bus costs this much. It took this number of hours, got off, looked for a hotel, didn't stay in that hotel. Did stay in that hotel, had dinner in this restaurant cost so much, you know.
Jonathan
But after arriving in Indonesia, Tony and Maureen realized they were running out of money and needed to find a way to Australia.
Tony
The most miserable thing when you're a young penniless traveler is going someplace where you can't afford it. We certainly couldn't afford to actually fly from Indonesia, you know, flying from Bali or Jakarta all the way to Singapore and Melbourne was right out of our price bracket, we couldn't afford that sort of thing. So the idea was you went down to the island of Timor and you could fly across quite a short flight from Timor to Darwin in the north of Australia. And that was our plan until the airline that took you down from Bali to Timor went bankrupt.
Jonathan
But, as you've probably already figured out by now, Maureen and Tony were resourceful....
Tony
And then we bumped into this New Zealander with a yacht. he was talking in a cafe, we heard him say, I've got a yacht and I'm sailing down to Australia and I need a couple more crew. And uh, we sort of jumped up and said, we'll join you. And he said, okay, toss in $20 for the food and we leave in two days’ time.
Well, it didn't quite go to plan. It was straight south from Bali and the plan was six to eight days. But it took 16 days, There was no wind. And when there was wind it blew in the wrong direction and we were becalmed for a couple days at one point and the food was running out and it was not the most comfortable trip.
You know, you're young, you put up with these things.
Jonathan
Did you have a moment when you were scared?
Tony
Oh yeah. After the becalmed episode there was a storm episode and the sails split one night and you're spinning around in circles and you're thinking: "was this a good idea? Probably not."
Jonathan
Eventually, though, they got to the very northwestern tip of Australia.
Tony
We landed at a place called Exmouth. We arrived there and our captain rowed ashore in a boat and walked up the beach and hitched a ride into town and found the immigration officer and said, "I've just showed up in a yacht, come out and stamp our passports", which was exactly what happened. The immigration guy said to Maureen and I, well, what are you, are you visitors are immigrants? And we said, oh, is there a, is there a choice? And B, what is the difference? And he sort of scratched his head and he thought, well, no one's ever asked me that. And he said, I don't know. And he sort of flicked through the book. He said, oh, if you're an immigrant, you get medical insurance for three months for free. So we said, oh, okay, then we'll be immigrants. So, he stamped in our passport, arrived in Australia, immigrants, because at that moment we'd said immigrant rather than visa visitor, we were in the door and could stay. Our original plan had changed because by that point, we'd had so much fun. It'd just been this wonderful trip, everything had been just terrific and we'd seen so much and we'd just got a taste for it and what really wanted to do more of it. We decided we'll spend a year in Australia and we'll save enough money to travel for another year. Instead of around the world in one year, now it's around the world in three years.
So we hitchhiked across to Sydney and we, the last ride dropped us off in Sydney and I remember Maureen said, well, here we are, we've made it, we made it all the way from London to Sydney. We've taken six months. It's been a great trip. How much money have we got left? And I said, well, we've got 27 cents.
Jonathan
27 cents wasn't a lot of money, even in the early 1970s. But did that stop them? It did not. They simply forged on, like they always did.
Tony
I had a camera and we got $25 for my camera from a loan shop and Maureen got a job in a sandwich bar that day. So all the sandwiches that were leftover that evening, she could bring home. So we had food as well as getting paid and away it went.
Jonathan
Tony and Maureen immediately started working. They put in long hours. Their strategy was to live on one salary while saving the other.
They also started making friends - friends who were curious about their travels.
Tony
So many people asked us, where did you go? How'd you do it? What did it cost? They'd say, oh, those hotels you said you stayed in, could you just write them down for us? And we began to get more and more notes we were giving to people and you kind of think, well, you can make these notes into a book and actually sell it to people.
Jonathan
And THAT is exactly what they did.
Tony
So, we started writing this and, wrote more and more of it, it just got bigger and, drew maps for it. It was all very amateur hour... This is all of Asia in 96 pages. And the first 1500 we folded and stapled and trimmed them ourselves. We were trying to think of a name. Yeah, we'd got a title: Across Asia on the Cheap. We didn't have a name for the publishing house. And um, there's a song where Joe Cocker sings "Space Captain", about traveling across the sky and this lonely planet catching his eye. And I said to Maureen, lonely planet, doesn't that sound good. Why don't we call it Lonely Planet? And Maureen said, great idea, except actually he sings lovely planet. So it was a mistake. I'd misheard. The name's been an error for 50 years.
Jonathan
And with their misheard name, the book was ready. Now all they had to do was sell it.
Tony
And I went into what was the biggest bookshop in Sydney. And found the guy who ran the, travel book area and the travel book area was just, you know, a few shelves. It wasn't anything like it would be today. And I described, what I was planning to do, write a book about the hippie trail and produce it myself. I described it to him and he said, yeah, that sounds okay. He said, if you come in here with that book as something I could put on the shelves and buy 50 copies. So, we did it. And I, I went round the other, all the other book shops in Sydney and nobody else had had 50 but they all ordered 10 or 12 or six or something, they all ordered some and within a week or two we'd sold the whole lot. We, we had to reprint and then we had to reprint it again. We ended up selling nearly 10,000 of that first book and we only sold it in Australia in New Zealand. It didn't get out of Australia, New Zealand.
Jonathan
Tony and Maureen had originally planned to work in Australia for a year, save some money, and spend another year travelling back to England to resettle there.
But in the meantime, Lonely Planet had been born. And their trip's date of departure was approaching.
Tony
Except we're not now setting out back to Europe. We're setting out to do another book.
Jonathan
So when was the moment that you realized that this is who you were?
Tony
I think, when we set off to do that second book, I sort of thought this is the start of a business.
Jonathan
Instead of heading back to England, they decided to write a guidebook that zoomed in on southeast Asia.
Tony
It was very evident that this was an area that people didn't know about. All they knew about Southeast Asia was Vietnam.
Jonathan
It was the mid 1970s, and even though the war in Vietnam was coming to an end, no one was thinking of it as a place to travel.
But Tony and Maureen could see that the whole area was starting to open up. So they travelled around there for a year, fact finding for the new book.
Tony
We set out from Sydney. We traveled up to the north of Australia. We were on a motorcycle. we took the motorcycle across the Timor and then we took that motorcycle all the way through Asia.
The second book was a much more planned operation. We knew we were doing a guide book. We, we didn't just note down the name of the place we stayed, we noted down the names of all the cheap hotels and chose the ones we were going to write up about and we'd traveled around pretty much everywhere we could think of that people would travel to.
The first one was printed by some guy he was the printer, all he had was the one little printing press in his basement. the second one was printed by a professional printer and it was professionally done and the whole thing about it was far more professional.
Jonathan
Lonely Planet was beginning to grow. They decided to settle in Australia, not England, and Tony, well, he gave up on the idea of being an engineer.
Over the next few years they made a name for themselves by producing a dozen or so guides for countries that at that time, were on the literal road less travelled like Sri Lanka and Burma, today’s Myanmar.
They were small, inexpensive books and, by this time, they had a network of travellers and writers who they'd commission to gather information. They hired an assistant, found a distributor, and paid an artist to draw their maps. Tony even went to the Frankfurt Book Fair - the largest book fair in the world - to promote Lonely Planet.
But after a while, it became clear that they needed to put out a guide to a much larger country, and one of the most complex in the world. A book that would be a game-changer.
Tony
We'd sort of done these books and we thought we've got enough money now to actually do a, uh, a bigger book. There were a lot of people going to India. we covered India in a small fashion in our all of Asia book, but it was nothing at all compared to what the size of India was.
Jonathan
It was a risk, but one they felt they had to take if they were going to prove their worth to travellers.
Tony
It came out to be much bigger than we, that intended. And it took much longer to put together. It took a long time to put together. We'd been doing 200- and 300-page books and suddenly we had a 700-page book. We'd been doing books that were $2.95 and $3.95 and $4.95. And suddenly we had a book that was $14.95. And these books we'd been doing had been selling, generally our, 10,000 was our usual print run if we were, if we thought it could be a good book. Well, India went back and sold thirty thousand, forty thousand, fifty thousand, sixty thousand you know, it just went on and on.
Jonathan
What made Lonely Planet so popular, was its approach to travel.
Tony
It was, a fair amount about traveling at ground level. Experiencing things for real, experiencing things closer up, interacting with people and enjoying the, the, the locality of it.
We were doing, we were in our early twenties, we had no money. So we were doing books for people who were in their early twenties with no money.
I'm a great believer in young people traveling. I even when they get out there at first, you know, they really do experience more things and I think there's a lot of virtues in not having much money. It does bring you closer to earth and you experience things in a better fashion.
Jonathan
They also provided travellers with practical, useful information that couldn't be found anywhere else.
Tony
Today all that information is available. you want to do a map, you look it up on Google maps, whereas in those days, so often you could, you couldn't find any map at all. You'd have to go and you'd walk, you'd pace out a hundred paces. You have your compass, turn to the east, walk 50 paces, there's the next, you know, and you'd draw a map that way. basically, you'd come to a new town and you'd, you'd find a hotel, you dump your bag and you'd start walking around and as you walked around you'd be drawing the map and you'd been noting the places and you did it that way, with a lot of walking.
You had to see the market at dawn, you had to see the nightclubs at midnight, you had to do it all.
Jonathan
After the guide to India came out, things changed. And before they knew it, Lonely Planet had become kind of an empire. The guides became so popular that Ethiopian rebels in 1991 used a Lonely Planet map to find their way around Addis Ababa to overthrow the government.
Rebellions aside, Lonely Planet, the company, went from strength to strength.
Tony
It grew enormously and I, I was kind of stunned. It did grow far more than I anticipated and it got bigger than I anticipated. And became a, became an international operation.
Jonathan
They were growing because the world was changing. It was opening up, flights were getting cheaper, and people were travelling more.
Tony's compulsion for collecting things - whether it was countries or the facts about them - was core to Lonely Planet's success.
They moved from hand-illustrated hippie books about places off-the-beaten-track, to Lonely Planet! The world's largest guidebook publisher! It was a household name.
They had published 500 books of nearly every country in the world, and sold tens of millions of copies. They had more than 500 employees, and 300 authors on the road.
Tony and Maureen had started Lonely Planet almost on a whim 35 years ago in a small Australian apartment. Things had changed so much by 2007 that they decided to sell it.
Tony
Our kids weren't going to carry the business on and the business was getting increasingly digital. The digital side was becoming more and more important, but it wasn't my first love. My first love was the books in print, so that wasn't going to carry on. And if you're going to be involved in anything, you've got to be absolutely passionate about it. You can't be thinking, well, I quite like this, but, it isn't my, my great love in life.
We thought, you know what, that's time to move on to something else.
Jonathan
Did you not have a sense of loss?
Tony
Oh yeah. But, um, but it was time for change.
Jonathan
After selling the company, Tony and Maureen started the Planet Wheeler Foundation, which has over 60 projects in Asia and Africa that help fight poverty.
These days, Tony and Maureen divide their time between Australia and London, and - of course - all the other places they still want to visit.
Because Tony is still passionate about travel. Tony Wheeler collects countries like some people collect stamps.
Tony
I get a real kick out of going places and, you know, new places in particular there's lots of places I haven't been to. Last year, one of the places I went to was Cyprus because, I'd never been there before you know, you draw a straight line between here and Australia and I was flying back to Australia and I thought, well, I can just stop in Cyprus and have a look around Cyprus.
Somebody asked me recently, what's on your bucket list of what you really want to do? And I, I came up with 30 with no trouble at all. Two years ago I did a four month trip.
It was a driving trip. I was, I drove from Bangkok to London with some other people, um, in old cars. Old MGBs, the English sports car of the 60s and Seventies. Every single day of that trip was just like the old days, you know, it was like the hippie trail in the 70s. It was the Silk Road in 2017.
Jonathan
But for Tony, the essence of travel is that it opens you up to the generosity of others, usually in the most unexpected of places.
Tony
You go to Iran, and I've been to Iran a number of occasions, you have met nothing but kindness so often. And I remember one occasion about, uh, 10 years ago and I was traveling around, I, by myself traveling around Iran and on a number of occasions, I'd be at a restaurant. And, I'd be sitting there and I ordered food and someone from would come over from another table and said, we see you by yourself and we speak English at our table. Why don't you come and join us? And that just doesn't happen in restaurants in the West so much does it, you don't get invited to somebody else's table in a restaurant. And that's, that's great. Yeah.
Jonathan
Do you think that's what travel does with people?
Tony
Yeah, it does. If people did travel, they would be kinder. They would be more, more out there. More empathetic.
Jonathan
So what's the one thing Tony wants you to take away from his story?
Tony
Live your dreams. if there's something you've wanted to do, do it.
Look, one of the things Maureen and I say over and over again, is if the big tram runs us down tomorrow, what would I say? I'd say, well, I had a wonderful time. I'm not gonna regret a thing. There's more things I'd love to do. Hopefully I get to do some more of them yet. If I had 24 months in a year, that, there'd be enough things to fill it.
Jonathan
Tony Wheeler.
We'll put links to Tony's books and the Planet Wheeler Foundation on our website: podcast.klm.com
You've been listening to The Journey, an original podcast brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
For more background on this story and to hear more stories about the trip that changed everything, go to podcast.klm.com.
And why not review us on Apple Podcasts... it helps other listeners find this podcast.
Thank you for listening. I'm Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
An avid collector, Tony Wheeler's hobby inadvertently led to the creation of Lonely Planet travel guides. In the 70s, he travels with his wife from Great Britain to Australia over land. Once they arrive Down Under, everyone wants to know how they did it. After filling pages and pages with travel tips, they wondered if there wasn't a better way to share their knowledge.
That first trip became the foundation of what would grow into a global empire and make ‘Lonely Planet’ a household name. Practically every country in the world eventually gets its own Lonely Planet guide. Over the years millions of copies have been printed. Although Tony and Maureen spend most of their time running a company with hundreds of employees, they remain passionate travellers. Now in their 70s, the couple still roams the world.
Tony and Maureen have also dedicated a portion of their company's profits to charity. They even founded the Planet Wheeler Foundation. This organisation supports numerous projects in some of the countries they travelled through in the 70s, such as Nepal and Afghanistan.
Read more about Planet Wheeler
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Paul Forkan
My name's, Paul Forkan and I'm 29 now.
Jonathan Groubert
Paul is English and when he was 10, his workaholic parents said...
Paul
"Next week we're going to India. You gotta pack one bag, go and tell your teachers." So it got to the end of the week, and I had my shirt all ripped and signed by everyone all over it and miss came by and said, "What happened with your shirt?" "Miss I'm leaving in a few hours, I told you." She was like, "What?" So she like quickly scrambled back, went to the office and rung my mother and said, "What's going on? Paul going to India." And she's like, "Yeah. Did he not tell you?" That she was like, "Yeah but you can't just pull them out of the school and just do this." "You got to give us notice," and all this stuff. so our parents didn't even tell the head teacher and that.
Jonathan
This was a decision that affected every aspect of Paul’s life right up to today. And would put them on a collision course with one of the most fateful days in human history.
This is a story about the trip that changed everything!
Hi, I'm Jonathan Groubert and this is The Journey.
The Journey is an original podcast by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel.
Paul
We would always go away at Christmas on holiday 'cause they would literally work all year.
Jonathan
But the Christmas Paul turned 10 was different. Paul grew up in a large family in Croydon, in south London. He was one of six kids, and instead of going on their usual Christmas holiday, Paul's parents decided to sell the house, leave everything behind and head out into the world - with the kids in tow.
Paul
Our parents were just like, "What the heck are we doing all this for? All we're doing is working, getting in at 11 o clock at night, then be up at nine in the morning, out and doing all the prep work."
So they were like, "We don't see our kids. We've got six kids."
I felt, "Wow. This is- this is gonna be good fun." the weather's gonna be good, see our parents loads. We're not gonna be at school every day, and I was like, "We'll be able to play cricket on the beach, football on the beach." So I was like, "Yeah, let's- let's hurry up and get out of here."
Jonathan
In your head this was, "It's gonna be endless vacation."
Paul
Yeah, pretty much.
Jonathan
Paul's family was definitely not average...
The Forkan family decision to up stakes and go to India was shocking to everyone. Even to Paul. But also, it kind of made sense.
Paul
So if you looked over at the Forkans, you would think, "Oh my God, that house is crazy." Our doors were always left open, we had no- we never locked our house. Everyone would come over, we'd be playing cricket in the garden, uh, football in the garden, everyone would just come there, there's six of us, so that was crazy in itself and then our parents. Most parents would work a nine till five, our parents would go work at nine in the morning, um, sometimes they'll-they'll get back at 11 o'clock at night, and this isn't just one night a week this is three times a week, um. So it was kind of very different to our mates where their parents would literally be at home at six, they'd have the dinner on the table.
Jonathan
You'd be left to your own devices?
Paul
Yeah.
Jonathan
Was that good?
Paul
I think it was good, it helped us grow up quicker. I used to look at some mates at school and stuff, they were not as independent, um, I was always like trying to push to do stuff myself and grow up, uh, quicker than others, I was kind of quite lucky in that sense.
Jonathan
Paul's parents worked their long hours in the field of social enterprise.
Paul
They were doing it 20 years ago when people didn't really understand social enterprise...
Jonathan
They organized fashion shows as fundraisers for schools, hospitals, charities...
Paul
The ticket sales would go to the school, the university or the hospital, whoever's organizing the event and then they would make money from the clothes so it was kind of a win-win.
Jonathan
Their business was successful, and they were deeply involved in the community, helping those who needed it. And that included unorthodox ways of helping their own children.
Paul
Me and my brother are both really badly dyslexic, um, and they would basically help us, where they would make us feel like we could climb any mountain, nothing can-can stop us, Even though they knew that I was struggling at school and would have, the classroom assistant sat next to me and I'd be coming home frustrated, but they just did stuff that kind of brushed it under the carpet and they would take me into work with them for a few days, you learn so much more outside of the classroom than just the four walls every day.
I used to love it, um. It would be so cool like, sometimes I'd just be working in the warehouse learning all the different operations and stuff. Sometimes I'd go on a buying trip, um, and it would be really cool like, you go out for the day, see my mum do some deals and stuff and I'd be like, "I wanna do that when I'm older."
Jonathan
The Forkan children were being educated in things you can't learn from school books: independence, self-reliance, common sense... So their parents' decision to take the kids out of school and travel the world was an extension of that.
They got their shots, they bought a travel guide, and they... just... went. School or no school.
Paul
Well, they couldn't do anything 'cause we were on a plane out pretty quick. So we just literally that was it, off we went with our one bag.
Jonathan
The Forkan kids were being educated in the school of life.
Paul
We're in Jordan in the Middle East just traveling around and then before we knew, we were in Mumbai. It was only meant to be a six-month maximum trip.
Jonathan
But six months turned into seven, then eight... the deadline kept getting extended.
Paul
My dad would have like a Lonely Planet book and he would just read places out, "What about here? What about there?" And then we would just basically, he'd go haggle with a Jeep or go get train tickets or whatever it is. And then off we would go.
And it was a real eye-opener and you had children running after our car because they'd never seen like white people before. And they were like so excited, we were just young and took it in the moment. it was so vastly different to being in Croydon.
Jonathan
The Forkan family settled in Goa, on the west coast of India, for a while...
Paul
We were then there for like six months and then we did a few trips from there, and explored the the state as well 'cause it's quite big. So we stayed in tree houses and like loads of different stuff like that. Camps by paddy fields. So we saw loads of like wildlife. That was amazing when you see a mongoose and a cobra kill each other, that was pretty cool.
Jonathan
...and then, after about a year on the road, Paul's parents thought it might be a good idea to put the kids back into a school.
Paul
My Hindi wasn't very good, I was then put into a class with kids like half my age. So I'm sat in a kindergarten, like type school bench with my knees no room for them. Yeah, just imagine being in a school with people half your size.
After six months um, school in India, our parents said that they were gonna homeschool us. So they went out and they bought literally loads of books.
Jonathan
But despite the best efforts of the parents it didn’t quite work out the way they’d hoped...
Paul
We sat down one afternoon um, and that was it. We never saw them books again. So their idea of homeschooling us didn't really happen and it just went back to playing football beach, cricket and they would teach us stuff, they would take us to sites, history sites. We would go to a fort or a temple or a mosque, and they'd explain to us about about it. and they would- then start, or were like, "Hey, let's- let's do some more good as well." they also took us to orphanages.
We would always volunteer like in an orphanage, every Thursday, Tuesday. We'd go to the slums as well and we'd make sure that the children were making sure that if they had any cuts or any stuff, like we were cleaning them up, making sure that they've got books, pencils.
Jonathan
It was back to the school of life.
But eventually, after 4 years of being in India, Paul's parents hatched a new business idea, and started making plans to head back to the UK with their children. Their 6-month trip, 3 1/2 years overdue, was coming to an end.
How did you imagine your future at that point?
Paul
I imagined I would be working for my parents with my brother and it'd be a family business, and we'd still be sort of traveling as a family.
Jonathan
Sticking together, still staying together, keeping the band together as it were?
Paul
Yeah, exactly. Anything, just to be in with the family, you know. if I could just work with my family, I'm happy. You know.
Jonathan
But before heading back, the Forkans decided to make one detour, for the Christmas holidays, just like old times.
Paul
And our dad basically had this, the Lonely Planet book. And he was, "Oh, what do you think about Sri Lanka?" So he went off and booked some flights, and came back and said, "We're going to Sri Lanka tomorrow." So that was it, off we went, we flew into Sri Lanka and it was Christmas time. There's a massive surfing festival on and all the hotels were booked up, so we had to drive six or seven hours down to the south of the island.
Jonathan
They found a place to stay in the town of Weligama [WEL-ee GAH-mah], on the south coast of Sri Lanka, at the edge of the vast Indian Ocean. They surfed, and had Christmas dinner... Paul's oldest sister hadn't joined them for this part of the trip. And his second oldest sister, Joy, headed to the airport that Christmas night to go back to the UK on her own.
Everyone went to bed, completely unaware that the next day would change not only their lives, but the lives of millions of others… forever.
Paul
It's eight, eight in the morning and my brother's like, "Paul, Paul wake up. Uh, there's some water coming, in the room." I'm, "Mate, leave me alone." Um, so then he said, Paul, I'm not joking." 'Cause we do pranks on each other like. If I was up first or something I would hit him on the head and you know, just kind of young teenage banter.
And he was like, "No, we need to get up." So then I got up and we then were like, "Crap, what's happened here?" we then had to put the bags and stuff on the bed and then, we saw all the waiters and stuff all running up and down, they were putting the chairs on the tables and we were, "What's happened here? Is this normal? Um, is the tide just coming in? What is it?" And it was quite calm, and then it felt weird. There was like no, like there was no birds and stuff and that it was like, "Hang on, something isn't right here."
You just had a weird feeling in the air. Like something bad was coming to happen. It just went quiet and it was water coming in and loads of people panicking. And that was all you saw.
And then this is a small wave. And then that went out. And then another one came in and it was up to sort of knee-height. Then it went to waist-height. And then when you are in water- when you're in water, even when it's not moving at your waist, it's hard to move.
I then walked across it in the- waist-height thinking, "Crap, we need to get out just in case this comes in any more." then before I know its kind of chest-height and, uh, we're outside. the water then goes out, and there's no water. And we're like, "That was so weird and crazy." And what's happening is a big one's on its way.
Jonathan
It was December 26th, 2004.
Paul and his family were about to experience the worst tsunami in history, triggered by a massive undersea earthquake a few hours earlier near western Indonesia. But no one had heard about it, and no one was prepared.
Paul
I was in my boxer shorts 'cause I was just woken up, um, and I was like, "What we do? What we do? Is this normal? What the hell." When you see the tide going, you're starting, "No, no. This is insane. This is something else. This is- this isn't- this isn't right." And then, "Well, okay, crap you've got 30 seconds."
Jonathan
Paul and his brother had a room facing inland about 30 metres from the beach, but his parents and younger brother and sister were in a bungalow right on the beach, facing the water.
Paul
The water was coming back, and it was coming back bigger, uh, and it was coming back quite quick.
And I was really lucky my brother basically, uh- I was holding on his and he's like, "Hold on. Hold on." We were just holding on gripping on and the water was going up and up and up.
Jonathan
A wall of water nearly 5 metres high hit the coast, and their bungalow. The force of it was so great, it ripped a sink from the wall and smashed it into shards.
Paul
It can move an oil tanker the waves and stuff like the fishing boats, all of them just- all got battered. It sometimes doesn't look like it because it just looks like water to moving, but the force of it is insane. we were just holding on, and it was taking off all the roof tiles and everything. And I was just trying to get height, um, and I- I couldn't pull myself up. My brother pulled my arm, and pulled me up, um, and then we were kind of holding on to the roof support beams that keep the tiles on.
Hanging on, with our waists getting pushed by the water. then my brother managed to get higher up, and I couldn't reach and he grabbed my arm. And if he didn't grab my arm I would have been gone.
Jonathan
Swept away?
Paul
Swept away, yeah.
The water- the water starts to then recede and go back. And the whole place is just absolutely battered. It's literally debris everywhere, glass everywhere, coconuts dropped, all color-- L-literally everything, sauce pans. "Okay, we need to find our family, and we need to get out of here.
Jonathan
Paul and his brother Rob assessed the situation from a rooftop. Then, they spotted something.
Paul
We found our little brother in a coconut tree.
Jonathan
Paul's parents had been able to get Matty and Rosie, his little brother and sister, out of their bungalow and Matty into the tree.
But then where did his parents go. And where was Rosie?
After searching through the debris of the resort, they found no trace of them. And they didn't know if another tsunami was going to hit. So they decided to head inland along some railway tracks, towards the centre of town.
Paul
The trains were turned over. there were loads of dead people. People who sort of nearly dead being carried and stuff and everyone's screaming distressed, they're cut up and stuff. Everyone's scrambling just helping each other, dragging people down by their legs along the rocky train tracks just to get everyone to a dry and safer place.
And we managed to find a mosque that was above ground and very well-built. We were like, "Okay. If we based ourselves on the roof of the mosque and something happens, a bigger one comes or whatever it is, we're fine."
Jonathan
Paul and his brother decided to head back to the beach, to look for Rosie. Someone approached them, and asked if they had a little sister.
Paul
She-she was with some surfers in a resort a few doors down. And she was all cut up and stuff on her arm and that. And she was only seven, and she was still in her pajamas and that. we got her, back. And then, some guy said he saw our dad, and he said that he was dead and I was like, "No, no, no." and I felt sick.
I brushed that thought aside and said, "No. This is bullocks. Like mom and dad are strong. They're still out there. They're-they're coming back.
Jonathan
Paul and his brother didn't want to believe what they'd heard. But there was also no sign of their mother and father. It was chaos all around: upended buses, boats wedged into trees, not to mention the thousands and thousands of injured and missing. It was clear that finding their parents in all of this would be nearly impossible.
Paul was 15, Rob was 17, and, as the eldest, they knew they had to take responsibility for the little ones, Rosie and Matty. The common sense they'd spent their childhood learning kicked in: the smartest thing to do would be to just get home.
That meant heading to the airport in Colombo, a whole day's travel up the coast. But they didn't have any money, and there weren't any buses or trains running. The gas stations were not functioning. And there was still no information about where else the tsunami had hit or how extensive the damage was in the rest of the country.
So, the 4 Forkan children - still in the clothes they'd woken up in the previous day - managed to find a ride. Colombo hadn't been hit as badly by the tsunami, but was chaotic with rescue operations. The Forkans managed to get their wounds tended to, and to call their oldest sister. They told her they were ok and trying to get home. But they had no passports, no clothes, and no parents - they were all minors.
They also had no home to go to - it had been sold 4 years back, remember? But the British consulate got the Forkan kids on a flight back to the UK. They boarded the plane barefoot, and in borrowed clothes, with nothing but each other.
Paul
We were the biggest family, West-Western family or, uh, orphaned in the tsunami. Um, so it was- it was big news.
Jonathan
Unbeknownst to them, the Forkans had become a huge media story back home. Once they arrived in the UK, they virtually had to go into hiding.
And a lot of other things needed to be sorted out too. Paul's oldest sister, who was 22, agreed to take them into her 2-bedroom house. They needed to go back to school. They needed to arrange the semblance of a normal life again.
All while having no idea if their parents were still alive. They were stuck in a kind of limbo.
Paul
And then I think it got to like March time, so it was a few months of living thinking that they were coming back, and then it was confirmed that they'd found their bodies.
Even after their funeral, I didn't think they were- they were gone. I thought they were- they were, like, the-the strongest people that I've known. I didn't think that, um, they would ever be leaving when I was a kid.
Jonathan
The Forkan family finally had an answer. Their parents were gone and the kids could begin to think about moving on with their lives. Paul spent a year and a half in school but, given the circumstances, it didn't go very well.
Paul
So, I was buggered. I was like, "What-What do I do now?" And everyone was like, "Well, you need to either get a trade." So, like, do plumbing or electrical or whatever it was.
Jonathan
But that wasn't for him either.
Paul
I needed to get out of my sister's house 'cause it just felt I was trespassing. Just, I-I was living in her garage. I needed to of move on and give her-her life back a bit, you know.
So, as soon as I got 18, I was- s-sat in the car park at work and, um- and I was looking on my phone of where to, uh, book some flights, and that was it. I booked a round-the-world ticket.
Jonathan
If there was one thing the Forkans were good at, it was feeling at home in other countries. School of life, right?
Paul
I love flying is the best, you know, it's quite random, isn't it, when you just- you know, you leave- you leave like London and you-you're here all the time, you-you get off the plane and you can either be in Sri Lanka or you know like wherever it is, and it's totally different culture, people, language, money, the whole lot, weather, um, it's the best feeling ever.
Jonathan
And Paul was, for the first time in his life, completely on his own.
Paul
It felt like I was living in a video game. It just feels so a-amazing and so good." When you're living in your sister's garage and there's no space in a three-bedroom house, and you're all living on top of each other in bunk beds. I don't know, it just felt-felt free.
I had no responsibility. No one to answer to, you don't have to be back for a certain time. You know,you'd go to a silent disco rave on the beach in India and you're like, "Oh my God, that's the best night I've ever had." And then you're staying in tree houses, you're meeting all these random new people, hiring scooters, jet skis. Being young and free, yeah, and wild. from 18-21, was s-some of the best years in my life.
Jonathan
Paul spent 3 years travelling around the world on his own - America, Asia, New Zealand. But blood is thicker than water, as they say, and on his 21st birthday, his brother Rob showed up.
Rob Forkan
I just turned up at the door and Paul had no idea how I knew where he lived, how to get there. Um, and just wasn't expecting it.
Jonathan
This is Rob Forkan.
Rob
And what was funny, it was literally like eight hours before or something, I was in India saying, Oh, I'm so sorry I can't be there for your birthday. Whilst literally then having my backpack and everything ready to go, I shut my laptop and just remember running straight to the airport and getting to the airport.
Jonathan
Can we say he was surprised?
Rob
Oh, that's an understatement.. He was blown away. Literally like I thought he was going to pass out. he thought it was in India, which I was in India at the time. it was also, a stopover on my way to Australia to go surprise him and tell him about the idea.
Jonathan
So, after celebrating with Paul, Rob sat him down and told him what had been on his mind - a business plan of sorts: sell a product and use a percentage of the proceeds to help kids in Sri Lanka who had been orphaned in the tsunami - like they had.
Rob
The more I thought about it, the more I thought this is, this has got legs. Oh, 100%. It was symbolic., you know, overcoming adversity and, and showing that no matter what kind of happens, do you, um, yeah, you can kind of push on.
Paul
And I was like, "Yeah, I'm in." I don't want to get to the 10-year anniversary, and basically, you just look at my brother and go, "Oh, we've done nothing for our parents, like legacy, what they kind of instilled in us."
Jonathan
Paul and Rob started the same kind of social enterprise that his parents had run when they were children. And thus, Gandys was born.
Paul
We spell it differently, but, um, our little brother used to always get called, uh, Gandhi 'cause he had glasses on. And after a night out you- would maybe sometimes say my mouth tasted as dry as Gandhi's flip flop, and it's like a slang term.
Jonathan
Because instead of putting on fashion shows like their parents had, they decided to sell flip flops.
Paul
Basically- we used to live in flip flops as children. me and my brother, we were like, "Okay, what's a universal product that everyone can afford?" we were like, again, that's a flip flop. "Right, let's-let's do flip flops. Um, it's a universal pro- a universal product solving universal problems."
Jonathan
Paul and Rob's foundation provided orphans of the tsunami with the basics. But before they knew it, they were doing more...
Paul
We were orphans. And, we set it up to help orphans, but as we discovered after a few months, we were just doing stuff with communities and the villages and just helping all-all children because we just thought it is important that every child should have access to a good education. They should get nutrition, and they should have a happy life at home. And medicine.
Jonathan
Their experience as kids helping with their parents' business and volunteering at orphanages came in more than handy. But they also had to use their skills in independence and self-reliance to get it off the ground...
Paul
After years of like failing at school and not doing so well at school, and our parents always saying, "No, it's fine. Don't worry. As long as you work hard, do this, you do that, don't give up." Um, that's kind of where the drive and the-the grit and the determination came from.
Jonathan
Paul's brother Rob agrees.
Rob
You know, not many 17 and 15-year olds manage to hitchhike home in a natural disaster in a third world country to do that and see everything that we saw and battle through all of that. Um, you know, then when we get everything else put in front of us, we can, you know, somehow just, you know, plow through it.
Paul
We did some like stupid stuff. We were young and naive, competing against massive like lifestyle brands, surf brands. And they would spend thousands on a photo shoot. Um, and then we would do our photo shoot, and literally it would be on an i- old iPhone, um, in the bathtub, um, to get the white backdrop, um, and that's our photo shoot.
Our website looked like it had been made by, I don't know, uh, a nine-year-old who had never made a website before. it looked awful, but we kind of just put it together and off we went. I'd got some postcards printed off of our brand, our website on, I'd go hand them outside the tube station round Clapham Common I'd then run home to see how many pairs we sold online, and there'll be none. and I'd be like, "Oh my God, I've been doing this for the last week or so [laughs]. I haven't sold one pair." So we were doing stuff just to get-get the name out there, and-and just trying to work out what works. Um, I don't go hand out postcards now at the tube station.
Jonathan
Gandys got its first flip flop order from someone in Germany, and before they knew it, they had 60 000 followers on Facebook. The business grew quickly from there.
Gandys sells more than flip flops now - they also make backpacks, coats and shirts. When they can, their products are made in villages affected by the tsunami. 10% of Gandys profits go to Rob and Paul's charity Orphans for Orphans.
And then, just before the 10th anniversary of the tsunami, they met someone named Mama Tina. Mama Tina owned a piece of land in Sri Lanka and offered it up as a place where they could build their first kid's campus.
Paul
It's got three floors now. It's got an IT, uh, room on it. It's got sports facilities and the side for the kids. So there's volleyball, cricket, um, and the kids go there for preschool. We-we get the local carpenter to come in, the plumber will come in. if the kids aren't academic, we get them lessons with, uh, these, uh, like tradespeople. Um, and the kids will get medication, nutrition, they'll get food. If there's like bad stuff going on at home, Mama Tina will be on it. 'Cause it's in a rural village, and we let them all run it themselves.
Jonathan
So when you and your brother were standing there and it had been built, and you'd realized your dream, and you did it on the 10th anniversary of the tsunami. And also the 10th anniversary of your parents' death. And you stood back and you looked at what the two of you together had built, how'd you feel?
Paul
I felt proud for my parents, th-there was saying now left for them. but me and my brother, we know it's not enough. We need- to do more, there's lot of children out there. We know that we're not going to save the world. But if we can just leave the world a better place and do-do as much as-as we can, um, then we're happy. And we know that our vision is to have our projects in every continent, um, and have projects in a few countries, and we know that this isn't- this isn't a five year project, this is- this is our life that we feel like we need to give back to people that deserve it.
Jonathan
Gandys has expanded their kids campuses as well. They have another one in Malawi, and two more are being built: one in Brazil and another in Nepal.
Paul
Ultimately, we were just selling flip flops, but that's what drives us. If we're ever having a bad day, or whatever, at work now, we know that, um, the other side of the world, or somewhere, people are benefiting from us. And even the factories that we use now on our clothes as well, we use like two brothers in Nepal. They hand-make all of our jumpers. We know that the people who-who make our bags are a husband and wife. We're their biggest, uh, customer. We know that her children, all of them, we're supporting, a family. That's how we like to make our stuff is by using small factories that are family businesses. and that's what we're passionate about.
Jonathan
The business is doing really well. They've opened three stores in London, and have had lots of celebrity endorsements from, you know, Richard Branson, former prime minister David Cameron and the Royal Family... and wherever they went and whoever they met, they wore their flip flops. Even to the Prime Minister's office, and Buckingham Palace.
And what would Paul’s parents think of all this?
Paul
I think they'd be proud, but I think they would be annoyed if we weren't working with them. They'd definitely be good people to have around, um, because they'd also be not pushy, but you know, they'd always have you dreaming and thinking big. That's what we try to do, you know, just keep traveling which is what they love. Just do keep doing the-the charity work that they instilled in us, um, and just live a happy life and have fun, you know, and keep it simple.
Jonathan
For Paul's brother Rob, it was also about moving forward - about acknowledging the influence of what happened to them, but not getting stuck in it.
Rob
That is the moral of the story: you need to find something to then refocus on, because otherwise you're forever living in the past. We didn't, we chose not to live in the past. We chose to look to the future.
Jonathan
Do you think about them a lot still?
Paul
I think about them every day. We make products and stuff and people wouldn't know, but we get like inspiration or stuff from them. We do collaborations. we did one with Liberty and that was because it was our mom's favorite shop, and she'd make us clothes from their prints. we'd done one with the Rolling Stones. That was our dad's favorite band. And our most recent collaboration was with McLaren, the Formula One team. My dad was massive into Formula One. We're always thinking about doing bits for them they're always going to be in the brand.
Jonathan
And how's Paul doing after all this?
Paul
I'm definitely tougher than what I probably would have been. Me and my brother, we have no fear because kind of nothing worse can happen to us. As our parents would always say if you get knocked off your bike just get back up. Stop whinging, get on with it," you know. Uh, that's of how we've got to live.
You know, you can look back and dwell on the past, but they won't want us to do that either. They would want us to be happy. So you just have to take it in stride, have fun, work hard, play hard, chase your dreams and that's kind of what we're doing. You only live once.
Jonathan
Paul Forkan.
We'll put links to his brother Rob's book, the Gandys website and their charity on our website: podcast.klm.com
You've been listening to The Journey, an original podcast brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. For more background on this story and to hear more stories about the trip that changed everything, go to podcast.klm.com.
And why not review us on Apple Podcasts... it helps other listeners find this podcast.
Thank you for listening. I'm Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
Overnight the Forkan family trades in their stable routine for a life of travel. Together with his three brothers and sisters, Paul has the time of his life. But when tragedy strikes and threatens to tear the family apart, they become closer than ever. Paul creates a brand with his brother that can both conquer and help the world.
Paul and his brother founded the company Gandys in 2012. The first product they developed were flip flops, something that everyone in the world needs. As children they grew up wearing flip flops. At the same time that they founded their company, they also created a foundation: Orphans for Orphans. Part of the profits from their company support the foundation so they can help children in developing countries. Initially they focused on children in Sri Lanka who had been orphaned by the devastating tsunami in 2004 – just like themselves. Today it has grown to also support projects for children in Malawi, Nepal and Brazil.
Read more
In 2014 Rob and Paul Forkan published a book in which they tell their story. For more about the book, see Amazon.
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Emma Slade
As I began to open the door and he had his gun in my back, I could feel it, you know. I didn't think I was gonna go, not in a million years. There was just-just absolutely no way because when somebody's got a gun in your- at your body, you-you feel like you're not gonna make any decisions about anything.
Jonathan Groubert
This is Emma Slade.
And in this episode of The Journey, we're going to take you on her odyssey: from living a life she thought she wanted, to a harrowing experience that made her do a 180.
This is a story about the trip that changed everything!
Hi, I'm Jonathan Groubert and this is The Journey. The Journey is an original podcast by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel.
Emma Slade worked in the high-rolling world of finance, as an analyst based in Hong Kong. It was a job she loved, and in September of 1997, she was sent to Jakarta. The Asian financial crisis had begun, and it was her job to see just how much trouble her banks' Indonesian investments were in.
Emma
I had a tough day. I asked some tough questions. I thought I'd done well, and I went back to my lovely five-star hotel feeling like, "Yeah, I did good job there, you know, I've got to the bottom of this and I'm gonna recommend we do this, this, and this."
Jonathan
Emma was back in her hotel room, when she heard a knock at the door.
Emma
I had a- I had like black, wool silk Versace suit with covered buttons, and I put it into the dry cleaning.There was a knock at the door and I presumed it was gonna be that or towels, um, being delivered, et cetera.
Jonathan
So, Emma opened the door.
Emma
There was a gun and that was pushed into my chest. And, uh, the man behind the gun, uh, pushed into the room and the door closed. And I just thought I was gonna die because I didn't understand why a man with a gun was now in my room with me and what he was doing there. So I was just-just crying on the floor, begging for my life because I presumed he was about to kill me, uh, had a gun on my head.
And then, it's hard to digest because you're reacting to something that you just never thought was gonna happen to you. So it is not something you've rehearsed, you know. I didn't know if I should link to the meetings I'd had that day that I'd been too tough with these businesses, I'd asked too many questions, and he was there to make sure he'd found the right person and was gonna, you know, get rid of that person.
Jonathan
This man seemed very interested in WHO she was, but he also started taking her stuff, like her credit cards and her Cartier watch. Emma's said he looked 'slimey'.
Emma
Thin, very thin wary kind of, uh, person with slick back black hair, and, um, a very shiny suit and very shiny creaky shoes.
Jonathan
Did he at any point say what he wanted?
Emma
No.
Jonathan
And he held a gun to your head at one point?
Emma
Yeah.
Jonathan
And did you did you try to get away?
Emma
Well, I mean, once the door is closed, how am I gonna get away, right? There's no exit points. Whe-where's your exit point, right? You got a man with a gun, you know, either very, very close to you or on you, and that, how do you turn that around?
He was very, um, agitated. There was a lot of walking around, walking back and forth, fiddling with things. And then I just don't know. I just-- He just didn't leave. Yeah. But terrifying because, at any moment, you know, you just didn't know what was gonna happen.
When he came into the room, I must have screamed a lot, which was heard in other rooms. But I don't actually remember screaming, I just think that if you're in such shock and such far, that you feel completely silent. But that alerted the hotel that something was going on.
Jonathan
About half an hour after the man entered her room, the phone rang. Emma picked up and a hotel employee asked if she was ok. She didn't want to raise her captor's suspicions, so she said yes. The employee then asked if someone was there with her. She said yes.
A few minutes later, there was a knock at her door. Emma answered. The man in her room stood behind her, out of sight, with the gun in her back. So she answered that she was fine. The hotel employee left.
Emma
Once they came to the room and went away from the room again, then we knew we were trapped because they knew- then he knew and I knew that people knew that we were there.
Jonathan
What started out as an apparent robbery, was now a hostage-taking.
Emma
I think you can imagine that every-every second in that room felt like a very long, uh, period of time and a very- like nobody knew, obviously. My mom didn't know and my family didn't know, it's just the sense that you're unable to tell anybody that you're in that situation. "I'm gonna die in this room, and nobody's even gonna know."
When I was, in that room pleading for my life, I felt very, like, I hadn't done anything that had made a difference and I felt very much that, particularly, I felt I've- I hadn't loved anybody and I hadn't been loved and I felt as if parts of me just hadn't grown up and the- If I died then, I just would have died without caring about anybody really.
Jonathan
Afternoon turned into evening. And then, there was another knock at the door.
Emma
I had the opportunity to, open the door, with the gun in my back and, I chose to run, which, frankly I shouldn't have done because it was extremely dangerous. But when you've been waiting for a door to open and it finally opens, you just don't really care. You just wanna go through the door.
There was no thought in it and when I- as I began to open the door and he had his gun in my back, I could feel it, you know. I didn't think I was gonna go, not in a million years. There was just-just absolutely no way because when somebody's got a gun at your body, you feel like you're not gonna make any decisions about anything. you feel very, disempowered, in my eye line, I could see these crouched soldiers and policemen with the guns, right? Then I guess I felt like, "Okay, he's one person here with one gun and there's about 70 people here with their guns." Instinctively, you just think, "This is my chance."
I knew that I could see them and he couldn't. I had a minute to run and I ran.
Then lots of police and army went into the room behind me firing guns.
I was in there I think for about two and a half hours. Yeah.
Jonathan
Emma was safe. It turned out her captor was not a hired assassin. He was just a gambler intent on a simple robbery.
The police got him, and after giving them her statement, Emma moved to a different room, in the same hotel, that same night.
Emma
I do remember phoning my mom and, you know, just saying, "You know, Mom, I'm fine but I have been held up by a non-gunman. Nothing to worry about." You know, I do remember doing that 'cause I wanted to tell somebody but I didn't wanna make a big drama about it, you know.
Jonathan
Despite her harrowing experience, Emma went back to work the very next day.
Emma
I still did my meetings. I'm just not a quitter and I just was gonna finish my job.
I don't think anything's worth doing unless you really gonna, you know, do it with your best effort. Yeah.
Jonathan
No half measures for you?
Emma
Not really. No.
Jonathan
THAT is an understatement.
Emma's never been one for half measures. And when she was young, Emma's father picked up on that…
Emma
I like a challenge, and I like doing things that, um, maybe, umm, are not expected. My father thought I should go into the city and be an investment banker.
Jonathan
And what did you think when he said that?
Emma
I thought it was cool because I thought t-that women didn't do that kind of thing. So I thought he was expressing some sort of faith in me that I could be kind of greater than my gender appeared.
Jonathan
When Emma put her mind to something, she always gave it her all.
Emma
I did English and History at Cambridge, then I did Fine Art at Goldsmiths, and then eventually, I did financial analytics.
Jonathan
That might sound like an odd combination, but when Emma was in university, her father died - and that had a big impact. She decided to trust his instincts and went into finance.
Emma
And I thought it would be a good thing to see if he was right and to become kind of successful and financially independent.
Jonathan
And, where were you working?
Emma
New York, and then London, and then Hong Kong. Most of my career was in Hong Kong. Yeah.
Jonathan
How many hours a week?
Emma
Oh, I mean, it's like seven days a week, you know, all the time. Yeah. Because the financial markets move really, really fast. They're global. Everything's in a different time zone. So, you know, you often need to be aware of what's happening in Japan, America, Europe, and so, it requires a lot of attention. Like a lot of investment bankers, probably my life was quite rigid you get up, then you go swimming, you do some kind of physical exercise, then you have breakfast, then you go to work, then you have lunch, then you get to work, it's a very, um, ordered way of living,. Obviously, you haven't got any children, you haven't got a-a partner, so it's a very work-orientated life.
I was very interested in being, um, successful, you I wanted to be smart and well-informed. If you ask me what's the, forecasts for economic growth in Indonesia next year, I wanted to be able to tell you exactly. And, asked me some question about the petrochemical industry in Thailand and vertical integration, I wanted to be able to tell you exactly. I think everybody in investment banking wants to be the smartest person in the room, and I was no different.
Jonathan
To look at Emma, you’d think she was living the life.
Emma
Most investment bankers are very interested in their bonus. I liked the Max Mara clothing.
I felt very lucky to have a job that was very stimulating and exciting. I liked, uh, feeling that the decisions I was making were meaningful and important because you're dealing with a lot of money. So that, you know, that felt good.
Jonathan
The financial world seemed to suit Emma. She was smart and successful - but emotionally...?
Emma
I was deeply unhappy with my father's death. And it was a way to cope with that grief and kind of still carry on with life, which didn't feel like it was very easy when he died. I think I wanted to make him proud and I knew that, um, of all the things I could have done, to get into that field would have been something that would have made him, peaceful and not worried that I would be, um, vulnerable in the world, I'd have a good job, I'd have money coming in, et cetera, et cetera. Those are the basic things that a parent wants for their child.
Jonathan
Emma worked in London and New York for a couple of years before being sent to Asia to work on investments there. And to her, Hong Kong was energetic and very exciting.
So the week after being taken hostage in Jakarta, Emma returned to her base there, as though nothing had happened.
But something very profound HAD happened. And eventually, it caught up with her.
Emma
My working day was no different but my mind was different. What I found was that when I was doing anything in a usual way like I was in the office sitting at the desk, right? Suddenly, I would be completely and utterly back in that room, and I would experience intense fear. Like I would break out in a sweat, I would be able to smell him, I would be able to hear his shoes walking towards me, and I'd be in a completely different time. So my body would be in the office, but my mind would be completely locked in fear and terror. And that just started to happen all the time, day and night. It became very, very hard to sleep. And so, it's like, I guess people would say that it's like when you have nightmares in your sleep but you kinda have them all day long as well.
And you're, certainly, not gonna mention it to anyone else. You know, especially not in a corporate investment environment, right? So, uh, you're worried by what's happening. You don't understand what's happening. You can't really tell anybody what's happened to you. So that's a pretty toxic combination. But there came a point about four months later where I just realized that I just actually couldn't-couldn't do this anymore.
I was walking back to Hong Kong Park, and there was-- there was the-- I saw like this chief financial officer of the company who was coming towards me and he-he fiddled in his jacket, like, his jacket pocket or something. And it completely freaked me out because that's- obviously, I presumed something was coming out of it. Right? And I can remember I just wanted to cry and being completely and utterly terrified. Then realizing that he had recognized me because, obviously, you know, and just not knowing what to do and just running past him because I couldn't speak to him because I was so terrified. In my mind he was then-- you know, he was coming with a gun for me, right? And so I think that- I just remember that was a pivotal moment which I realized I can't do this no more because I'm no longer seeing reality for what it is because I'm so in that room still in my mind.
Jonathan
And your-your boss was none the wiser? Emma, she's doing great.
Emma
Yeah.
Jonathan
Yeah. Tough as nails.
Emma
Yeah. Exactly.
Jonathan
Emma told her boss she wanted to go home.
Emma
The request wasn't granted initially because I think they thought I was fine because I'd done such a good job at hiding what was really going on with me. And what they didn't realize was this was me saying, "I can do no more," you know. And, uh, I just got up and I-I walked and I ... And, uh, that was it. I was done. I-I knew I just had to go home.
Jonathan
Emma went back to England. But things DIDN'T get better.
Emma
Yeah, it was horrendous. Yeah, it was even worse back in England, I'd say. Yeah, it was really, really bad.
I don't know why but it became very difficult. I couldn't read, I couldn't write. I-I just wanted to just end my life really. It was really awful.
The thing is that the incident was one thing, right? And people can understand that and sympathize with that but what I was ending up suffering from was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and that is very hard to explain to people, and I felt bad that I had it because I felt like I didn't understand why I had it because I thought I'd got over it.
Eventually was taken on a special course for people who have survived hostile situations or very life-threatening conditions and that- that's, uh, that was the start of the, uh, the help I needed really.
Jonathan
The course was intense. But afterwards, Emma felt she could start to move forward again - in ways she previously couldn't have imagined.
Emma
When it was over, um, I, uh, gradually started to kind of reintegrate into life again and, I went back to work part time and then, eventually, I went back to work full time, um, but not for very long because from that stage I'd realized that I just didn't wanna do that with my life anymore and I-I had fundamentally changed.
Jonathan
What changed?
Emma
I just didn't find that financial markets very fascinating anymore, you know. It just looked like a bit of a game. I couldn't really get involved with it properly anymore. Yeah, and I wanted to, understand more about kind of who I was and what made me well and what made me happy and, I didn't, kind of, wanna waste my life anymore.
Jonathan
Emma's mother saw that she was having a difficult time, and thought she should try a brief getaway. So she signed her up for a mosaics course in Greece.
Emma
So, I went to make mosaics in Greece which actually wasn't as exciting as I kinda had hoped. It was kind of glue and bits of China, you know, and, but it was there that I saw somebody doing some yoga and was really fascinated with what this woman was doing 'cause I hadn't seen it before 'cause yoga at that point wasn't as huge as it is now and that was really the start of me realizing that I needed to physically heal and, um, that, uh, I discovered this huge passion and also quite a natural ability to, uh, be a flexible yoga person. I just knew I had to give myself some time to find a way to, live differently.
Jonathan
Being held hostage had left Emma feeling vulnerable, and yoga helped her build up her confidence.
Emma
I think it took me many years to feel safe, to be honest, to be really honest because the memories of the experience and the physical trauma kind of stayed in my body for a long time.
Jonathan
The practice of yoga offered her a chance to get strong again. Physically, but also mentally. And yoga, of course, is closely linked to Buddhism.
Emma
It was very interesting to me that here was a philosophy which talks so much about the nature of mind, the nature of thought, the nature of suffering, the nature of mental suffering. It was very interesting for me because of the experience I'd had.
Jonathan
Emma travelled around the world for a couple of years studying yoga and meditation. She returned to England to teach yoga. Her classes were full, but she became more and more drawn to the practice of meditation, and into the Buddhist teachings of compassion.
When was the moment you thought, "Well, this is it. I'm going to become a Buddhist?"
Emma
Well, it wasn't easy because, you know, I'm not- I'm not a big-big fan of institutionalized religion, to be honest, you know. Even now I have my doubts about what happens when wonderful ideas become human institutions. I was kind of wary, to be honest. But in the end I just thought, you know what? I think I'm never gonna understand this fascinating philosophy in-depth unless I commit to it, so I did.
Jonathan
Emma became a Buddhist - in Scotland - in 2003, but it took many years before she REALLY committed to it.
Emma
I didn't have a clear Buddhist path. I went in various courses. I did some retreats but, I guess, it didn't have- Probably what I didn't have is a teacher. I didn't have a teacher who could take me forward at that point.
Jonathan
And then, in 2011, she went on a group tour to Bhutan.
Emma
Yeah.
Jonathan
You don't know why?
Emma
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan
Probably Karma.
Emma
Yeah.
Jonathan
And then what happens?
Emma
So I'm like the Buddhist nerd in the group. Other people they wanna go shopping, they wanna buy textiles, they wanna look at the mountains. I want to talk to meditators, right? I mean, try to wander around central London bumping into meditators.
In this Himalayan country, I know there's, you know, incredible meditators and Buddhist scholars and philosophers. So, yeah, it's a chance to talk to monastics and talk to people who felt meditation was a really important thing. So I just walked into a temple high up in the mountains in Bhutan. A place called Dochula and you can see the profile of the Himalayan range on your right side, it's very high up in Bhutan. It very kind of blue and crispy and we walked up these steps and smell of incense and we went into this temple. And as I walked into this temple, there was a monk over there on the right-hand side in his red robes with a shaved head. Right? And I think I see around him a silver crescent around his head. I then wondered if it was just like the winter light, but I felt very strong kind of feeling of, wanted to talk to him. But then, again, I'd been talking to anybody who was in robes in Bhutan. And then I started to talk to him and then I heard his voice and his voice had a very, very powerful impact on me and I just say, "I need to talk to you." We sat down in the temple and we talked and I just completely lost track of time. And then I got quite emotional. I cried because I tried to explain that I wanted to be a kind person and I never, actually, admitted that to anybody up until that point.
Jonathan
Meeting this man, or monk, Emma didn’t really know who he was just yet, had a profound effect on her. She wanted to stay and spend more time with him, to tap into his wisdom. But she was on a tourist visa and had to go back to England. A few months later though, she was back on a plane to Bhutan to try and find him again.
Emma
I thought I'd just go back to Dochula walk in and he'd be standing right there just like he was before. You know, I walked in the Dochula temple and there was somebody much taller there who clearly wasn't him but a monk and, you know, I kind of look at this monk thinking, "Who the hell are you? You're not the right monk."And then the guy said, "No, no, the one that was here then he's gone to three year retreat."
I was sure I was supposed to come back and find this guy, you know, what- what's going on? And so, I felt really-really crestfallen and, uh, but the-the driver he gave his number to the monk. So, we went to Dochula resort to have a cup of tea. I remember just being completely floored 'cause I was like, "I'm sure this is the next thing. Now I don't know what to do."
Jonathan
While Emma was wondering what the next step was, the driver's phone rang...
Emma
And he said, "No, no, that wasn't a monk it was a lama of the temple and they found him and he remembers you and, yeah, he'd like to meet you too, again. And he's in his home village doing rituals right now but he's gonna come to meet you." And that's what he did.
Jonathan
Meet Lama Nima Tersing.
Lama Nima Tersing
If you want to find a way to happiness, first you have to suffer. Without suffering you will never know about the happiness. If you're always happy you don't know what is suffering. If someone tell about suffering, they will never believe it because they never suffer.
Jonathan
He says things like that.
When Lama first met Emma, he had his doubts...
Lama Nima
I saw nothing, but we had done some conversations about Buddhism and meditation. From that I got something touched in my heart. After that we apart from the time, but after two months, again she came back and she wants to meet me. From there, I totally changed my mind that she can practice and I asked her to do some practice. She was very talent (laughs).
Emma
And that's where he gave me the Mala beads that I wear today. They were his prayer beads and he said, "Here, you're gonna need these." And that was when I kind of knew, "Okay, you're-you're saying you're going to be my teacher."
Jonathan
It was her past experience - her father's death, being taken hostage in Jakarta - that made him think she might be a good student.
Lama Nima
She had got many problems in her lifetime. From there, when we have done conversations, then she understand everything about what is happiness. If you want to live happily or strong, what you have to practice.
From there she understood somethings, how to write away from the suffering, how to overcome the suffering, how to be strong.
Jonathan
Emma went back and forth from England to study with him at the monastery in Bhutan whenever she could. But even Lama underestimated her.
Emma
So he gave me huge texts on compassion to read, uh, massive and I think he thought all that would shut her up, "I'll see you in a couple of years." You know, and I kind of- you know, kind of, yeah, he didn't know who he was dealing with, right?
So, I sort of read all of those and came back with a whole load of questions and I think he'd only started to realize, "Okay, she's actually really, really serious about this." And, uh, then he gave me some mantras to learn and I learned them off by heart and then not actually that easy to learn to in Sanskrit and Tibetan. Uh, I think, again, he realized, "Okay, she's not kidding around here."
Jonathan
Nowadays, if you were to pass Emma Slade on the street or, say, sit next to her at an airport, you’d probably turn your head. Because of her head...
Emma
I have a shaved head and I'm wearing, uh, full-length red robes of a Buddhist nun. Because I am a Buddhist nun. Yeah.
Jonathan
In August of 2012, less than a year after Emma found Lama in Bhutan, she began to live under vows.
Emma
Lama and I never discussed me becoming a nun. Never. One day in November he said to me, "Now you change your dress." I realized that he was telling me to stop being a lay person and become a monastic and he had never mentioned it before. I never thought I could become a nun and, uh, he never said what was gonna be entailed. Uh, he just said, "You have the mind of a nun. You have to become a nun."
Lama Nima
She's one of the Westerner people, but I asked her to be a nun. She's qualified, she's very intelligent. That's why I ask her, she agree and she has done. I think now she's more better than me.
Jonathan
Emma was officially ordained a year and a half later, on very short notice. She found out the night before the ceremony, and had no time to prepare.
Emma
And it was about two hours long all in Tibetan. And, um, I had to speak back, uh, when he's spoken in Tibetan I had to repeat and Tibetan, uh, which I hadn't been able to prepare for and I didn't have the text for so, I just had to do my best.
Jonathan
It was almost as though the ceremony was a test.
Emma
I felt like I could fly, you know. I felt really kind of amazing off too. It's really strong and powerful and um, it was incredible experience. Yeah. But, you know, uh, I just wish Lama would give me a bit more preparation before he does these things.
Jonathan
How did she do during the ceremony? Did she do it right correctly?
Lama Nima
Yes, she's doing everything perfect.
Jonathan
How is she doing now?
Lama Nima
She is doing everything perfect. She's studying too much now. Now she knows most of the Buddhist philosophies like books she read daily. Now she understand more.
Jonathan
She reads it in Tibetan, right?
Lama Nima
Yes.
Jonathan
Unbelievable.
Is it hard for her to live the way you live?
Lama Nima
For her, she never say it is hard, unless she's telling that, "I will try my best, I can do." She never says, "It is hard, I'll never do this."
Emma
I'm the only Western woman ordained in Bhutan and I think I'm the only non-Asian who's been given the chance to Manasseh to study in Bhutan. So, what has been offered to me has been incredibly rare and uh, I'm very lucky to have it.
Jonathan
And in a way, her former life prepared her for the one she's living now.
When you were working for this organization- as a financial analyst, you were pretty much living a celibate monastic life, it sounded.
Emma
You know, you- you're not wrong there. Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that.
Jonathan
But as similar as they might have been on some fronts, the contrast between the two worlds is usually extreme, and Emma is in a unique position to realize that.
Emma
I can recall being on holiday wearing a bikini, you know, uh, I can recall going out for a nice meal somewhere and having a glass of chardonnay, right? I can recall them as memories um, but I don't need to have them now, but I can remember what they were like because I've experienced them. Some monastics have never experienced them. So I kind of know what I've given up because I did once have it.
Sometimes you have to wash your clothes in a bucket right? sometimes you have to wash yourself in a bucket you know, you don't have any hair appointments or makeup to put on or clothes to buy or cars to service in the nunnery in Bhutan, you have to ask permission to leave the boundary, right? So you can't just nip out to see a friend for cappuccino unfortunately...
Jonathan
She also has very few possessions......
Emma
I have, uh, some boots for when it's cold and sandals for when it's warm. And I have a jacket for when it's cold and, um, yeah. I mean, I have a sleeping bag. That's very helpful. I have a lot of books for studying...
Jonathan
Emma's room has a mattress, a pillow, kind of a desk? And... that's it. But the view is great. Valleys, rivers, mountains... It's a peaceful, contemplative setting. But she's had to give up a lot more than just her material possessions.
Emma
In the West, people are ordained for short periods of time you know, a year, 2 years. There's no option like that in Bhutan, is either for life or you don't do it. So, you know, I can remember walking down that corridor thinking I'm never ever having sex ever again. You know, and I'm not that old, so, it's a big commitment. It was, uh, the only way forward, you know, I couldn't go forward as a layperson.
Jonathan
So, for those unwilling to make such sacrifices, what's the one thing Emma's odyssey, from the financial world to the mountains of Bhutan, can teach people?
Lama Nima
What they have to learn is, from her story, they have to learn that if we try our best, if we practice, we can do anything. We can change and we can overcome the sufferings.
Jonathan
Emma has taken her teachings in compassion and put them to good use. In 2015 she started a charity called Opening Your Heart to Bhutan that helps children with special needs there. That started her on yet another journey...
Emma
I was trying to work out how to fundraise well for a country that a lot of people haven't visited and for a cause that a lot of people don't know about. So one of my students one of my yoga students said, you know, I don't know about your past life, but I got a feeling it's quite interesting. Why don't you write your life story and sell that for the charity? And so yeah, so that's why I did and that's the first time that people really knew what had happened to me up until that point I'd still be pretty private about it.
Jonathan
Emma's book is called Set Free, and all of its proceeds go towards funding the charity, which has made a big difference in the lives of children with special needs.
And if there's one thing we know about Emma after all this, it's that she does not take half measures - in anything.
Lama Nima
She's very what you can say, unique persons. She's very unique person, she's very intelligent, she's very wise. I want her to be the most perfect nun.
Jonathan
Is she your friend?
Lama Nima
Yes, a best friend in my life.
Emma
Emma lives at the nunnery in Bhutan full-time now, buckets and all, though she occasionally returns to the UK for her charity, and to visit family.
Emma
People often even at airports you know, I've had some of these sit next to me at an airport I've never met before and just so you know, my dad's really really ill and I'm here because he's really ill and you've never met this person before but they feel that they can talk to you and you will respect their feelings and yeah, I mean most people, I handed my passport in at Delhi customs not long back and the guy on the passport. They said yeah, what's the secret to happiness?
I mean that's a huge compliment. It shows that people want to, uh, consider these questions of-of the profound meaning of what it is to be human and where that feeling of peacefulness and happiness comes from and that's what we should be asking. We should be asking for those things.
Jonathan
Those are the big things, right?
Emma
Yeah-yeah. It's fine, you know, as long as they understand I probably don't know the answer. I'll give it my best shot.
Jonathan
Emma Slade.
We'll put links to both her book and charity on our website: podcast.klm.com
You've been listening to The Journey, an original podcast brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
For more background on this story and to hear more stories about the trip that changed everything, go to podcast.klm.com.
And why not review us on Apple Podcasts... it helps other listeners find this podcast.
Thank you for listening. I'm Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
Emma Slade is an analyst at a large bank working at the top international level, responsible for major investments and with everything perfectly under control. But then, during a business trip, she’s kidnapped. Emma’s life is flipped completely upside down, but this turns out to be the start of an incredible journey that ends far from the fast-paced financial world.
After leaving behind life in the financial world, Emma Slade now lives in Bhutan as a Buddhist nun. She has also established an organisation that supports children in need called Opening Your Heart To Bhutan.
In the book Set Free, Emma Slade describes her incredible journey from the world of banking to Buddhism. All proceeds from sales of the book go towards Opening Your Heart to Bhutan.
More on Set Free
An impression from Emma’s previous life, where she worked as an investment banker in Hong Kong, responsible for investments in Southeast Asia.
This is Emma’s current life in the mountains of Bhutan. It’s a simple life, primarily spent studying Tibetan texts on Buddhism.
During her stay in Bhutan, Emma discovered that disabled children were often unable to live a full life. Her organisation aims to change that.
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Etana Jacobson
I felt like I'd messed up. I did feel sort of scared and then the bongo sort of really got going and it was about 600 people at that point around the fire and people really doing the dance. They were doing it with the classics and didgeridoo. I slept alone on the porch.
They were the Australian wild dogs. There was different kinds of animal poop on the porch. I felt I'd pushed things as far as I could but this little piece of me this little will had to just be different. Even here. Here I was and I might get speared to death. It was a pretty scary night.
Jonathan Groubert
This is Etana Jacobson.
She’s talking about the time she spent in Arnhem land, in the north of Australia, a remote area, populated by an indigenous people called the Yolngu. The closest major city is Darwin. But Arnhemland is a world away. It has its own laws, governing system, and many unwritten rules.
Etana senses that something has gone terribly wrong. And it’s all her fault.
Etana
The worst thing was, I felt I'd really let these folks down.
Jonathan
How did Etana, a young American woman, end up living in one of the most remote outstations in Northern Australia? That story in this edition of the Journey.
I'm Jonathan Groubert. The Journey is an original podcast from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel.
These days Etana lives in Santa Monica, California, where we spoke with her via Skype. But she grew up on the other side of the United States.
Etana
I grew up in Peabody, Massachusetts. On the North Shore of Boston, it's a pretty colorful historic area. It's a working-class area. Kind of a mixed suburb, mixed demographics, mixed people.
I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family. We were very religious. We couldn't turn on light on the Sabbath. In some ways, people would consider this a fundamentalist upbringing. My dad yelled at me once for going to the library on a Saturday, that sort of thing. Just a very stern, stoic childhood.
I had to lobby to be the first girl to read from the Torah. There were just a number of things like that. My whole childhood was like that. We would try to do good things within that context and got a lot of feedback that women couldn't do it.
Jonathan
When they told you that you couldn't do things because you were a girl, what went through your head?
Etana
I was like, "I will do those things." I was pretty angry, and pretty much, it was a surge of energy, bright hot energy. I saw myself doing those things. Doing anything and everything certainly a man could do, maybe things men wouldn't dare to do. I simply felt nothing could stop me.
When I was a baby, they brought me home. My mother said first thing babies do as you put them on their belly or wherever you put them, they stay. She said, "You found a way to flip over on your belly, like wiggle, almost wiggle like a worm around your crib and you found a way to escape the crib when it was impossible for a baby to do so." Then we put up a special bar and then you found a way to escape the bar and it just became something that in the middle of the night, the game was like, "The baby's getting out," and they simply couldn't contain me in this crib.
I learned to speak pretty early and when I was like 18 months old I just stood up and said, "I'm not staying in this crib anymore." My father was like, "Who said that? What is that?" I was just standing there apparently saying, "I am not staying in this crib anymore." That was pretty much the pattern I guess was set.
Jonathan
It just never stopped.
Etana
I guess that's just my nature.
Jonathan
Once Etana attended a public high school, she became less religious. And more adventurous. She graduated high school early to attend a two year college program in New York state to study ritual theater. Then she transferred to a prestigious university in New York City to design her own major.
And she kept on moving. She has an innate curiosity about other cultures and new worlds.
She lived with a Navajo tribe in Arizona as a sheep herder. Then she hiked the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal. There was something in Etana that drove her further and further away from the small New England town where she grew up.
And her goal was to become as deeply immersed in indigenous culture and civilizations as she could get.
Etana
I was just simply trying to live my life and find an identity as somebody from this very traditional background but of modern person if you like, just as a normal person, just sort of find my way in the world.
I really wanted to get away from home. That was a burning desire in me. Even as a baby I had this impulse to run away, to be free, so that a big part of it. I would have just had this burning desire to be as free as possible. I do think there's something in me that is nomadic. Maybe that's cultural, too, but I just had to be free. There is just this deep desire to be as free as possible, unconstrained.
I think it was just constantly, I was in some ways up for anything. I ran across the border into Tibet. You're not really supposed to go across the border but there was a point you could-- There was a big sign saying, "Don't cross this sign, you'll be in Tibet," and I just ran past the sign. I'd like to push things as far as I could. A lot of times people say women can't do this, a girl can't do this or it can't be done, I would hear that. I'd be like, "Well, can it?
Jonathan
In Arizona, then Nepal, and later, the islands of Indonesia, Etana was searching for… something.
Etana
I was just constantly looking for what's perhaps the most oldest human civilization. The human civilization that lived the longest, preserved its culture the longest, had the least amount of interference perhaps from heavily industrialized cultures. In some ways, what's the most sophisticated human culture. By sophisticated, I mean they live as close to the earth as possible.
Jonathan
Etana was travelling through Bali, when she started writing to an author named Robert Lawlor. Robert’s book, Voices of the First Day, describes the distinct art and culture of the Aboriginal Yolngu people. The Yolngu’s traditional art and lifestyle had stuck with Etana throughout her travels.
Etana
It talked a lot about bark paintings and dot and circle paintings. This is going to sound a bit out there but the author would offer an analysis on circle paintings. He would be like this is actually mapping consciousness where this is showing what's called a dreaming, that there's a Yolngu belief that everything in the world has a dreaming, has an energy form that it exists in. There's something sacred about that form. I looked at this dot and circle paintings and this bark paintings and I just felt something. It was really deep and I was like, "I have to go and experience this."
Jonathan
There was just one problem. The Yolngu live in Arnhemland, an extremely remote corner of Northern Australia. Robert Lawlor said it was impossible to go there.
Etana
And I was like, "Oh." They said it's basically impossible. You have to get permission from the various tribal councils. It's a semi-autonomous region. If you do go you have to be subject to their laws and they have tribal laws and so forth but primarily, they were like it really can't be done. It's pretty much impossible to go out there except if maybe you were a health worker or something of that nature.
Jonathan
Of course, this man said to you, "It can't be done." So you thought?
Etana
I was like, "Let's see. Let's just see." I kept looking into this, researching, thinking about it and indeed, it didn't seem like there was an easy way to go about doing this. For one thing, this area is surrounded by 500 miles of open bush in every direction and then it's topped by the Arafura Sea which is full of deadly box jellyfish and crocodiles and other predators that can kill you.
Jonathan
To Etana, box jellyfish, crocodiles, and the 500 miles of open bush were part of the draw.
Etana
This author wrote me another letter and said, "Look, if you even want to try this, you have to go to Darwin", "All right, well, I'll go to Darwin. I'm going to follow my bliss.
Jonathan
Etana was on a mission to find people who live as far away from industrialization as possible. So she moved from youth hostel to youth hostel, asking if anyone knew how to get to Yolngu land.
You were asking people, "How do you get the Yolngu land?" Everybody said, "Well, you don't go to Yolngu land, can't be done." You thought--
Etana
Can I? I was like, "Is there some way?" I simply kept talking to people.
Jonathan
Somehow, Etana had met the only other foreign traveler for thousands of miles who was also trying to get to Arnhemland: Katie. She was English, a dancer, and she had secured a special permit to travel to Yolngu land. But there was a catch.
Etana
Here was the thing, as a woman in Yolngu land, you can't go anywhere alone. This was really interesting to me, because this was similar to things I had encountered all throughout my childhood.
Had she been a guy, she could have gone alone, she was a woman, so she couldn't. She met me, and I was like, "This is perfect." We had again a similar background in dance et cetera, and it was just the right fit.
Six days later, I was being flown out on a Cessna 2060 with two or three tribal elders.
Katy and I were in the back and you can feel every bump, everything that happens in a little Cessna like that and I had no idea exactly what to expect and we're flying it's beautiful, the bush is beautiful from the air and we were flying over this beautiful silver billabongs which are like these winding rivers.
They just look like beautiful silver ribbons around mangrove swamps and just gorgeous open feathery bush, pandanus trees, light vegetation. It's just a beautiful thing and I was like, "This is amazing", "I have no idea what's going to happen next but this is great", I said I just feel exactly right about myself right now. I'm doing exactly the right thing in this moment in time, that's how I felt, I knew it.
Jonathan
And then, the Cessna approached a large clearing. It looked like a football field. There was no airport. Just an open wide strip of grass. The plane landed. The door opened. And then Etana and the a tribal elders who were also on the plane stepped into the grass. The elders wore cheap rubber flip flops and led the way to the closest village.
Well, it wasn’t exactly a village. It was more of an outpost with a few flat buildings, painted a shiny green. Behind them was a network of paths that led into the surrounding bush where most people spent their time.
Etana
The earth was really beautiful deep red. That was awesome. It's just like these deep red roads, little paths really.
Jonathan
Etana saw a few people and politely waved.
Etana
People noticed us and Yapa is the way to say hello so there were just different ways, people were just going, "Yapa, hello", and I'm like "Hi."
Everybody was quite friendly, people weren't falling all over themselves but people were warm and curious. We were shown to one of the council house which was again this long law building with maybe three rooms in it, and we just were both shown to this room, that was where we were to be. Yolngu tend to have maybe 15 to 20-25 people using that house like a base.
Some folks can live comfortably in the bush, they would do stuff like dig out an earth oven in the front yard, it's called an imu. They'd just set that up and use the house as a base but do all sorts of things around it.
You'd see that, you'd see people making baskets out of pandanus leaves. People hunted so they would hunt wild wallaby, which was a small kangaroo and they are adorable but that is the staple of their diet, they would hunt that and turtle. You'd see folks doing some of that. They were making dampa which is this bread that's made from something called dinko. It means wild bush peanut and it's also a staple. It's almost like an acorn. It's like a really nice, crispy bread with a soft texture that tastes great.
Jonathan
Etana was captivated by the hunter gatherer lifestyle and immersed herself in the local Yolngu culture. She would wake up to a green fluorescent frog - the size of a dinner plate - sitting on the toilet. She would drink a milky bush tea in the morning. She tried her best to fit in and do as the Yolngu did. And luckily, there were some English speaking residents who could help explain the local customs and traditions. As the weeks passed, Etana began to feel at home with the Yolngu.
If I can just ask you, at that point what was the plan?
Etana
My deep interest was I want to live as much as possible in this-- I would like to see if it's possible to live as a hunter, gatherer frankly in a way that is respectful and isn't bugging anybody but if there was a way that I could be of use and fit in as I had in other places like being a shepherd in Navajo land and these are wildly different cultures and so forth.
I just was saying, "Can I do this? Is it possible to live like this? Might there be some fit?"
Jonathan
And yet, for all her efforts, there was one local custom that went against her basic nature.
Etana
There's something called the law that it governs a lot of how people live. Even if you go to pee or something in the bush, you're supposed to have like, some people with you just within a few feet. You're just really not supposed to go alone anywhere as a woman.
Jonathan
Etana had seen what happens when customs were not respected.
Etana
When I was out there somebody got speared. Some Australian guy. It might have actually been the doctor who's there out to practice medicine. He'd done something wrong that offended someone in some way.
Jonathan
Etana wasn’t just learning local traditions. She also began sharing some of her own. More specifically, the ones she grew up with, and thought she had left behind in Peabody, Massachusetts.
Etana
They said, "We'd like to know more about your rituals because we believe we're one of the lost 12 tribes.”
Jonathan
The 12 tribes of Israel refer to the Old Testament and the 12 sons of Jacob. Missionaries settled in Arnhemland in the 1940s. Some had children with Yolngu women and this group still has a philosophy of life based on Christian missionary beliefs. They saw a deep connection between themselves and Etana.
Etana
They just felt that there was that something they wanted to learn about and have me take them through certain rituals and I'm like, "If you like, I can share you Rosh haShana, saying Tashlikh", which is where you throw crumbs in a moving body of water to rid you of missteps or sins of the past year. They were like, "Great, let's do that."
Jonathan
When they said that, what did you think?
Etana
I was like, "Sure." I have met people all over the world with all kinds of beliefs and I want to support people in expressing themselves. I felt like there was some greater truth to that, I was happy that they wanted me there and were interested in that part of me and it just seemed fascinating and very unexpected.
My name, Etana, people usually never spelt me pretty quickly because it's a Hebrew name. It just comes out. They were pretty excited to know that and they've said, "Well, the Lord sent you to us."
Jonathan
Etana celebrated the Jewish New Year with the Yolngu, Rosh Hashona. They also celebrated Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement, where it’s traditional to blow a shofar, which is essentially a ram’s horn. With no Shofar’s handy, they made do.
Etana
They blew the didgeridoo and you're supposed to throw crumbs in of bread but there isn't a lot of spare bread in Yolngu land, so we threw rocks and we did a number of things like that. We basically said Tashlikh, we said prayers and it was pretty amazing. We're just out of this remote beach in the Arafura Sea. There's just no-- Nobody, nothing around us for hundreds and hundreds of miles.
Jonathan
You're doing it with these people in this place and I'm just wondering, at that moment how did you feel?
Etana
It was a powerful feeling. It was a powerful resonate feeling to be-- in some ways you felt like you were on the-- to me the ends of the earth. A place that was very remote according to how I grew up in such a densely populated place. You're just in such a place that was so difficult to get to that I've been told you can't get there. It cant be done and then there we were in this very special beach and to be embraced at that moment and have people say "we're so glad you're here." They literally said the Lord sent you to us. It was totally unexpected. It was a really powerful feeling. Then to combine our rituals in a way that was a lot of what I wanted to do in my life, take what I knew and share it with other people and see where we meshed. It was a really powerful feeling.
Jonathan
Etana had managed to ingratiate herself with an indigenous people that does not normally tolerate outsiders. She achieved her goal of living closer to nature. This was the culmination of a dream. Her ultimate destination after years of travel. So you’d think she’d have been satisfied, right?
And she was...until she heard about... the Nyarra.
Etana
I kept hearing there were these out stations to go to and that was maybe even again, one step further from where we were. There was going to be something called the Nyarra, which is a clan increase ritual. They base a lot of their lives around these intense rituals. A lot of people would gather, maybe hundreds of people, 600 people in the end to this small outstation, which probably only had maybe 50 to 100 people living there year round for this massive ritual called the Nyarra.
There's a series of rituals that are done and these are really intricate and a lot of them are secret. Some of them involve dancing and music and a lot of collapse sticks and didgeridoo and particular dances and also bark paintings.
The Yolngu world is organized into two, what's called moieties.
It's like Yin and Yang. [...] It means crocodile and sharks, so they see everything in that way. The point is I wanted to get if possible I'd love to participate in the Nyarra if I can.
Jonathan
True to form, Etana was attracted to places that are hard to reach and forbidden to outsiders. But the Yolngu had such trust in Etana, they invited her to this sacred ritual, deep in the bush.
Etana
More or less they facilitated me getting on this little teeny Cessna, I think even smaller than the one before. It literally might have been two people or four people out to Wauru. We got there and that was an even teenier outstation. That was maybe a 10th of the size of the township. This is again, just hundreds of miles of open bush. We landed in this teeny airstrip, which was a 10th of the size of the other. Literally, it was a clearing in the bush. There was a campfire, a big fire and a tiny tin schoolhouse and that was about it.
There's an airstrip and there's a giant campfire and people just somehow brought out food. People hunted all the time and gathered literally. Little families arranged themselves in these literally like Bart canopies, just built little canopies. It was really nice and people just camped out under it. It's pretty warm there all the time.
Jonathan
Other Yolngu families had already arrived, and Etana quickly found ways to connect with this smaller community as they prepared for the Nyarra ritual. Etana had so ingratiated herself with Yolngu that she received an offer that was quite personal.
Etana
I was learning as much as I could, but also I wasn't there as an anthropologist. I wasn't studying this as such as just experiencing it through the group of people I was with. There was another woman whose English name was Rhonda but she was helping out or teaching at the schoolhouse. We hit it off and she was like, "Well, I'm going to adopt you."
I was like, "Great, thank you." It was an honor, it was a nice thing.
I said thank you then she said, "I'm giving you a Yolngu name and I said, "Great, what is it?" This is going to sound a little out there and I have this written down. She actually wrote this all down for me on a piece of paper. She said, "Your name is Dinko [...] Drke", with all the Rs rolled, really hard.
Rhonda wrote out on a piece of paper, this is your name now, this is how you're related to people. This is our outstation rural. This is like our homeland, our home area now. I felt I learned more at that point. I think people had been honestly quite kind to me at that point, very kind and very pleasant and reasonable.
I felt just more accepted in a nice way. I just felt there was that extra step. Any answers I spoke that are somewhat reserved, and I just felt that there was just more and it was nice, and I liked them.
Jonathan
You were talking about looking for identity, trying to find out who you were going to be. Did you find it there?
Etana
I feel I got some real answers and some real insight. It probably culminated on the final night of the Nyarra.
I was adopted as Yirritja. There's two, moieties, Yirritja and Dhuwa, crocodile and shark. I became Yirritja at that point through the woman that adopted me. They're like, "Right, well, you have to be painted a certain way for the final night of the Nyarra." Which is actually an elaborate ritual dance called the bongo and that's about all 600 people ultimately start doing this elaborate ritual dance around a giant camp fire with clap sticks and didgeridoo. This goes on like 12 hours.
It's just an extremely involved event. They have these incredible bark paintings which are so famous. They originated in these rituals. They weren't going to do this elaborate X-ray bark paintings. They're quite beautiful, like geometric shapes. They're painted onto people's bodies and they're just stunning.
Jonathan
And there was Etana. The Yolngu were painted in white and red, dancing and moving all around her. Drums filled the air. Etana had been on a quest to find belonging in a remote community, surrounded by nature, far from everything she knew.
And here she was, at the culmination of many year’s journey. She was searching for a home and now she had found it. It was as profound a moment in her life as she had ever experienced.
Which is what made what happened next all the more ironic.
Etana
There was a moment I just wanted to be by myself for a second...I think I've been with people non-stop for two months in this fashion and I loved it. I just needed a moment. Just a moment to just clear my head. There was a mandrake swamp you had to to get to the beach. This is a really remote area. The beach in addition to being full of crocodiles that could kill you which roamed around and box jellyfish in the water which could kill you.
It was a nice little walk, saw the beach. You can't go in the water because the box jellies but okay I saw it. It was spectacular paradise, unbelievable turquoise water whites sand all that.
Jonathan
Etana needed a moment to breath by herself. She left to take in the beauty in solitude.
So she walked away… alone. On her own, in the bush. Remember that one thing she was NOT allowed to do.
So when she returned to her adopted family, she saw something wasn’t right.
Etana
I went back to our little back canopy area and I was like, "Yapa? Hi?" And they were like, kind of just looked at me. It’s hard to describe this that was more intense than any words could have been. I felt like people can almost probe you in some way like almost reaching to your mind in some way and people who could just instantly tell if you're lying or are you really can’t lie. That was my experience. I didn’t try to lie. I was just like, "Yapa? Hello there?" They were like, "What do you mean?" I just felt like there’s bit of a wave come over me that I heft up like I just did something that wasn’t-- I sort of broke a taboo.
Jonathan
People stopped answering her questions. The tribe’s body language had suddenly shifted away from her.
Etana eventually figured out what she’d done.
Etana
The concern was that again women being alone you might have stumbled on to men’s business, it’s called men’s business and you could be speared.
It was a strange feeling.
Jonathan
You knew you'd crossed the line?
Etana
Yes.
I was just sort of, "I'm sorry. I didn't go anywhere I really shouldn't have gone. I just did go to the beach for one second. I came right back." Literally it had been minutes. People had been so warm and accepting up to that point. But I felt like there was this shift like certainly the cold shoulder that I shouldn't-- I was stumbling around a bit. People make gaps in life. I guess that was a gap. I thought I made this judgment call. I could be alone for 10 seconds in two months.
Jonathan
Feeling isolated, Etana left the group to sleep.
Etana
I felt like I'd messed up. I did feel scared and then the bongo sort of really got going and it was about 600 people at that point around the fire and people really doing the dance. It's kind of a subtle dance, but they were doing it with the classics and didgeridoo. I went and slept alone on the porch of this little tin schoolhouse.
They were like the the Australian wild dogs. There was different kinds of animal poop on the porch. I literally was scared the whole night I might get scared to death any minute.
It was almost an opposite feeling to how it felt on the flight out on the Cessna. Then I felt you know what? It's worth it. I felt like no matter what happens at this point on it was myself I did what I wanted to do in this world.
Now I felt like the opposite. I felt like I'd pushed things as far as I could but this little piece of me this little will had to just be different. Even here even there. I had to assert myself, I had to be alone for 10 seconds when I knew women weren’t supposed to be alone. Some part of me thought I could do it. Here I was and I was like well I might get speared to death. It was a pretty scary night. That's all there was to it. The worst thing about it was I felt I'd really let these folks down. I felt like I'd let my adopted family down.
They'd really been very kind and generous to me and accepted me and like made an effort to get me. I felt like I'd let them down and I wasn't even sure how or why. It was a pretty torturous night.
Jonathan
The sounds of the Nyarra ritual echoed in the distance.
And Etana, sitting alone, disconnected from the Yonglu and her adopted family, started to make other connections.
Etana
Somehow through the night I had this thought that crept into my head under the stars, which was just so bright because there's no light pollution. I just was like, maybe I can only be who I am. I've gone to what is for me the ends of the earth.
I've pushed things so far all my life. Maybe I was born who and where and what I am for a reason. Maybe I was born basically an orthodox Jew in a working class suburb of Boston for a reason. Something very subtle did shift to me at that moment, there's something there's maybe some real value to that and as much as I honor and I'm excited about exploring or interacting with other cultures and being useful to other cultures, I should also just be aware of I have my own culture, my own life and there's a lot of value to that too. I slowly got up because nobody had speared me. I joined the bongo and I either was still painted red at that point.
As it happened, everybody was pretty kind to me. Nobody really brought up what had happened. I was able to join in the bongo in an appropriate way until it went on and on and finally ended.
Jonathan
The ceremony ended. And Etana left the Yolngu shortly thereafter and went home to return to the United States.
Etana
I just felt like there had to be something more and better and different than I had grown up with even aside from having such a restrictive upbringing. I think after that to some extent, I don't know if I, say, accepted it more but I just had more of a sense of balance, wholeness.
Jonathan
These days Etana is building a career in Los Angeles. She’s directing her first feature. And while it may seem Etana has given up living rough for a life in a major U.S. city with all modern conveniences, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Etana
Frankly, a female filmmaker in LA, you get more push back than becoming an adopted Yolngu tribe person in Arnhem Land. That was more direct. There was no push back.
Jonathan
Etana is sharing her stories in a new jungle: Hollywood. She says LA is far harder to navigate than any crocodile and jellyfish infested aboriginal wildlands.
She also says her time in Australia taught her that seemingly small lapses in judgement, like walking alone from the Nyarra ceremony, can have big consequences.
These stories and experiences inform her film and production work. She calls it her jungle to jungle theme.
Etana says that perhaps the most important thing she discovered on all her travels around the globe, immersing herself with indigenous peoples, learning their ways and their practices is that sometimes, you need to go away, maybe very far away, to see what’s right in front of you.
Etana
You can pursue your wildest dreams to the fullest extent and it may be amazing, and it may be scary, and it may be totally unlike anything you ever heard, but there'll probably come to a point you, perhaps, can only go so far and you just maybe need to go home. Wherever that is, even if you're still traveling, there's a part of you that you're not, ever going to get away from it. There's just this part of you, you're going to carry with you everywhere, and I mean everywhere.
What I experienced are just personal to me and there's no story, there's no sound bite, there's no film, there's no piece of music that's going to completely convey this to people. You do have to keep traveling, you do have to experience this for yourself.
Jonathan
Etana Jacobson.
If you'd like to see some of Etana's illustrations from her journey, or more images from the book that inspired her quest to Yolngu land, you can find them on our website: podcast.klm.com.
The Journey is an original podcast, brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
To hear more stories about the trip that changed everything, go to podcast.klm.com. And why not review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners find this podcast. Thank you for listening. I'm Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
Etana Jacobson has a natural curiosity about indigenous cultures in faraway countries. She has one ultimate dream: to live with a tribe in one of the most remote areas of Australia. This tribe is called the Yolngu, and they live in Arnhemland in northwestern Australia. Outsiders are usually not accepted, but Etana is the exception. She received a special status - until she makes a huge mistake.
The ‘Voices of the First Day’ by Robert Lawlor inspires Etana to live with the Yolngu. In his book, he describes in detail the 100,000-year-old Aboriginal culture that the Yolngu tribe is also a part of. After reading this book, Etana contacted Lawlor to ask how to reach the area where the Yolngu live. It’s impossible, answered Lawlor. More information about the book can be found on Amazon.
This was Etana’s admission ticket to one of the most remote areas of Australia: Arnhemland. She was only allowed to access the area because she was travelling with another woman, Katy Lee. Women travelling alone are not permitted in the area governed by the Yolngu tribe. To obtain this permission, Etana also needed to recognise the local laws of the Yolngu.
This is the coat of arms for Galiwinku, the small community where she lived. The round object is a ‘dilly bag’, a traditional bag woven from the fibres of the pandanus tree. It is used daily by the Yolngu to collect food in the jungle. The two elongated objects are the spears used for hunting.
During her visit to the Yolngu, Etana did not have a camera with her. She wanted to experience life as close to nature as possible and to immerse herself in daily life. As a memento, she drew a few sketches of the area and how the local people live. This sketch shows the place where the Nyarra was held, which is the celebration to mark the end of a six-month ritual that involves dancing around a large fire. This spot is surrounded by hundreds of kilometres of jungle and the Arafura Sea.
Today, Etana lives in Los Angeles, where she works as a film director. She finds life as a woman in the entertainment world of Hollywood to be more difficult than living with the Yolngu. Yet, at the moment she is directing her first feature film.
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Shannon Leone Fowler
We were only waist deep in the water, it was quite shallow, it was very calm. There was no one else in the water at that point. It was quite late in the afternoon, bordering onto evening. We started kissing and I had my legs wrapped around his waist. And he started, he jumped. I was about to ask him what it was.
He said that he was having trouble breathing and his head felt heavy and I needed to get help. And I couldn't see much at that point. The light was fading. I couldn't make anything out. And so I said, well, come with me.
Jonathan Groubert
This is Shannon Leone Fowler. She’s 45, small, delicate, with big, melancholy eyes and a powerful spirit. In 2001, she was on holiday in Thailand with Sean, her fiancée. Sean and Shannon were young and in love. Perfectly happy. Until disaster struck and Shannon’s life changed forever.
This is the trip that changed everything.
I’m Jonathan Groubert and this is… the Journey. The Journey is an original podcast from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel.
Shannon is a marine biologist and the ocean is everything to her. She grew up in the north of California. Not by the sea, as you might expect. But inland, near the mountains. In a small university town.
Shannon’s parents were both political scientists and her mother is also a writer. Shannon was raised to be independent, riding her bike, looking for adventure. And she spent her summers on the beach by her grandparents in San Diego starting a life-long love-affair with the ocean.
Shannon
I decided I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was eight-years-old. It was the first summer that I flew down to San Diego by myself. I remember looking out of the plane, and the ocean just seemed enormous, it seemed limitless. Previously, I'd wanted to be a tightrope walker. I decided to abandon that aspiration for marine biology.
My grandfather was an oceanographer. So, he was able to explain everything to me. How to avoid being stung by a stingray, how to swim if you got caught in a Riptide, how the moon influence the tides. Um, we would go to tide pools and he would be able to name all the different creatures. It was like this key to another world.
It just set the scene, so to say, for me to be fascinated by the ocean, and I always loved animals. What I really wanted to do was study the animals in the ocean.
Jonathan Groubert
And Shannon is a woman with a plan.
After high school Shannon attended the University of California to study Marine Biology. Shannon envisioned her future as a marine biologist and academic, like her grandfather. She lived on the ocean in Santa Cruz. Diving, surfing, walking her dog.
Shannon Leone Fowler
The ocean has always meant possibility to me. It's a place where I just feel I can breathe. I think it makes me feel small in a way that puts everything else into perspective.
Jonathan
And despite being a poor student Shannon became an inveterate traveller. Seeking adventure, often alone, soaking up the culture.
On her trip through Europe she traveled from France to Spain. She took a night train from Nice to Barcelona and ended up in a youth hostel. Here, she met a group of fellow travellers.
They asked her to come out for drinks and, despite being exhausted from the trip, she went along.
Shannon
All I want to do is go to sleep. I've been traveling all night." Sean bounded up the stairs and he was so funny and charming and flirtatious and enthusiastic that I ended up going out for drinks with them.
He's, he was tall. Over six foot, blue eyes, a crooked nose that had been broken. He had a dimple and he had a great smile. Maybe a little rough around the edges but I-I thought he was very good looking immediately.
Jonathan
Sean and Shannon kissed that first romantic Barcelona night. They started travelling together and, in the way of these things, fell deeply in love.
Shannon
I think any-anytime you really fall in love with someone you become a better version of yourself. You see parts of yourself that they have fallen in love with, that makes you appreciate those parts of yourself in a different way. And he-he just made me laugh more than anything. I thought he was incredibly sexy and that, of course, helped, but I liked who I was with him and I liked being around him. I could see spending the rest of my life with him.
Jonathan
They traveled together for months, zigzagging across Europe.
But she is 24. He is 22. And as so often happens at the end of a holiday romance, they went their separate ways. Shannon returned to a job teaching diving in the Caribbean, and then back to Santa Cruz. Sean got a job in Ireland.
And remember, this is 1999. There was no Skype, no WhatsApp. They tried to make it work, long distance. She would call him from a crackling, unreliable pay phone. They wrote each other love letters. And, as inevitably happens, they broke up, started dating other people and moved on. Sean even went back to Australia.
Then fate stepped in.
To complete her study Shannon needed to do research. She was offered a placement on a project that focused on sea lions. And its location… Australia!
Shannon
There was a part of me that I thought, "Sean's there." I think I would have spent the rest of my life wondering if I hadn't seen him again. Because of the way it ended, because how I felt about him when I'd last seen him. We were young and the months apart were hard. But there is a big part of me that leaped to the idea of Australian sea lions because I knew I would see him again.
Jonathan
Shannons headed for Kangaroo Island, off Australia’s southern coast. She packed up her research materials: scales, notebooks, hoops and countless boxes of bleach used to identify the sea lions, and flew to Melbourne in June of 2001.
Shannon
Sean came to pick me up at the airport. I was really jet lagged. I was a little bit hangover. I remember seeing him down the corridor, he was in a suit because he'd come from work to pick me up and I'd never seen him in a suit before. He looked-he looked really good. I remember thinking, how attracted I was to him and how much I'd missed him. We didn't kiss that very first night, it was the second night that we ended up just getting back together.
Jonathan
Shannon shuttled between Kangaroo Island and Melbourne. She had her sea lions and she had Sean. Life was great!
When Sean got a job in China, they were in a long distance relationship again. But this time, they kept in touch. They emailed, called and made plans to travel.
Shannon booked a ticket to Beijing. Sean took time off work and they explored China together. With the emphasis on… together.
Shannon
It had been an intense trip and we decided to splurge on a very mid-range hotel but there was air conditioning. There were clean sheets. There wasn't construction going outside and it felt like luxury. It just felt like absolute luxury. We had sex that morning and he was wrapping himself in a sheet and he said, "Miss, if you'll have me I wanna marry you."I was sitting on his lap. He was wrapped in the sheet. He looked ridiculous. It looked like a kimono practically. And it just felt certain.
Jonathan
And you said--?
Shannon
I just kissed him. I didn't even really feel like I needed to answer.
Jonathan
Shannon is 28. Sean is 25 and can’t stop talking about the beautiful life that lies before them.
Shannon
We were talking about where we were gonna buy a house and he was really excited to be a dad. He could picture everything. Where we were gonna live, what we were gonna do for work. I mean he had it planned out to the extent of us retiring and having a caravan and we would drive it around Australia and we would spoil our grandkids rotten. We would drive our kids crazy because we would spoil our grandkids so much. And he was someone who just made you see that. He made you see that future.
Jonathan
After the hustle and bustle of China, they needed a break and flew to Thailand’s white-sand tropical beaches at Ko Phangan.
Shannon
We just wanted to sit on a beach and relax and swim and eat and be together, we just wanted somewhere easy. So we went to Ko Pha-ngan and it just looked like paradise. Exactly what you would conjure up in your mind if you thought of a tropical beach paradise, white sand, palm trees, turquoise blue water. He was able to-to flirt his way into an upgrade so we had a Cabana right on the beach. It was right at the end so we had a little bit of privacy. It was wonderful.
Jonathan
And it is there, surrounded by azure water, and warm breezes that Shannon reveals to Sean that she… is pregnant.
Shannon
Sean was a bit freaked out. He was 25. We did not have much money. Um, and it was a surprise. But I didn't think that I could do anything except have it, I guess in a lot of ways we hadn't really kind of come to the point where it even seemed solid. It was-it was still very early on.
Jonathan
The very idea of a baby seems, somehow, surreal. After all, there, in the paradise of Ko Pha-ngan, the future seems very far away. All they have is this lazy, wonderful moment. It’s everything they’d hoped for.
And that’s when it happened.
Shannon
It was just like every other day on the island. I had a coconut oil massage on the beach that the local ladies do. It was already kind of starting to get towards the end of the day. We were walking back to our cabana, cabana 214 and he wanted to wrestle, he was twice my size and I knew I would lose. Um, but we wrestled and I lost, I got sand stuck all over my skin because I've had this coconut oil massage.
So I just went straight into the ocean at this point to rinse off. It didn't seem any point in tracking sand through the cabana jumping in the shower. Sean went into the cabana. I came out and he had his glasses He couldn't see where I was at first. So I took off my top and I threw it at him and he came over to me. We were only waist deep in the water, it was quite shallow, it was very calm. There was no one else in the water at that point. It was quite late in the afternoon, bordering onto evening.
Jonathan
Shannon wrapped her legs around his waist and they kissed. They stood entangled in the water: the tall young man and small, tough woman. She, so at at ease in the ocean. He, so nervous about the water. He keeps asking about shark attacks, to her amusement. As an expert, she continually reassures him: he’s perfectly safe. Her legs wrapped around Sean’s waist, she feels something brush past.
Suddenly he jumps and then drops her in the water, to get to the shore as quickly as he can.
Shannon
I thought it was a stingray. It had brushed against my thigh and then I thought it had settled on to the bottom because to sting, it has to have the traction to flip its tail up. If you step on its back then it can then flip its tail up and sting you. I thought, Sean had stepped on it and it had stung him, he rushed to the shore. He said that he was having trouble breathing and his head felt heavy and I needed to get help. I couldn't see much at that point. The light was fading, but I didn't see anything on his legs. I couldn't make anything out. So I said, well, come with me. He said that he couldn't. I really wasn't-I wasn't panicking at all at this point. Um, I thought he was in pain but he was lucid, he was calm, he wasn't screaming, he wasn't crying, he was totally coherent. I was topless, we were right in front of our cabana, and I ran and I put on a dress. I turned around and he'd collapsed in the sand. He was face first in the sand. I thought he'd passed out, I thought he was unconscious 'cause of the pain. So I ran back to him and I tried to turn him over. He was twice my size and it was really difficult to turn him. When I turned him there was a breath that came out. I thought he hadn't been able to breathe with his face in the sand. I ran to get help to a bar that was very close, a few hundred meters down. I said that my boyfriend's having trouble breathing and I think he was stung by something. We ran back and he had no pulse at that point. I'm not sure how many people there were. Everyone was crowded around me. We were trying to do CPR, there was an, a woman, a very young backpacker was doing, um, the chest compressions and counting, there was an Israeli guy who was telling her she was doing the chest compressions wrong. There was this crowd of people pushing in on us on the beach. At first, everyone was watching him. They were waiting for him to start breathing again. They were waiting for him as it always happens in the movies, to cough and come to life. There was a very noticeable shift for me that everyone started watching me. No one was even watching him anymore. Everyone, I think surrounding us knew that he was dead.
I was screaming for an ambulance over and over again and the-there was no ambulance on Ko Pha-ngan. So, a truck was eventually reversed down. A number of people, the Israeli guy, there was some locals, um, moved his body into the back of the truck.
Jonathan
The road is so bumpy they can’t do proper compressions on his chest but keep trying anyway. Shannon sees the Israeli guy turn his head away, unable to watch.
Shannon says she knew in her heart it was too late.
When they finally got to the clinic, the medics got to work trying to resuscitate Sean. They forced air into his lungs. Tuck needles in his heart and administered adrenaline. But after 20 minutes, Sean was declared dead.
Shannon looked at his lifeless body. Purple welts circled his legs. The marine biologist in her said, “box jellyfish”. Its powerful venom kills almost instantly.
Shannon
I knew he was dead on the beach but there was a part of me that was holding out. It just all seemed so surreal, it seemed like beyond anything I could even imagine. Um, so although a big part of me knew he was dead, it was still a shock when the doctor said it.
Jonathan
The receptionist asked Shannon how she would to pay. Shannon was speechless. A young British woman in the waiting room started saying something to the receptionist in Thai. Shannon collapsed, crying, into the British girl’s lap. After a while the girl got up, pointed to two tourists and said: “They will take care of you.” Then she walked out the door and was gone. Shannon vaguely recognized the two women from the beach. They had seen everything and came over to help.
Sean’s body was brought to a temple, the only place that’s cool enough to preserve it. Shannon stayed in the temple for hours, touching and guarding Sean’s body.
Her parents offer to come over, but she refuses. The two Israeli women offered comfort and help while Shannon arranged for Sean’s body to be brought to Australia. After four days, she flew the body to Bangkok on the way to Melbourne and got a hotel room for the night.
Shannon says the whole experience was a waking nightmare.
Shannon Leone Fowler
I thought I was going to be a single mom at 28 and this baby would never know his father. Um, but I wanted it more than I can say. I had a lot of trouble eating and sleeping after Sean died, and it was hard to know what was shock? What was pregnancy? What was grief? I had so many physical symptoms and I didn't know how to untangle it. I had a miscarriage that night in the hotel bathroom on my own. And it [exhales heavily] it felt like every choice in my life had been ripped away from me. Because I had lost Sean and I felt like I had lost the ocean. I was halfway through a PhD in marine biology and I just watched my fiance die on the beach from something killing him in the ocean, I didn't know if I would ever be able to go back to the water again. I didn't know if I would ever want to. And-and then I lost the baby, it felt like I'd had this life and I had been able to see it so clearly with Sean in Australia, having children and working as a marine biologist within days, all of that was gone. And I just felt desperately alone.
Jonathan
Sean’s family arrive in Bangkok and then they all flew back to Australia.
Sean had a traditional Catholic funeral. The church was packed. Family, friends: everybody struggled with his sudden death. Shannon’s heart went out to all of them, especially his poor mother.
Shannon
His mother, she couldn't even come to watch his coffin being lowered into the ground. She just didn't think that she could bear that. And that physically was surprisingly difficult for me, because I'd spent quite a lot of time with his body in the temple. I felt a very strange kind of ownership over his dead body, which may be hard to understand but it was hard to let go of-of just that, of knowing I would never spend time with his body again.
Jonathan
Shannon spent ten days with Sean’s family but felt her presence had become awkward. After all, fair or not, she was the woman who brought their son back in a casket.
So she headed back to California hoping to feel more grounded, more at home and more welcome. That was the idea anyway.
Shannon
I found myself surrounded by people who were getting married, and announcing they were pregnant, and buying houses, two of my best friends from childhood literally got married within that next month. I found it very hard to relate to people, and I could tell people found it very hard to relate to me. People had trouble looking me in the eyes. I could see people would avoid me and so often that they come out with these cliches that it's so much worse.
I felt like people around me wanted me to forget about it. They wanted me to process, move on. They wanted to not talk about Sean. People would say things like, you know, it's been six months, or you'll find someone else or, everything happens for a reason, and I'm sure, it-it will be made clear to you why he had to die. That's never sat well with me. He's a 25-year-old. There's no reason why he died.
Jonathan
Shannon says she resented being made to feel like she had to apologize for her grief, or pretend she was getting over it. Because she wasn’t getting over it. Because she lost Sean. And he was the love of her life.
It is now 2002 and Shannon found herself looking for a place, far away, where she didn’t have to hide her grief.
Before Sean’s death, the sea was the most comforting place in the world. The sea meant beauty, space and freedom. The sea used to be place where she could just breathe. But not anymore.
Shannon
I hated it. I hated it so much. I had given my life to the ocean and I felt like it had totally betrayed me.
Jonathan
Shannon wanted to run away and do what she and Sean had always done: buy a one way ticket to somewhere and just go. They found each other, travelling. It was something they shared.
But now she was alone. So where to? Western Europe and Australia: too many memories. Asia: Sean died there. South America or Africa? Too intense on her own.
Shannon
So I just thought, Eastern Europe. It's cold, it's cheap, no one speaks English, perfect. I didn't want people to be able to talk to me. I felt like I couldn't communicate with anyone in English, so I might as well be somewhere where we're not even trying. And I didn't want to be somewhere hot because I'd been in Thailand with Sean when he died and it had been hot, I wanted to escape that close heat. I didn't want to be a place that was friendly. So, Eastern Europe just seemed- ticked all the boxes, and I flew into Budapest.
It mirrored my state of mind perfectly. It was grey and cold, it was winter, it was kind of a depressed place but it was also a place that I think I found surprising bits of life where I wasn't expecting it.
Jonathan
Shannon criss crossed Eastern Europe. There was no plan. No route. No logic.
Shannon
I didn't have a single reservation and I just thought I'd go from there. I wasn't even sure what countries I would visit, it took me a while to find my feet at all. When I first landed in Hungary, I couldn't see much beyond my own grief, I just wasn't able to. And it was really in Poland, in Krakow, where I started noticing the history around me and I started being able to see past my own pain. I completely unintentionally ended up at Auschwitz on All Souls Day.
Jonathan
All Souls day - November the second. When Catholics commemorate the faithfully departed. Traditionally, it’s a Day is dedicated to prayer and remembrance.
Shannon
It was a beautiful remembrance of what had happened, and it wasn't pretending that it hadn't, it wasn't glossing it over, it wasn't putting a Disney spin on something that had happened that was horrific and awful, it was acknowledging it. And I cried through Auschwitz as I'm sure almost everyone does, and just felt that remembering something and not trying to put a silver lining on something which I feel Americans often try to do. They try to make it a happy ending, you know people- when Sean died, people kept telling me things like, "Everything happens for a reason." It's hard to be in Auschwitz and think that everything happens for a reason. It was the first time since Sean's death that I just felt like, I am in the place where I am supposed to be. I'm in the right place at the right time and this is where I wanna be today.
At All Souls you attend graves, but it's not just graves from people you know and you loved, it's strangers graves. You bring flowers in the morning and you light candles in the evening, the graveyards were just lit up with candles, and I just thought there are different ways to remember someone who's died, and I just needed to find my own way. Poland kind of forced me out of myself. I was able to look around at the history and the acknowledgment of that history in a way that made-made me feel insignificant, but also just made me feel a part of the world again.
Jonathan
After Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, Shannon went to Israel and met the two young women who had helped her at the beach in Thailand. One is called Shani.
Shannon
I needed to see them because although I hardly knew them in some ways, in other ways they understood me in ways that no one else in my life can because they were with me at what was the worst moment of my life. Being in Israel, just a place where the culture dealt with death and grief differently. They'd served with people and they watched people die. And they were young, they were 20, 21. Um, and, again, the way that they dealt, not only with death and grief, but mourning, and the rules and how to deal with someone who is grieving was completely different. They used Sean's name, they used his name often. They asked me questions about Sean, which is something that Americans most often didn't do. They let me dictate if I would talk to them where they were also totally comfortable if I cried, which Americans weren't.
When I was at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem with Shawnee was the first time that I wished that Sean and I would just find peace in our separate places, wherever we were.
Before that, every time I had wished that he wouldn't be dead. I was still trying to take it back. Jerusalem was the first place where I felt like I was ready to accept that that wasn't ever gonna happen.
There were the Sarajevo roses everywhere, where a bomb had gone off and it had killed someone and they had filled it in with red resin and those were all over the place. What I hadn't been expecting was the posters, there were posters everywhere, and they were quite- very macabre, very dark humor, you know?
This acknowledgment this kind of taking back, grief and survival for yourself not being dictated how it's gonna be told. It just felt like the most alive city I had ever been in. People were incredibly friendly, so- happy that I was there. I felt like they had so little in their control but they had taken their survival back in their control. They were telling it the way they wanted to tell it. And it was with a really surprising sense of humor from the outside. That meant a lot to me, that grief could be met with power, creativity, and beauty.
Jonathan
So, what was this process that you were going through?
Shannon
Trying to figure out how to chart my own path through grief, how I wanted to remember Sean, how I wanted to go on with my life, how I wanted to deal with the pain of losing him.
Poland and Bosnia and Israel, really changed the way I felt about grief. Certainly, as a Westerner, as an American, um. The kind of acknowledgement, the rituals, the remembrance, the insistence to not sugarcoat things, were things that I found useful. One of the things that I have learned throughout this is that everyone needs to just find their own way through it. There's no right or wrong.
Jonathan
At what point during these travels, do you think to yourself, "I'm on the other side of this process now?"
Shannon
Sarajevo. It was just such a shocking city. It completely threw me. I felt that if this city can survive in this way, then anyone can survive.
Jonathan
After Sarajevo, Shannon hit the road again. There is no rhyme or reason, there is only the chaos and unpredictability of life itself. She travels 24 hours. Took ferries, buses, trains and end up in Romania. And then Bulgaria.
And then Shannon was ready to go back to the place where it all started: Barcelona, where she first met Sean.
Shannon
I just felt like he was everywhere, every corner I turned, there was a pub we'd had a drink at, or a restaurant we've gone to, or I remember walking down that street with him. So, I'm not sure if it was the right decision or not but it was hard. It was harder to be there than I thought it was going to.
Jonathan
And it was here that this leg of her journey came to an end. Life and its obligations tugged her back again, back to Kangaroo Island to be precise. Shannon returned to her sea lions and worked part-time at the University of Melbourne, doing lab work. She even found a place to live in Melbourne, the city she once planned to settle in with Sean.
It’s tough going. There are memories on every corner. But Shannon says she’d learned to handle it. And the ocean is near. Somehow she’d managed to do an entire season of field work without touching the water once. She worked with the sea lions and their pups on the beach.
And then one day, she rented a surfboard and hit the waves hoping for some kind of revelation. Hoping to breathe again. But… nothing. She didn’t feel anything.
A few months later she went alone to the remote Pacific island nation of Vanuatu to go… scuba diving. She hits the water and is surrounded by jellyfish.
Back on land, walking down a dirt road, something had changed...
Shannon
It was a very physical moment. I can't even say what preceded it. It wasn't this lightning flash of I went 100 feet below and I saw something. It was just that I'd spent time in the water and I was appreciating being back underwater. It was this physical moment where I just felt like I got my breath back. And it-it was startling. I started to enjoy life again- without feeling guilty about it, I could see myself going forward in a way that I hadn't been able to for quite a long time.
Jonathan
Shannon finished her PHD in September of 2005, three years after Sean’s death.
And she kept busy in the enviable way scientists do. She joined research expeditions to the poles, eventually settled in London, where she got married and had three children.
In 2017 Shannon published a book: Traveling With Ghosts. A memoir and a story about loss, based on the journals she kept when she traveled through Europe. It took her a long time to write.
Shannon
I felt like what I was writing about in was the thick of it, like the really hard part of grief that I felt got glossed over in books and movies that, you know, someone loses someone. They cry for 20 minutes and then they're dating someone again, and it just kind of seemed to skip over the worst of it.
Jonathan
How do you feel about the sea right now?
Shannon
I miss it, actually. I feel very landlocked in London. I miss the ocean. I love the ocean, but it's a much more complicated grown-up relationship.
Jonathan
Where are you now with Sean?
Shannon
I still think about him every day. He has been dead so much longer than I even knew him alive, which seems strange to me. I always kind of have to do the math. It's been 16 years since he died, over 16 years.
Jonathan
Shannon, are you still grieving?
Shannon
I still miss him. I'll always be in love with him. I think he'll always be a part of my life.I think I will feel that way for the rest of my life.
Jonathan
Shannon Leone Fowler.
You’ve been listening to The Journey. An original podcast brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
For more background on this story, and on Shannon’s book Traveling With Ghosts, go to podcast.klm.com.
If you liked this story, subscribe and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners find this podcast.
I’m Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
Ever since she was a young girl, marine biologist, Shannon Leone Fowler, has loved the ocean. Whenever she can, she’s on the beach in California. While travelling, she meets the love of her life, Sean. They visit an idyllic island in Thailand, where their dream life turns into a nightmare. Everything that matters to her is taken away in a few seconds - by the sea.
Inspired by her experiences, Shannon has written a book of memoirs called Traveling with Ghosts. The book was published in 2017 and has received critical acclaim worldwide. More information on the book can be found on Amazon and on Shannon’s own website at shannonleonefowler.com.
This is the ocean view Shannon enjoyed at her grandparents’ home in San Diego, California, where her love of the ocean was born at the age of eight.
Sean and Shannon shortly after they kort met in Barcelona. After they met, they travelled together through Europe. Here they are in Portugal (double portrait) and in Slovenia.
As part of her marine biology studies, Shannon conducts research into sea lions on Kangaroo Island, south of Australia. This research brings her to Australia in 2001. Her relationship with Sean had come to an end, but when they see each other again, the sparks start flying once more.
Shannon and Sean on holiday in Australia shortly after reuniting.
In 2002, Sean is working in China. Shannon visits him there and together they travel across China. It is a fantastic but intense trip. During their travels, Sean proposes.
After their tour through China, Sean and Shannon travel to the Thai island of Koh Phangang to relax. This is the view from their cabana. It is on this beach where fate intervenes, and their dream life becomes a heart-wrenching nightmare for Shannon.
Shannon travels alone across Eastern Europe without a plan or reservations, only a Lonely Planet guide in hand. These are her memories from this journey, where she learns a great deal about mourning and loss. Her filled diaries later form the inspiration for her book Traveling with Ghosts.
Shannon working as a marine biologist during an expedition to Antarctica.
After avoiding the ocean for a long time, Shannon’s bond with the sea is restored. But, as she puts it, the relationship has become a more complicated one after her horrifying experiences.
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Episodes 1 to 6 of The Journey are available via YouTube. The podcast can also be watched with subtitles in Dutch, German, French and Spanish for those who do not understand English.
Rose Clark
At about 11:30, I woke up feeling some pitching motion in the ship and aware of the sound of breakers. A nasty sea had already got up and Solace had swung round towards the reef. We were lying off a lee shore within 100 yards of the breakers with a rapidly rising sea and wind. Pitch dark, raining, the anchor chain was clearly foul of a rock and liable to part at any moment and the engine was useless.
Jonathan Groubert
This is Rose Clark. Rose is reading an excerpt from a book written by her father, Victor, about his trip around the world in a small wooden sailboat with only a teenage mate.
This passage is about their dramatic shipwreck in November of 1954, on the reef surrounding a place in the Pacific Ocean called Palmerston Island.
Rose
The ship was pitching like a rocking horse. It had all the appearance and feeling of having parted. There was now no hope. It was a matter of seconds. I sent Stanley below for the lifeboats and we had scarcely put them on when the keel, thank God it was an iron one, struck with a jarring shock.
We clung to the rigging, smothered by the seas. As the ship was held by, oh, it's getting a bit emotional for me. Okay, we clung to the rigging, smothered by the seas. As the ship was held by the series of crashing breakers onto the reef.
During the next six hours, the tide fell. It was barely light, when we saw the islanders coming out to us. Some in canoes, some over the reef. There was a lot of long faces, but little was said. The ship was obviously hulled though she didn't look a wreck, but what a position to be in, on a reef, exposed to wind and water on a tiny coral atoll with only 70 inhabitants, hundreds of miles from anywhere, almost thousands from civilization. I think I'm a born optimist, but my heart was never nearer my boots then at that moment.
Jonathan
For Victor Clark, his Mate Stanley, and surprisingly enough, decades later, for Victor’s daughter Rose...
This is the trip that changed... everything.
Hi, I’m Jonathan Groubert and this is The Journey. The Journey is an original podcast from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel.
The story of the shipwreck you just listened to is an excerpt from the book “On the Wind of a Dream”, written by Rose's father.
Rose is 37, tall, like her father, ginger and English.
And she knows her dad’s stories by heart.
Her childhood was filled with tales of his adventures on the high seas. The whales, the storms and all the exciting details.
Well, Victor found them exciting. For Rose… not so much.
Rose
In one sense he would love to tell his stories, if people came around for dinner or whatever, and I think I just switched off. I think I just didn’t realize how amazing he was.
Jonathan
The one place, the one story, that Victor returned to, again and again was: the shipwreck on Palmerston Island.
Rose
So it's between New Zealand and America in the South Pacific Ocean, probably a bit closer to New Zealand and it's kind of like halfway around the world from where I am in England. And it is.. a couple of hundred miles from the nearest other island, the nearest other Cook Island. Palmerston doesn't have shops or anything, so we're literally talking, 200 miles away for the nearest shop.
Jonathan
Depending on the time of year, 50 to 80 people live on this atoll that is part of the Cook Islands.
Almost everyone on the island is a descendent of the original settler, the English sailor and carpenter William Marsters. Back in 1863 he brought three Polynesian wives to the island, which is divided up between the three families to this day.
Palmerston is the only Cook Island where English is the first language, albeit with some anachronistic usages.
Palmerston is also, without exaggeration, one of the most remote inhabited places on earth.
And despite having crashed his boat on its reef that fateful November night in 1954, and being forced to stay here far longer than he had ever planned or imagined, Palmerston was a place Victor Clark came to love deeply.
Rose
He always said that Palmerston was his favorite place in the world and his favorite time of life.
We used to joke and say, oh, we know your happiest time of life. What about your, your wife and your kids? And he used to do his raucous laughter and um, you know, we all used to laugh about it, it was an incredible time for him.
And the people of Palmerston, were on, in his thoughts and prayers every day for the rest of his life.
Jonathan
Why were the people of Palmerston in his thoughts and prayers until the end of his days? Why was his time here the happiest time of his life?
Why exactly was Palmerston so special to Victor Clark?
Here’s why.
Lt. Commander Victor Clark had retired from the British Navy a mere two months when he set out on a 33-foot all-white ketch, a two-mast wooden sailboat, called SOLACE.
His plan: to sail the world.
Rose
He was having a really rough time in the navy and uh, yeah. So wanted to escape and have his trip round the jolly world. Go for an adventure.
Jonathan
And for his trip Victor needed a ships mate.
Stanley Mathurin
My name is Stanley Mathurin. Born 14 March 1937.
Jonathan
While on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Victor met the then 16- year-old islander, Stanley Mathurin. Stanley was already locally famous for his sailing prowess and he was looking for new adventures. So when Commander Clark turned up in Solace, introductions were made.
Stanley
He was a retired naval officer and he knew that my great ambition was to go to sea and be a captain. He figured that was a good opportunity for me to go to sea. He said that he liked the cut of my jib or something like that. And so the next thing I knew I was gone.
Jonathan
They left the Caribbean in January 1954 and set sail towards the Pacific Ocean.
Everything went well until November of the same year, when Victor and Stanley stopped at Palmerston.
Rose
They had stopped off at Palmerston and you have to anchor outside the reef, because you couldn't take the boat into the lagoon.
Stanley
Well we were on board and it started blowing and um, well we figured we better, take up the anchor and sail away, you know.
Jonathan
What did you think to yourself the moment you realized everything was going wrong?
Stanley
Well, I thought, that's it. We're thrown on the reef.
Bill Marsters
Yes, I still remember what he looks like and his friend that he brought with him from the Caribbean, Stanley, he was only 16 when he came here.
Jonathan
This is Bill Marsters.
He’s the son of Tuakana and Inano Marsters, the family who took Victor and Stanley in after the crash. I managed to reach him via Skype, something they have there these days.
Bill was only 6 at the time, but he has vivid memories of the time of the shipwreck.
It took a great effort, but the islanders managed to get the badly battered Solace on the beach. There were barely any tools and no electricity, so everything had to be done by hand. It took 9 months to make it sea worthy again.
But when it was the duo set sail, but used Palmerston as a base while criss-crossing the Pacific. All told, they were on Palmerston for more than 2 years.
Victor and Stanley enjoyed life on the island greatly. This is what Victor wrote in his book.
Rose
I shall never cease to marvel at my good fortune and getting wrecked on Palmerston. If I had wanted to get wrecked and had had the whole world to choose from, I could never have found a better place. Green waving palm trees, white sandy beaches trimmed with verdant bushes. Blue lagoon cooled by trade wind, no noises other than nature's, wholesome food in abundance, Robinson Crusoe did not do nearly so well.
Jonathan
As time passed Bill Marsters remembers how Victor and Stanley integrated themselves into life on Palmerston.
Bill
He always have classes for kids to study about the Bible and singing hymns.
Jonathan
As you can imagine, the arrival of two new men for an extended period of time, was kind of a big deal, full of grand moments carved into the history of Palmerston Island.
Moments like the air drop.
Stanley
We had to light a fire so that the pilot could see how the wind was blowing in order to know where to drop his parachute with all the stuff.
Screws and bolts and nuts and glue and stuff, to help with the repairs.
I was all excited. This boy from St. Lucia, you know, all this is happening to him. I mean, I was living a dream.
Jonathan
Newspapers worldwide ate up the story of the daring airdrop delivering supplies to a shipwrecked naval commander.
Victor Clark had some notoriety back then. Not just because of his daring circumnavigation of the planet in a tiny wooden ketch.
But also because Victor was a decorated war hero who saw extraordinary action in the Pacific.
Rose
He was bombed a few times in ships in the ocean. He swum in shark infested water for a few nights with a broken arm on a piece of old barrel or wood or something.
I think he absolutely believed that God had his back. That was always his first in life, is that he knew that moment he was in the water, that God had his back and that he would survive it. Survived the oceans, survived the sharks. And eventually they got rescued by someone and then betrayed and then he was a Japanese prisoner of war. Um, and that is something he never spoke about. And I think that's a lot to do with the pain that they all suffered, he saw incredibly awful things.
Jonathan
After the war, Victor was passed over for promotion and given a desk job.
He resigned and immediately began his ambitious trip around the world that lasted more than 5 years.
Back in England, at a youthful 68 years of age, he married a woman 30 years his junior and had two daughters. Rose was born when Victor was 72.
Despite his advanced years, Rose says he was an energetic father and, because he was already retired, always around.
Well, he was around physically. Emotionally, he may have been somewhere else...
Here’s a tender moment Rose sent us of Victor and herself.
[Fragment from Rose]
Rose
He used to love reading us stories. He would dress up and knock on the door as a different character each time and come and be that person for a Sunday afternoon. He was just really fun.
I felt close to him, but it was only when I was older at the age of 20 that I realized that I had dad issues, in that I didn't know anything about an intimate father. There had been an emotional distance between us that I hadn't probably realized at the time.
I don't think as a child, I don't remember affectionate words being spoken to me. I don't particularly remember ever being told I love you, by dad. So as a family, we're not, we're not very warm, affectionately like that.
I think towards the end of dad's life I, I learnt to say I love you. Yeah. And it was hard, but I got there.
Jonathan
Did he ever say it back?
Rose
He was in hospital one time and I was just able to be really honest with him, but he, I think he just smiled because he probably actually couldn't talk at that point.
Jonathan
Lieutenant-Commander Victor Clark died in January of 2005 at 97 years of age.
And as large as he was in life, that is how humble his funeral was.
Rose
As far as mum's concerned, like when a body's dead, it's nothing because their spirit is gone to heaven and the body's just the body. So she wasn't precious about this kind of thing at all. We weren't in a great state when dad died. We had like a tiny family funeral with a few people and that was it. Dad had always envisioned horses with feathers and carrying his coffin on a, you know, a carriage, you know, like an important person would have. Um, and obviously he definitely didn't get that.
Jonathan
Rose was 25 then.
Meanwhile, she trained to be a special education teacher. And got a good, but demanding job.
Rose
I had been working in a Manchester, central Manchester primary school as a learning mental, training as a therapeutic play worker to help with the children that were really troubled.
I loved it, but I, as the years went on, I got increasingly burdened by it and I just felt more and more useless. And I didn't know how to fix these people that were very broken, and I think that really began to frustrate and upset me and it just became too much and I guess you would say I got burnt out.
Jonathan
Just like her father, Rose is a devoted Christian.
She walks around with a worn, dog-eared bible full of notes and comments written in the corners.
But back then, Rose says she became... alienated from her faith.
Rose
I had begun to slip into patterns of life that weren't particularly helpful. Um, so I had started drinking a bit more excessively again. I had started dabbling in smoking weed again, but all the time going to church still, that was the thing. It felt like I was being really hypocritical because on one hand I was loving Jesus and knew that I was unconditionally loved by him. But then on the other hand, I was doing things that were just really not great for my quality of life and probably hurting other people along the way as well I think.
Jonathan
Add to that a difficult living situation and a complicated and unfulfilling love life.
But, just then, a couple of remarkable things kind of came together.
Her cousin inherited Solace, the sailing boat Victor Clark and Stanley circumnavigated the world with.
Rose and he were refurbishing Solace together.
They came across all kinds of silent witnesses to the long journey Solace made with her father, like the improvised nails the Palmerston islanders used to stitch her together.
She started rereading her father’s book about his voyage around the world.
When she was a child, her father’s stories often bored her, but now, for the first time, she found a new appreciation for her father’s amazing feats.
And she was particularly curious about his time on Palmerston Island.
Rose
Yeah. So I was reading dad's copy of 'On the Wind of a Dream' and tucked in the front cover, there was a piece of paper and it had a Palmerston telecom address. And I thought, wow, this could be my route in. So I emailed it and I said, for the attention of Mama Inano. And I wrote and I said, dear Mama Inano, I have no idea if you remember who commander Victor Clark is, um, but I'm his daughter and I am wondering if I could come and visit you because, you know, Palmerston was a great time of his life and he spoke very fondly of you and Tuakana and all your family when I was growing up. So can I come and visit?
Jonathan
Tuakana and Mama Inano were the people who took in Victor and Stanley.
Despite the passage of nearly 6 decades Mama Inano remembered them very well.
She also told Rose she was more than welcome.
So, Rose prepared for the trip to tiny Palmerston Island, that speck in the Pacific that played such an outsized role in her father’s life.
She took enough for a few months’ travel.
Rose
My cousin Tom said to me, are you going to take your dad's ashes? And I said, oh, if I got room I might, you know, it definitely wasn't a planned thing from my point of view. I had like a front pocket on the front of the rucksack and uh, so I had room, so I took some of dad's ashes as many as I could fit in a jar.
It was a big old peach jar that my mom had lying around. So I stuffed his ashes into this peach jar, screwed on the lid and thought that'll do.
Jonathan
Why, why would you take your dad's ashes?
Rose
Because it was the place he loved most in the world.
Jonathan
Getting to Palmerston is still quite a journey.
First Rose flew to LA, followed by a long flight to Rarotonga, the largest and most densely populated island of the Cook Islands.
Mama Inano happened to already be there for a medical procedure. So, the two met on the island.
And together they prepared for the final leg to Palmerston.
There are no ferries or flights there. The only way to get there from Rarotonga, is to wait for a cargo ship that just happens to have Palmerston on its route.
They waited a month for the ship, to take a trip, which even today, is not for the faint of heart.
Rose
So going across on the journey, you will lie on the deck, like little sardines in a tin.
Wrapped up in my sleeping bag. We had a tarpaulin over us in case it rained and to probably cover us from the wind a bit as well. There were people chucking, chucking over the edge, you know, being sick.
Jonathan
And how long did it take?
Rose
It's about three days. Two nights.
We had arrived at the nighttime when we were sleeping. I think the little boy, Nariki, he had started to get excited when he'd peeled up the canvas to see that we'd arrived and there was a light in the distance. And he said to me, oh, this is Palmerston, we're home, we're home. Yeah. It was amazing.
We get picked up by the little tin boat, you know, the islanders come out and they pick you and your stuff up and drive you back across the lagoon. And I was in the same boat as Mama Inano and we stepped ashore and she put her arm around me and she said, 'Welcome my dear. You have fulfilled your father's dream', because she knew that he'd always wanted to come back.
Jonathan
Your eyes are tearing up a little.
Rose
Yeah. Every time.
It hit me that, that was what I was doing. I was coming to - because of dad. Yeah.
Jonathan
So who came out to greet you?
Rose
All the island come down. You know, when they know that family members are coming back, they'll all come down to the seashore to welcome you if, if they're physically able. Yeah. Yeah. So big. I mean that's a massive thing in itself, you know, they all come and give you a kiss or two kisses, always two kisses. I was explaining to them who I was and they would say, oh yeah, we know we've grown up hearing stories about your father.
Jonathan
Bill Marsters explains how Victor Clark is remembered on the island.
Bill Marsters
Well, I think he was a really, uh, a good man, a Christian man and everybody knows him, what he had did for the island.
We never thought that his daughter will come back, to to follow up, uh, her father's, uh, route what he did.
Jonathan
Rose settled onto the island, staying with Bill and Mama Inano - or Grammy, as Rose calls her.
And then she showed them the peach jar with her father’s ashes.
Rose
I said to her, listen, I've got dad's ashes. Is it okay if I scattered them in the lagoon or whatever? And she said, leave it with me, my dear. I'll speak to Bill, her son.
Bill
I just felt that she were just following up to the, uh, the history of her father, one of the reason is to bring his ash back, but that's what the really aim. She said she wanted to come to, to get approval from the family if she can bring her father's ash and bury besides my father.
I feel really happy about it because I, my, my father had a lot of time with him and they seem to be worked together as like brother.
Jonathan
All the Palmerston islanders then held a memorial service, laying Commander Victor Clark’s ashes to rest, in a manner closer to what he had envisioned.
Rose
Death to them is much more of a precious thing than it was to our family, you know, they would think the idea of throwing him in the lagoon or something was outrageous. You know, he needed a proper burial and they were, you know, they, they were so honored that I had brought him home.. So it was a really special thing for them. All the islanders came to the memorial service and the old mamas that were still alive that remembered him, told their stories and memories about him. And we sung his favorite hymn. Um, yeah. And it was just really special and definitely felt like it had been how it should have been.
Jonathan
That's incredibly moving.
Rose
Well, I mean, at the time I was a wreck obviously. Yeah. All my emotions that I'd pushed down for years came out and I. Yeah, I definitely cried that day. And another thing was that, um, on the day of his memorial it rained and poured the whole day and to Palmerston people, rain is such a blessing. So they were saying to me, oh my gosh, this is God's hand of blessing. Just the whole thing was amazing.
I love to think that he saw it. Yeah. I love to think that he, that you can look down from heaven and see what's going on.
Jonathan
Rose’s sojourn on the island, helped her gain insight into a man she loved and respected but barely knew.
Like his inner struggle with god. Take the story of the night before the shipwreck.
Rose
So he's having a quiet time on his boat that evening, just spending time like reading his Bible or, you know, with God and he felt like God said, I want you to stay and teach these people about me.
And being the naval officer he was, he said, sorry Lord, I'm leaving in the morning and just left it at that. And it was that night that the wind changed direction suddenly. And he got flung on the reef and ended up staying there for nine months.
Jonathan
Is that how he said it to you?
Rose
No, absolutely not. So I found that out from Mama Inano when I got to the island.
Jonathan
What did you think when you heard that?
Rose
It was amazing. That makes so much more sense.
Because, he had always said that on his grave he would like sailor and missionary written. And I used to kind of laugh at him going, you weren't a missionary, what the heck are you talking about? But I see now why that made sense to me more because he had spent a lot of time teaching them about Jesus while he was there and God's love for them.
Jonathan
Rose says that, after that, she was done. She’d buried her father in the place he loved most. Got to know him better and finally closed off the chapter of his loss. Time to leave Palmerston Island behind.
Right?
Rose
So my plan was to get a cargo ship to go back to Rarotonga and fly to New Zealand where I would be for another few months and then go back to life in England. Um, but what happened is that a ship never turned up, so I missed my flight.
Jonathan
So the ship never came, Rose missed her flight and there was one more thing...
Rose
Carly.
Yeah.
She was seven or eight by then.
Carly had behavioral difficulties and they didn't really know how to deal with her.
She wasn't able to start school until they could get the funding, for somebody to come and specially work with her.
Jonathan
At that point, the local school principal found out that Rose had experience working with kids with special needs.
So, of course, the principal… asked Rose to stay.
Rose
I said, 'no way. This is a tiny island, hundreds of miles away from anywhere else and I am not going to stay here. But thank you anyway'. Um, and then I think my conscience began to get the better of me because I realized that if I walked away she would not be a seven or eight year old who hadn't started school, she would be a nine, 10, 11 year old that hadn't started school and haven't had that chance for education.
I totally believe that God uses his word to speak to us at situations where we need guidance.
So the next morning I was walking around the beach doing my daily walk and there was a weird strip of red water right by the water's edge. It was bright red. A couple of hundred meters worth. And um, God spoke to me about the Red Sea and how he had parted the waves for the Israelites to leave Egypt to their freedom. Um, and uh, just said to me, in my spirit, I'm going to make a way where there seems to be no way.
I knew what I felt God was saying to me. And then just thought, okay, there's nothing else I can do now. I'll stay on Palmerston.
Jonathan
So, you plan to leave, something happens that intervenes, you change your mind and you decide to stay. Where have I heard this story before?
Rose
You have heard that with my dad.
So for him it was like a little argument with God and for me it was a, God saying, this is the shape hold that I've carved out that you fit perfectly into. And it didn't take a shipwreck for me to say, okay, I'll stay.
Jonathan
A religious person would listen to this story and say, “She read God’s signs correctly.” Others might say, “she was looking for reasons to stay.”
Whatever you believe, Rose, who, like her father before her, had no intention of staying on one of the most isolated places on earth, decided that, for now, Palmerston Island is home.
This is what Rose’s routine was like.
Rose
So Carly was only in school for a few hours a day. So then in the afternoons I would go into the main classroom and help out with all the other 20 however many kids.
Jonathan
Rose says time is a relative thing on Palmerston. One day is much like the next.
There is abundant fresh food. Limitless sunshine.
And, Rose didn’t exactly say this, but I’ll say it, a sense of purpose. The feeling that she was there for a reason. In this new environment, far away from everything familiar, she could reinvent herself.
Rose
I thought, okay, I'm going to try and live life without alcohol. And for me alcohol had been a real confidence thing, especially socially. It had always been a bit of a crutch for me. So, um, to try and integrate into a little community without my false crutch of alcohol was a challenge. It was one that I overcame and managed it. After that I never drank alcohol again.
Jonathan
And Rose changed her life in other small but significant ways..
Rose
Apart from the alcohol thing I would never step out the house without a tonne of eye makeup because I literally thought that I was gross and like people wouldn't want to see me as I am today, but when I got to Palmerston I thought, okay, here's my chance. These are people that have never known me with makeup so they're not gonna know anything different. So then I stopped wearing makeup. That's a tiny, insignificant thing to a lot of people. But to me that is just so freeing.
Jonathan
How long did you stay in the end?
Rose
Four and a half years.
Because I loved it. There was no reason not to be there. I just really loved it. I loved that slower pace of life. I loved learning how to enjoy my own company.
Jonathan
At the end of four years, the day came that Rose returned to Britain. Bill and Grammy gave her a send off befitting the departure of a member of the family.
Rose
Took me to the beach where we always say goodbye when anyone's leaving. Um, same as when dad was there, big semicircle of people all gathered. And then they sang their Maori songs, traditional Maori song that they sing when people go, um, and yeah, then all the kissing begins and all the tears obviously this time because it was a final goodbye.
Um, yeah, so very emotional. Especially saying goodbye to Grammy because I knew that it would probably be the last time that I saw her because she was well into her eighties already. So that was really hard. I think I tried to tell myself that I would see her again just to make it easier, but I mean we both knew that we wouldn't this side of, heaven. So yeah, that was hard. She, she like physically found it difficult to let go of me. Yeah.
Psalm 121, verse eight. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth and even for evermore.
Jonathan
And that's what they read for your father, right?
Rose
Yeah. And for me, I think it’s just a real send-off, you know, a real beautiful send-off.
Jonathan
Now when you were standing on that yacht and looking back at the island, as the trees and the sand were fading in the coastline, what went through your head?
Rose
I went to the end of the boat and just sat looking out to it. Um, yeah. And crying turmoil. Yeah.
Jonathan
Rose has been back in England for a year and a half. She works for a charity and loves it.
And she says her time on Palmerston has changed her for the better.
Are you happier?
Rose
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
I feel like I went a prisoner and came back free.
I've learned lessons and I've carried them back into this busyness and I'm determined not to get caught up in the rat race again.
Jonathan
Do you understand your dad better, you think?
Rose
Yeah.
Jonathan
What part of his life do you think you understand better?
Rose
His need to find a purpose and just to run away from all the crap that life brings sometimes and go and I hate that expression, find yourself, I guess for both. Well, for me it was to find God in a more intimate place. And just to experience the most loving people I've ever met honestly, they definitely gave me a different outlook on life without a doubt. Yeah.
Jonathan
You think you'll ever go back?
Rose
Yeah, I'll go back. Definitely. And whether that is to live for years or just to visit for months, I'm not sure, but I will without a doubt go back.
Jonathan
Your father said that, uh, his time on Palmerston was the happiest in his life. How about you?
Rose
For me, I can say the same, as well.
Jonathan
If he were alive today, sitting here in this room, what would you say to him?
Rose
I love you so much, dad, and thanks for being an inspiration.
Jonathan
Rose Clark.
If you’d like to see pictures of Rose’s time on Palmerston or if you’d like to listen to an interview Victor Clark gave to the Imperial War Museum about his time in WW2 we will put them on our website: podcast.klm.com. Go and look, go listen, they are fascinating.
This was the last episode of the first season of The Journey. An original podcast brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. To hear more stories about the trip that changed everything, go to podcast.klm.com.
And why not review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners find this podcast.
Thank you so much for listening. I’m Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
In the 1950s, Rose’s father takes a trip that attracts enormous media attention, as he attempts to sail around the world in a wooden ketch. The voyage ends in shipwreck on a tiny atoll in the Pacific Ocean: Palmerston Island. This event was to change not only the course of Clark’s life, but that of his daughter – who hadn’t even been born at the time.
Growing up, she often heard her father speak about the small atoll in the Pacific. After the disastrous night when his wooden boat was dashed to pieces on the reef, he discovered that Palmerston Island is a paradise on earth. The few inhabitants are hospitable, the natural environment is an unlimited source of food and the only sound to be heard is the gentle rustle of the palm branches.
Little Rose is bored by her father’s stories. But as she gets older, she becomes fascinated by her father’s life. Who was he, really? She decides to go in search of his past. It is a quest that can end in only one place: Palmerston Island.
Fate had dictated that her father spend years in that place. And miraculously enough, the same thing happened to Rose. Her initial plan to spend only a short period on the island takes an unexpected turn. In the end, she lives there for years. And as with her father, her time there leaves an indelible impression.
The island is one of the Cook Islands, which lie in the South Pacific between New Zealand and Hawaii. Palmerston has an area of approximately 2.6 square kilometres and fewer than 100 inhabitants.
Stanley Mathurin is the sailor who accompanied Victor Clark on his voyage around the world. He came from St. Lucia and was only 17 years old at the time. Here we see him practicing with a sextant, a navigation instrument used to determine one’s location at sea.
November 1954. ‘The Solace’ runs aground on a reef near Palmerston Island. The local inhabitants rush to their aid, helping to drag the ketch ashore.
Both Victor and Rose Clark found their personal version of paradise in Palmerston, where each of them enjoyed a happy period in their lives.
After sailing around the world for five years, Victor returned to England at the age of 68. There, he married and has two daughters: Jess (rear) and Rose (front).
Rose meets Mama Inano (Grammy), the woman who, together with her husband Tuakana Marsters, took in Victor and Stanley all those years ago.
Carlie is the reason that Rose decided to extend her stay on Palmerston Island. Thanks to her background in working with children with behavioural issues, Rose was able to offer Carlie the support the girl needed at school.
Victor Clark’s shipwreck garnered major headlines in the English-language media. The flyover air drop in particular was the subject of great attention. In this operation, a naval aircraft flew in from New Zealand and dropped off materials to repair Clark’s sailboat, something that captured many an imagination at the time.
To read Victor’s interview with the Imperial War Museum, click here.
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Episodes 1 to 6 of The Journey are available via YouTube. The podcast can also be watched with subtitles in Dutch, German, French and Spanish for those who do not understand English.
Jonathan Groubert
This is audio from a vacation film of two special people hanging out on a beach in Greece. This is Ries van Rijn.
And this is the famous fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier.
It’s the 90s. Ries and Jean Paul are friends, lovers and co-workers.. And that’s actually kind of amazing, because they both come from two totally different worlds.
Gaultier, is, well, he’s Gaultier! The epitome of outrageous, outspoken, Paris fashion.
Ries van Rijn, by comparison, is from a small, conservative fishing village in the Netherlands. And this is Ries’ sister Vera.
Ries was supposed to grow up, get married to a local girl and become a hairdresser. Instead, he became a fashion model, Amsterdam trans-icon and a famous fixture in Europe’s gay scene. He partied with Madonna, had cocktails with Freddie Mercury. You may not know his name, but Ries was the face and the body of many massive international ad-campaigns. But let’s just push the pause button here.
This story is not about Ries or even Jean Paul Gaultier. This story is about Ries’ sister… Vera. Vera van Rijn was more than Ries’ sister. She was his confidant and the keeper of his secrets.
It’s a story that finally takes us all the way to New Delhi, a hectic polluted, but beautiful place. Smells, colors and sound abound. And…. it’s a place Vera would go to, to get her life back…
Hi, I’m Jonathan Groubert and this is The Journey. The Journey is an original podcast from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel.
Vera van Rijn lives in Volendam, a small fishing village in the Netherlands, just a 30 minute drive, and a world away, from the capital Amsterdam. This is the place where she and Ries grew up.
Now, Vera’s apartment is exceptionally tidy, in that Dutch way. The walls are white and there’s a collection of angels and other Catholic paraphernalia neatly positioned around the windows.
But there’s one small corner with brightly colored bells and elephants and a traditional drawing. Souvenirs of India. Vera only just got back from there a few months ago.
She’s in her early sixties and has gone abroad before, but the trip to India was different. This was the closing chapter to a personal epic that started in the 1970s. Vera and Ries came from a big family.
Vera van Rijn
My father and mother have nine children.
Jonathan
Vera and I spoke in English, but as you can hear, she doesn’t speak it every day and often falls back into Dutch.
Nine kids? Which one were you?
Vera
Ah, number three.
Jonathan
You were third?
Vera
Yeah. The first girl.
Jonathan
The first girl. And Ries was which one?
Vera
Ruud, Sam, Vera, Marian, Frieda, Ries. Six.
Jonathan
He was the sixth?
Vera
Yeah.
Jonathan
Vera is ten years older than her brother and she practically raised him. Everyone agrees Ries’ blond curls and gentle character made him different. Really different.
Vera
I bought my first lingerie. You know, bra and a...
Jonathan
And an underwear?
Vera
Yeah. And my youngest brother, he… he do this [sound effect].
Jonathan
He made a slingshot from your panties?
Vera
Yeah. He make fun of it and I come to my bedroom and Ries had my underwear on. So I go to my mother and I said to my mother, ‘ma, I don’t know…’ And my mother says: ‘Sweetie, I give him too few hormones’.
Jonathan
Vera says that when Ries was four, he would parade around in his sister's dresses and stiletto heels. He loved to go clothes shopping with Vera - sparking a lifelong interest in fashion and fabrics.
When Ries was 10, he asked his older sister if there are men who love other men. Neither Vera nor Ries even knew the word 'gay'.
So how old were you when you realised he was gay?
Vera
I think twenty-three.
Jonathan
You were twenty-three? And you still didn’t have a word for gay?
Vera
No.
Jonathan
As Ries grew up, Volendam became less like home. People whispered, “We pray he will be normal someday.” His mother even encouraged him to find a nice girl.
Vera, in the meantime became a married mother of two. She cleaned houses in Amsterdam several times a week for some extra cash...
Ries came with her to Amsterdam one time and had his mind blown. Amsterdam is cosmopolitan, liberal and free. Gay men walk the streets openly holding hands.
Vera
He didn’t see that in Volendam. It was just like a sponge. He saw funny people, he saw gay people.
Jonathan
Unsurprisingly Ries started going to Amsterdam a lot.
Vera
Ries was eighteen. Then he go one night to Amsterdam. And then he go three days in Amsterdam. And then he said to my mother ‘I go to live in Amsterdam’. And my mother thought, ‘yeah, that’s right’.
He told me that he want to be free. You got all the gay bars. And he loved that. The freedom of the sex, the drugs, the transformations, the dresses, the underwears, the everything.
Jonathan
Ries moved in with a friend from the gay-scene and quickly became a fixture of the city’s nightlife. Some called late 1980s Amsterdam, the gay capital of the world.
The great chronicler of Dutch street life, the photographer Ed van der Elsken, asked Ries and his close friends to pose for him. In one shot, Ries casts a sultry gaze into the camera. He seems perfectly at ease. Perfectly cool. This photo later would symbolize this period in Amsterdam’s history: freewheeling, confident, and totally unaware of what was about to happen.
By this time Vera had become a prim and proper conservative Volendam housewife and mother.
But she traveled to Amsterdam everyday. A friend of Ries gave her a job as a seamstress in a bespoke clothing store that had a very specific clientele...
Vera
So there was a shop in Amsterdam, Guappa. And it was in that time, a very famous shop. They’re making clothes, leather for girls, but also for prostitute ways.
Jonathan
Prostitutes?
Vera
Naughty lingerie, for naughty people. Sexy bras and sexy pants from leather.
Jonathan
They also made crotchless panties.
Vera
Yeah. I make also leather trousers with not the backside in. So I make assless chaps.
Jonathan
Vera loves her days away from her husband and kids in Volendam. She loves the gossip. The tales of nightlife, the wild parties. It’s a glimpse into Ries’ world. A place that’s extravagant and decadent.
As for Ries, he got a job in a hair salon. He spent his days cutting hair, and he spent his nights indulging in Amsterdam’s clubs. There are transvestites, nudity, leather, wigs, sex and drugs. Nothing is off limits.
Ries and his friends’ home base was the notorious club, Roxy. Joost van Bellen deejayed at the Roxy and remembers Ries vividly.
Joost van Bellen
Ries was there a lot [at the bar]. I remember him standing there with all kinds of big names from fashion from London and Paris.
The Roxy was a place where lots of stars who came to Amsterdam were designers or famous people would go. Stars had to be the same like everybody else and everybody else was a star at the Roxy. There were lots of very famous people hanging out there, all of a sudden you would be standing next to Willie Nelson or football player, soccer player Maradona or remember Bono sitting besides the DJ booth. I remember Boy George coming there, Leigh Bowery, the Club icon and also Ries.
Jonathan
Ries would pop by Vera’s work to regale her with tales of his previous night’s exploits.
And then, together, they would indulge in their mutual love of clothes and fabrics. Vera often worked with cashmere and silk from India. And Ries would talk about his desire to go to this magical land.
Vera
If we talk about India, we talk about the clothes and the silk and the colours and the… yeah… of the people.
Jonathan
Then Vera and Ries would dream about how they would explore India… together… someday....
Cut to a chic street in the center of Amsterdam. Ries is biking along when a door opens and a bleached blonde Frenchman rushes out. This was the French fashion designer and gay icon, Jean Paul Gaultier, and he was instantly... smitten.
Gaultier had recently designed all the outfits for Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour. You may remember the infamous cone bustier. This pretty much made him the most celebrated fashion designer in the world!
Johan Wijker
Ries worked at that time in Amsterdam and he had a modelling for Elegance. It’s a magazine and he was wearing a suit of Jean Paul Gaultier.
Jonathan
This is Johan Wijker. He used to hang out with Ries and his friends and remembers exactly how Gaultier and Ries met.
Johan
And he was bicycling through the Leidse street in Amsterdam and Jean Paul Gaultier was coincidentally in Amsterdam and he talked to Ries. He just said hey, hello, hello, who are you?
Jonathan
Vera says Gaultier took Ries out for dinner and they started dating.
Vera
And they fell in love. He was too proud on it. He...
Jonathan
What did he say to you?
Vera
Oh and he was to the most beautiful hotels in Paris. And then he was in New York. And then he was to Milan and everything he told me. Yeah, he was in a dream world. In a dream world.
Jonathan
Ries regularly traveled to Paris to be with Gaultier. It was love.
Ries also started getting regular work as a fashion model for photoshoots and catwalk shows. He traveled the world as Gaultier’s model, muse and lover.
And of course, we tried to talk with Gaultier…
... but he never got back to us.
Ries’ beauty and charm attracted attention everywhere they went. Ries even told his housemate that Madonna said she was attracted to him, although she certainly must have known Ries was gay.
Ries would call Vera and tell her about his adventures a couple of times a week, even when he was abroad. She recalls the time Ries sat in a club next to the fashion model, and mother of many of Mick Jagger’s children, Jerry Hall.
Vera
He told me he was once in New York and he was in a bar and just like nothing, Jerry Hall comes sit with him on the table. And he said to me ‘I couldn’t nothing say. Jerry Hall. The most beautiful woman in the world.’
Jonathan
Johan Wijker was still a student then. He and a group of friends often took the train to visit Ries in Paris.
Johan
We were at Gare du Nord and we were picked up by a chauffeur and the car, the Rolls Royce Cabriolet, and we went through Paris to the shop of Jean Paul Gaultier.
And then later on we met him and we went to a bar in the evening and Sophia Loren was there and all kind of French people I don’t know, but they were from cinema or artists or, well, a lot of models of course.
Jonathan
Johan says Ries moved effortlessly through this world of international stars. After Paris, Ries arranged for them to go to the Spanish island Ibiza where they ended up at a rather exclusive party on a yacht.
Johan
We were invited on the VIP deck. So there were the rich and famous people. And at that time, Freddy Mercury was sitting there and Caroline of Monaco.
Jonathan
And how did Ries behave during this?
Johan
Like a fish in water. Yeah. He liked that life. Yeah.
Jonathan
In 1993, Ries and a group of friends filmed a vacation on the Greek island of Mykonos. Gaultier was there.
In the film, they’re on a beach. A shirtless Gaultier embraces Ries from behind. They have the same short, blonde cut. They’re laughing and joking. It’s intimate.
Ries was often abroad these days, but he always saw his sister when he came home. Vera says she gobbled up his stories, vicariously enjoying his amazing, glamorous life.
Vera
He told me about the people in Paris. He learned me a lot on everything what’s going on.
Jonathan
Vera is the only member of the family who got to hear all the details about Ries’ jet set life.
Vera
He couldn’t tell my mother. You know, my mother calls Jean Paul Gaultier, Jean Paul Koltrui.
He brought also sometimes a beautiful scarf from Jean Paul Gaultier.
Jonathan
A scarf?
Vera
Yeah. But she don’t care.
Jonathan
And so as time passed, Ries became a semi-celebrity and was regularly seen in the gossip sections of magazines with all kinds of famous people.. He traveled the world. He saw a lot of countries. Except the one he and his sister always dreamt of... Nevertheless, it seemed like a time of endless happiness.
Until, rather suddenly, everything changed.
The ravages of HIV/AIDS was reaching its peak in the mid-90s.
Amsterdam’s gay scene was hit hard. Johan Wijkers remembers how the years of carefree partying transformed into a dark age.
Johan
Another friend of mine was living in Miami. And he said there is a strange illness in America. Well, it’s called AIDS and all the gay people getting AIDS.
Some people get also ill in The Netherlands. Some of our friends or people you knew got ill and most of the time at that time they were ashamed and you didn’t see them anymore because they went back to the parents.
Jonathan
DJ Joost van Bellen has similar memories.
Joost van Bellen
All of a sudden there were more and more people missing at the dance floor. Sometimes, I think, during those days losing all those people and was like being in a war situation.
It was very scary and doomy, but on the other hand when going out at night, it was all about escapism and dancing on the on the edge of the volcano as we say in Dutch.
Jonathan
Vera, still working in the boutique, also saw how the virus slowly gripped Amsterdam’s gay scene. People were infected or dying.
And she worried about her brother.
Vera
I said often to Ries, ‘please take care’.
Jonathan
You were worried.
Vera
Yeah. I knew that he has a free life - sex life was also free.
Jonathan
Then Ries was struck by a bout of tuberculosis. A routine blood test revealed the obvious..
Vera
Yeah he must take a blood test. And we get the results and then I saw HIV. He was mad of me. And because he was mad, I knew it.
I was afraid the way he’s going to die. That’s what I was afraid.
Jonathan
When Ries finally confided in Vera that he was HIV positive, he made her promise not to tell anyone. Especially the family.
Vera
Every time I go away, then he said to me ‘promise me, don’t say anything at home’. And I promised. And I could understand it too.
Jonathan
Why do you think he didn’t want anybody to know?
Vera
Ashame.
Jonathan
What was he ashamed of? He lived his life so freely.
Vera
Yeah, but in that time, nobody says ‘I have AIDS’.
Jonathan
Ries was afraid that family, friends and acquaintances in Volendam would avoid him. That he wouldn’t be allowed to hold his nephews and nieces.
Vera watched Ries grow increasingly desperate: He tried homeopathy, herbal mixtures, whatever he could get to slow down the advancing virus.
And when her family would ask about Ries, she did what her brother told her to do. She would say, “Oh he’s fine, jetting around the world, living the high life…”
Vera
I lied a lot. My sister-in-law ask often, ‘how goes Ries?’. Then I say ‘oh yeah, he’s now in New York.’
Jonathan
Meanwhile, Ries' health declined. At first, he could still work. But he quickly lost weight and was constantly coughing. He stopped working and quit traveling. The relationship with Jean Paul Gaultier ended..
And Ries still hadn’t told anyone but Vera that he was sick. Ries even tried to rekindle his old life in the Amsterdam night clubs. But he grew weaker. His liver was damaged. And, by the end of 1994, there was no hiding it anymore. His roommate brought Ries to the Prinsengracht Hospital. Ries’ condition shocked the staff.
As for Vera, her first visit with Ries in the hospital was very confrontational. What she saw was…
Vera
Fear. He was afraid for everything. Everything.
Jonathan
Ries still didn’t want his family to know he was in the hospital. Vera says that even when it was clear the end was coming, he told Vera not to tell his mother.
Do you think Ries knew he was approaching the end at any point?
Vera
Yeah. He knew himself.
Jonathan
And he never asked to see his mother?
Vera
No.
Jonathan
Ries was dying. Vera visited him almost every day. They’d talk and when they would part Ries would always say… 'Bye love.’ They were the last words Vera ever heard her brother say.
One morning the hospital called her. Ries had died in the night. He had been in the hospital for only three weeks.
Vera
Prinsengracht Ziekenhuis called me: “Your brother is dead.”
Jonathan
This was the start of the worst period in Vera’s life.
Not only had she just lost her brother, her dearest friend, but it fell to her to tell the family about Ries' death.
Vera
And then I must go to my mother.
My mother was in shock.
Jonathan
It quickly became clear to the family that Ries had died from AIDS and that Vera had been lying to them about it.
How exactly did she react?
Vera
Shock. Mad.
Jonathan
Who was she mad at?
Vera
At me.
Jonathan
What a terrible position to be in, Vera.
Vera
Yeah.
Jonathan
To keep your promise to him, and to in a sense, betray her.
Vera
Yeah. It was for them a terrible shock.
Jonathan
Ries’ funeral was a clash of two worlds. Small town laborers mingled with big city transvestites in short skirts and pink corsets. Dutch society figures attended.
It was an open casket wake and Ries had yellow roses in his hands. Vera took the roses and saved them.
Vera, in the meantime, had been ostracized by the family for keeping Ries’ secret.
Vera
The worse thing, I was so alone. Nobody… nobody… nobody helps me. I was so alone.
Jonathan
To deal with the loneliness and grief, Vera started drinking.
Vera
When it was Ries’ death, I began to drink. I drink a lot. I was five times a year, a week drunk.
And then I feel sorry and then I was three months sober, and then ping and something happens. Then I go to drink.
Jonathan
Why were you drinking?
Vera
To forget. The pain and also the missing of Ries.
Jonathan
Years pass.
Vera and her husband divorced. She had little contact with her family. Vera’s children grew up and moved out, making her isolation complete.
Vera says she self-medicated with alcohol to manage her alienation.
And then, Vera reached her absolute low point, in 2016.
Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum held a retrospective of photographs by Ed van der Elsken. They plastered the city with posters of that remarkable photo he took of Ries and his friend, on that day in the late 1980s.
On a visit to Amsterdam, Vera found herself confronted by her brother staring at her from every corner.
Vera
I am often in Amsterdam and everywhere I came, I saw pictures of Ries and his friend.
Jonathan
She wandered through the city and found herself in front of the former building of the Prinsengracht Hospital.
The place where Ries died.
Vera
I was so in shock, that I saw the picture of Ries and everything came back. I was complete mad.
When I go to sleep, I got mad of the nightmares.
Jonathan
Vera went on a bender...
Vera
Then I’d been fourteen days drunk.
Jonathan
Vera’s son was alarmed and got professional help. The psychiatrist made a quick diagnosis.
Vera
You have PTSD.
Jonathan
Post-traumatic stress disorder.
Vera
Yes. I want to go to a psychologist. And he helped me.
Jonathan
How?
Vera
He listen. He said to me, 'there’s nothing wrong with you. You must move on with your life. Give Ries a place.'
Jonathan
The therapy helped. Vera realized she needed to do something to exorcise two decades of unrelenting loss and grief.
To do this, she needed to take… a trip.
Not just any trip: THE trip. The one she and Ries always dreamed about. She needed to go… to India.
Why?
Vera
Forget him. Go on. And what I have to do was to go to India. Because we want to see that together. I thought to myself, ‘I’m now fit. I do it and I close it off’.
Jonathan
But why the trip to India?
Vera
To prove myself that I could it. I will make a new start.
Jonathan
You actually were sort of imagining who you were going to be when you came back.
Vera
And if I can go to India in my own, then I can go further with my life.. I must go on.
Jonathan
Vera realized she needed to do this alone and to do it right now, in her early 60s, while she was still fit enough.
She booked a trip to New Delhi and got on the plane.
Vera
I sit there and it was something in the air. You know, the plane goes woah, woah, woah. And I thought to myself ‘when I do this, in my own to India, then I can do anything when I go back’.
Jonathan
At last the moment arrived. The moment she and Ries had dreamed of: she was in India.
Vera
I go to bed at nine o’clock. I wake up at six o’clock. Every minute of the day.. I’ve seen everything. It was great.
Jonathan
What was the highlights?
Vera
The people. They all laughing, they waving, they are friendly. The beauty of the temples. The shops in Delhi. With all the lace, with all the beautiful fabrics. Everything is beautiful.
Jonathan
Vera was physically alone in India, but Ries was with her in spirit..
Not as a haunted, painful memory, but as a companion.
Vera
I thought to myself, I did it. After all those troubles.
It was a relief. I was proud that I can do that. I was proud of myself.
And then I thought… what have Ries thought of this? He loves it.
Jonathan
Was that the moment that you let go of Ries, there?
Vera
Yeah.
Jonathan
You have your life before India and you have your life after India.
Vera
Yeah. Yeah. India changed my life a lot.
Jonathan
Vera has been completely sober since the trip.
She’s taken up painting, mostly religious icons. She looks after her granddaughter and is taking Spanish lessons.
Vera’s even planning a new trip to Varanasi in India. Devout Hindu’s cremate their loved ones along the ghats that line the holy river Ganges.
And remember the roses Vera took from Ries’s funeral? She’s bringing them with her, to finally put Ries to rest in the land of his dreams.
Vera
And then I bring the roses in Varanasi.
Jonathan
You’re going to put the three roses in the Ganges?
Vera
Yeah. I still have them. Three yellow roses.
Jonathan
Vera van Rijn.
You’ve been listening to The Journey. An original podcast brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
For more background on this story and to see that wonderful photo of Ries, by Ed van der Elsken, go to podcast.klm.com.
If you liked this story, subscribe and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners find this podcast.
I’m Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
Vera van Rijn is originally from Volendam, a traditional fishing village not far from Amsterdam. She grew up in a large family, and Ries is her favourite sibling. At an early age he discovers that he is quite different from the other boys: he is attracted to men. In his hometown he feels completely misunderstood, but he has no problems adapting to Amsterdam. At the end of the 1980s, the Dutch capital was known as the gay capital of the world.
After moving there, Ries immerses himself in the lively gay scene while Vera keeps a close eye on him. When he is discovered by famous fashion designer, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Ries rises to the ranks of super model and rubs shoulders with celebrities such as Versace, Madonna and Freddie Mercury.
Portrait of Ries (left) and his good friend Marcel, shot by Ed van der Elsken. Van der Elsken is a Dutch photographer who made a name for himself photographing Dutch street life. This photo is used to promote a large retrospective exhibit in Amsterdam. Vera is suddenly faced with the image of her deceased brother on every street corner.
The death of Ries is major news in the Dutch press.
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Episodes 1 to 6 of The Journey are available via YouTube. The podcast can also be watched with subtitles in Dutch, German, French and Spanish for those who do not understand English.
Todd Leeloy
The trip to Argentina changed my life in no uncertain terms. I started in Mexico and I went to Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Argentina. I said I fell down in Latin America
Jonathan Groubert
This is Todd Leeloy. He’s 48, beefy, broad-shouldered, handsome and a little weathered.
His story starts back in December of 1995. He was on a business trip through Latin America, working for a Fishing Tackle Company.
Todd
I sold rods and reels in Asia, Africa and Latin America. That was my job. I was international business manager for American Tackle company.
By the time I reached Argentina, I was really tired. You know, we’d had about five weeks of travel and I don’t really sleep well in a strange bed and so by the time I reached Argentina, I was tired but restless right and so I would wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to sleep and so I go take a walk. A city at night is such a different place.
Argentina is particularly beautiful. Buenos Aires is particularly beautiful. The place has this sort of dream like quality or melancholy quality right and it’s kind of surreal and some way when my heart just opened to the beauty of the place.
We had worked all day. I was having dinner by myself in this outdoor café across from the cemetery and this girl walked by, she was young woman probably 19, 20 years old and she just had this really easy smile, this beautiful smile and long, dark brown hair and she didn’t notice me. She just walked straight past but I noticed her and there was something about her that was just really beautiful and the people in Argentina are beautiful in general but there was something about that young woman that really just struck me.
She is wearing like black jeans and a T-Shirt with a bag over her shoulder.
She just looked happy. She just had this big smile on her face and she was just walking.
Jonathan
And how close did you get to her?
Todd
Well, not far. I mean I was at this little outdoor café and she just passed on the street. So maybe 10, 15 feet.
Jonathan
And all in all for the entire time that you spotted her to the time that she was out of view, how much time passed?
Todd
30 seconds, 15 seconds. Yeah, she just walked right past.
Jonathan
That was it?
Todd
That was it.
Jonathan
Now a young man spotting a mysterious, beautiful young woman on a balmy night in a big city should have been momentary, ephemeral, and over. But that is not what happened. For Todd Leeloy, this moment, here in Buenos Aires, defined the rest of his life. This was the trip that changed everything.
Hi, I’m Jonathan Groubert and this is The Journey. The Journey is an original podcast from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel. So, after finishing his dinner Todd goes back to his hotel. The next day he needed to travel again. More meetings, more appointments. But the image of that girl passing by, didn’t let him go.
Todd
I couldn’t forget her like she would show up as I traveled around. You know, we went from one city to another city – she just showed up in my thoughts and my thoughts just kept coming back to her. She just seemed to fit in that place so well like to really embody sort of the beauty and the positive nature. The place was so beautiful and she just fit right into that and she had this optimistic, happy feeling to her.
Jonathan
You may have noticed Todd is a thinker. Maybe it’s more accurate to call him a poetic soul: a person with a great imagination and rich inner life. That singular moment Todd laid eyes on that young woman was more than magical. More than sexual. She became his muse. She opened his eyes to a new world and new beauty. Todd developed a passion for Argentina’s history and literature that became nearly… insatiable.
Todd
I didn’t really know much about Argentina but when I left, I started having dreams about her and so I just started to read. I went to the bookstore and I just bought books on Argentina.
I started reading about the history of the place and the art of the place and I read the writers and I read Neruda, I read Borges, I read a number of southern writers and writers from the Andean Cone and she just came into focus for me as this vibrant, beautiful, ripe womanhood in this place and it was sort of tinged by the darkness of the dictatorship and the ugliness that had happened before that.
Jonathan
In the 1970s and 1980s Argentina was run by brutal military juntas and fascist regimes in which an estimated 30.000 people were picked up, tortured and killed. They call them simply: the disappeared.
Meanwhile, its literary life still flourished. Borges and Chile’s Neruda are just two examples of the creative everymen, poets, scholars and intellectuals who fostered a mystical, magical form of writing that was both real and surreal. Some call it Magic Realism.
The more Todd read, the more obsessed he became with Argentina stories and history.
And the image of the Argentinian woman would not let him go. He even gave her a name, Miranda.
Todd
Three months after I got back from Argentina and I couldn’t stop every night. The dreams were in my head and the image of her wouldn’t leave me alone and I was working but I was reading books and my day-to-day job of trying to get numbers and contracts and you know computer systems and stuff working just wasn’t satisfying anymore. Something inside of me is calling me to write and so that’s why I left my job and started writing.
Jonathan
Devoting yourself to something to which you have no actual connection like that other than an extremely attractive young woman who you saw in Argentina who you saw in some kind of a fugue state.
Todd
Right.
Jonathan
Driving you to this. What the heck is going on here?
Todd
I don’t know. I had listened to my head for a lot in my life and I tried to do the practical thing, the right thing,. Worked hard, and all of a sudden, something spoke to me from inside of my head, inside of my mind that said, this path that you are on isn’t the right path for you. There is something else, whether it’s this story or another story, what your life is calling to you for or about is something different. It started with the dreams. It started with seeing her in dreams and reading about the place and, reading the literature and falling in love with the place through words. There was a beauty about it that numbers just don’t have. Putting together a good business plan and making the numbers work and driving profit are all good, practical, smart things but there was a beauty that I hadn’t really witnessed before.
Jonathan
Todd resigned his job and left a blossoming career behind.
This was a drastic decision because he was on the cusp of achieving the career he’d worked hard for his entire life.
Todd
I was born in Trinidad and when I was about 8, we moved to Singapore and then we moved to Portland, Oregon when I was about 12 and I’ve lived all over the States.
Jonathan
Todd was always a smart kid.
Despite moving around a lot, he breezed through school eventually getting an MBA from Arizona’s prestigious Thunderbird School of Global Management.
It was practical, when you come to the States, you know, as an immigrant, you want to work really hard to get ahead I’d always painted and I wrote stories but it really felt like the practical smart thing to do was go to business school. I was good at numbers, good at math, smart and so I thought okay, I will go do that. Immigrants in America generally want to make a better life for themselves. You are going to work really hard and you are going to have a piece of the American dream. Don’t listen to your heart, listen to your head and do practical things.
Jonathan
And “practical things” he did! Todd ended up at the fishing tackle company and traveled the world.
Todd
It was a good job with a steady income that delivered the kind of security and career path any immigrant would wish for. It was all, y’know, okay.
Jonathan
Until that one moment in Buenos Aires, that turned everything upside down.
Todd put all practical things like a job behind him and, for the first time in his life, he started to follow his heart.
Todd
I took a drive to the Harvard library through a thunderstorm. I drove 15 hours from Memphis to the Harvard library, I got the Buenos Aires Herald on microfilm which was the English language newspaper and I read 10 years of daily newspaper what was happening during that period of the dictatorship and the story just kind of started to shape in my head that sort of centered around her. And so I wrote a story, took about a year to write it, called The Disappeared.
Jonathan
In “The Disappeared” Miranda is part of a complex narrative in which a love story is entwined with Argentina’s history. And in keeping with that spirit of magic realism, Todd says that the story isn’t his. It was gifted to him.... by his muse.
Todd
There are things that happened to me in Argentina that opened my eyes to a world that I didn’t know. I didn’t see. My heart was open to something, you know, through The Girl in the Cemetery – there is no logical answer to, right. There is no reason why the story that I wrote The Disappeared should have been written by me. There is no reason why the images should become dream, should become character, should take on a form that they did, I don’t know if I have a psychic ability. I wouldn’t put it in those terms. I just know that I have very vivid, very lucid dreams and being in Argentina and seeing the girl made me start to see that more clearly. They call that traveller’s trance, sometimes. So maybe it’s some combination of being in that traveller’s trance opened my heart and my mind to something but I would never be the same like I would never feel comfortable with the life full of numbers.
Jonathan
And so, Todd started writing. After one year his manuscript was ready. And the result of this was...
Todd
Nothing unfortunately. I mean I wrote the story. I tried really hard to pull it altogether in a way that it is commercial. it was a novel and then it became a screenplay but nothing came of it. It was kind of incoherent. I wasn’t developed as a writer yet. You know I was a business guy. I’ve struggled with becoming a writer.
Jonathan
It was a painful confrontation with his shortcomings. But Todd was still determined to develop his story into something… big. He wanted to learn the craft of storytelling and leave ‘his life full of numbers’ behind. So, Todd moved from Memphis to Los Angeles to become a professional storyteller.
Todd
I came out west to go to film school. I tried to develop myself as a writer after years of being a business guy. I took directing classes at UCLA. I made short films. I became obsessed with the idea of telling the story.
And I worked it for years to try to make sense of all of the pieces because I had these flashes, these images in my dreams. It felt like a fool’s errand for years. I will be honest with you. And it’s full of doubt. Why am I writing this, why am I – am I going crazy? Why am I so tied to this?
Jonathan
While Todd’s stories may appear to him in his dreams, he found he had to deal with more down to earth-stuff, like making a living.
Todd
My thought was, while I am learning to become an artist, I am going to learn the industry from the inside I was hired on at Sony Pictures and so I went to work in their digital marketing group. The internet was brand new in 1997 timeframe, right and I was working in technology with major entertainment brands and trying to figure out how to connect people to media.
Jonathan
And so, Todd went from one job to the other in the creative and tech industry. He was a financial success. And while his work life was way more creative than, say, selling fishing tackle, it was still a far cry from his true ambition of becoming a writer and filmmaker.
Todd
I’ve struggled with becoming a writer while I have a professional life. And so it’s sort of the two parts of me that have been at odds. I know I have the story that I feel like I have a duty to get out in there all the stories I want to tell and at the same time, there are the practical parts of having a life and having a career in a modern American city.
Jonathan
And so, life went on. Time passed. Years become decades. Like so many people before him, his creative ambitions succumbed to the need to pay the bills. Meanwhile Todd got married, had kids… You know how things go. After Sony Pictures, he had a job at MySpace. And he worked for a company that matched people based on their interests. Something that later on evolved into the popular dating app Tinder. That’s a lot of years and a lot of distractions. I asked Todd how much he thought about Miranda during this period.
Todd
I would say almost daily. I don’t think she ever really left my mind. Practically, I have a file that’s always open and it’s been in the back of my head for years and years and years and years. It’s just you know what is she doing, what is she thinking, how is she – what did she become, why is she smiling? What is it about her character in her character that has this sense of joy? She was the thing that I came back to, the object, the idea, the image, the person I came back to time and time again to think about the life I wanted to lead and the story that I felt I needed to tell and those things felt very, very entangled.
Jonathan
Did you ever consider going back to Argentina to go look for Miranda?
Todd
I had a couple of opportunities to go back and I haven’t for a range of reasons but I always felt like I would find her. You know I traveled a lot in my career and I always felt like I was looking for her like every time I would be in a train station or a bus station or an airport, I felt that I would find her passing. In the back of my mind, I kept my eye out for her knowing that one day, I would cross paths with her again somehow, somewhere.
Jonathan
And then came one of those brutal moments that life just throws at you. Todd had an ugly divorce, as he put it. He felt down. Lonely. Utterly disconnected from the stories and the muse. It took him a long time to recover. After a while, he felt that he maybe could go on a date sometime. And so, he downloaded the dating-app his previous employer laid the foundation for: Tinder. If you don’t know Tinder, it’s the most popular dating app in the world. You know. Swipe left if you’re not interested. Swipe right if you are.
Todd
One of the first dozen people that I swiped right on was this woman named Cecilia from Argentina and there is something about her. She had this really easy smile and she traveled. Her photographs were from around the world, I really liked what she wrote on her profile. And she was a commercial producer. We went to dinner at a Peruvian restaurant and from the start, I just liked her. Sometimes you meet somebody and lightning and the thunderbolts and the fireworks go off. Cupid hits you in the heart with an arrow. It wasn’t like that. It was something much more meaningful, much more profound. I really - I really liked her.
Cecilia Salguero
My name is Cecilia Salguero. I am 42 years old. And I am from Buenos Aires Argentina and I am a producer. I do commercials.
Jonathan
Cecilia Salguero came to LA for work a few years ago. She was new in town and put herself on Tinder to meet new people. She met Todd. And she was pleasantly surprised he knew so much about Argentina.
Cecilia
So the first thing he told me is, I love Argentina. Here not everyone knows even where it is on a map. He told me he had been there many years ago. And he said yeah, I was there on a business trip. We had like great conversation. We spent probably like two hours and it was really interesting. To be honest, I was not completely into him but I really enjoyed the time we spent together.
Todd
One day, she came over to my house and I showed her my Buenos Aires Travel journal and on the trip, I’d walked around and taken a bunch of photographs of the city and she found the photographs and she looked at it and she was like, wait a minute, this is around the corner from my house. Where were you staying and I said, well, I am staying at a hotel right across from La Recoleta, the cemetery at the Etoile hotel and she looked at me like dumbfounded and she went to Google maps and she showed me where the hotel was and where her mom’s house was and it was literally five minute walk up the side of – along the edge of the cemetery - she showed me – she went on her phone and she showed me a picture of herself as a young girl. And I knew, it was her. I immediately knew in no uncertain terms, I recognized her. And then I told her the story of what happened that night and who I saw. She lived there at that time and she would be walking home that way at the end of the night. She was usually happy and I felt like this is the person who I saw 20 years ago.
Jonathan
And so… Todd gave her the story that he had been working on for the last 20 years, since that night in Buenos Aires.
Cecilia
I think like maybe two weeks into the relationship, he sent me a PDF and he said, listen, I want you to have this. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to but I want you to have this because I don’t want you to think that I changed this after meeting you.
Jonathan
And what is this?
Cecilia
And this was a PDF that had the synopsis of a story he has written and the description of the characters and there was Miranda and the description I really felt identified with the character. Not only physically but also in some details that he would describe her personality and that kind of thing, I was really impressed by that. I really recognized myself in the description. That is why I was shocked.
Jonathan
Well, what did you think when you realized that the story about Miranda may have actually been you?
Cecilia
Well, you know we will never know but there is really a true possibility that it’s true. I am a lot more rational than Todd. But is it a possibility? Yes it is a possibility, like a real possibility. It was just around the corner from my house. I would go there all the time. So yeah, you know it’s totally possible.
Todd
The first time I saw her, I felt, it felt like my heart was at rest. It felt like, my life had been looking for her and when I saw her, I felt for some strange reason at rest. She has this notebook and on the notebook, she has the cities like a number of cities on it, right. And so we did this exercise where I colored in the first letter of the city with a blue pen and she colored in the last letter of the city with a pink pen and we looked at what cities where we at together, and it’s something like 15 cities over the last 20 somewhat years. We’d both been in almost at the same time. We looked at dates in our passports and other things and it looked like we had like crossed paths sometimes within hours of each other in the same airports missing each other by hours, sometimes, and it was very, very beautiful and interesting. We have this strange overlapping crisscrossing experience.
Jonathan
So let’s just step back here for a moment and look at what just happened. Todd is convinced that he has met the very woman who determined the direction of his life for the last two decades. This is the muse he has been thinking about every day and every night since that evening in Buenos Aires. She inspired him to follow his heart, to become a writer. The ‘Miranda’, around whom he has written a novel, his life's work. The one he always looked for in a crowd of people. Well, where do you go from here? Did you become lovers?
Todd
Yes. For a while, for a time.
Jonathan
You were dating?
Todd
We dated for a while but you know, I’d just gone through a divorce and I wasn’t really ready for - to be you know…
Jonathan
But dude, this was Miranda. This was literally the girl of your dreams.
Todd
You know not everybody you fall in love with has to end up in your bed. Yes, she is literally the girl of my dreams. I loved her with every part of myself. I care about her. I just had been a little beat up. I wasn’t necessarily ready for another kind of long term relationship.
Jonathan
When you revealed the fact that you had been dreaming about her for the better part of two decades before you met in real life. How did she react to that?
Todd
She would look at me and say act accordingly. This magic has brought us together you know. We should be together, act accordingly. I think that’s her tick on it. I mean we do have this connection and we do have what can only be described as love for each other.
Jonathan
Don’t you want the Hollywood ending?
Todd
I think you could have a really meaningful deep friendship. I love her. I would do anything for her. I just don’t want to get married right now. Does that make sense? I think we are brought together in service of the story. I think we were brought together in the service of waking me up, right in terms of helping me be the person I can be. I could be, where I’d reach my potential. I think it can be more nuanced and complicated than boy meets girl and they ride into the sunset together. There is something deeply profound about the way I feel about her that I’ve never felt about anybody else.
Jonathan
How would you describe your relationship with him now?
Cecilia
Oh complicated, that’s definitely complicated. We will see. I don’t know. I mean, I think we want different things. So it’s very hard to – I don’t know. It’s very hard to say right now.
Jonathan
But what do you want?
Cecilia
I would really like to give like a romantic relationship a chance. I don’t think he wants that.
Jonathan
You are Cecilia, do you think he wants Miranda?
Cecilia
No, he is not that crazy, no.
Jonathan
Todd and Cecilia are very close. They don’t live together, but talk every day and see each other frequently. 20 years ago, Miranda lit Todd’s creativity. Life extinguished it. And Cecilia is the person who reignited it.
Todd
She showed me art. LA has got an amazing street art. There are lots of murals on lots of the side of buildings right. She made me really see it like to stop and take a look at it, take a photograph of it. We went to museums together and we spent time together and it just, I really felt like this was a different kind of relationship that was blossoming than any relationship that I had in the past.
Jonathan
Miranda was your muse. What is Cecilia?.
Todd
Cecilia feels like my catalyst. You know if a muse is something that’s kind of like in the air. Catalyst is something that makes something spark it changes the chemical property or something. I think meeting her in real life has changed my life in terms of what I want to do with the next part of my life. Meeting her changed my life again in that this thing that I had kind of hidden away you know in my life, my creativity and my desire to tell stories. You know it sort of got buried under product plans and fundraising and you know jobs and work and travel. I hadn’t really pulled that out in a long time. That it’s, it’s actually what my heart wants to do.
Jonathan
Cecilia and Todd are working together on several projects these days. Including one particular story that has occupied Todd’s mind for some time.
Todd
We have a draft of the script for The Disappeared that we are working with another writer on to sort of polish it and then we are working on a book based on ‘The Girl in the Cemetery’. The Girl in the Cemetery. I sleepwalk. For years, I have lived with episodes of flying and falling, hurtling east at subsonic speed to land somewhere in the future for a few hours or days before heading back in time on my return trip. I cannot sleep in a strange bed. So I often walk when my clock is off stumbling through deserted moonlit streets with a camera. When I do drift off dipping gently into that dark stillness, I drown disoriented by waves of ideas, images and sensation, a swirling tumble made of dream and memory. I wake wondering, has the past passed. It was called The Girl in the Cemetery. The story, the broader project is more around, you know, dreams and memory and sort of trying to make sense of these magical experiences I’ve had in my life. You know when I met Cecilia the first time– she made me take my life in a completely different direction right when I saw her there. Now that I met her again, together I think we are moving in a different direction. We are both travelers, gypsies by trade. We have been searching for each other through space and time missing each other, yet knowing in the back of our minds that we would one day meet again for the first time. What now? The dreams, Miranda remains.
Jonathan
Todd Leeloy. If you want to read one of Todd’s stories, we got it, go to our website: podcast.klm.com. You’ve been listening to The Journey. An original podcast brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. To hear more stories about the trip that changed everything, go to podcast.klm.com. And why not review us on iTunes. It helps other listeners find this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I’m Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
After a long day of work, Todd Leeloy is sitting on a terrace in Buenos Aires enjoying his evening meal. Todd is in his early twenties and is working for a large American company that sells fishing rods and tackle. He is in charge of the company’s Latin American business activities which includes Argentina. It will be the trip that will change his life forever.
From the terrace he sees a young woman walking by. It is an image that he can’t shake. That is the moment she became his muse and will never leave his thoughts. And she motivated him to make several radical decisions.
During his time in Buenos Aires Todd is captivated by the city’s beauty and architecture. In the following days, weeks and months, these images inspired him to create countless sketches. He has been drawing since he was a child.
From his apartment Todd looks out over La Recoleta Cemetery. This place would later take on a magical meaning. One of his stories is entitled “Girl in the Cemetery”, in reference to this location.
Todd and Cecilia do an exercise with a notebook that lists the names of cities. He colours the last letter of each city he has visited blue, while she colours the first letter pink. They discover they have often been in the same place, at almost the same time.
The two don’t live together but have a very close friendship. They are working together on several film and story projects. They see or talk to each other almost every day.
This is one of the stories that Todd wrote, inspired by his stay in Buenos Aires and seeing his muse “Miranda”.
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Episodes 1 to 6 of The Journey are available via YouTube. The podcast can also be watched with subtitles in Dutch, German, French and Spanish for those who do not understand English.
Dina Kaplan
It was a lovely, busy, workday afternoon in Manhattan and Dina Kaplan, top executive and face of the New York start-up scene, was getting ready to… cross the street!
So it would be maybe a 18-second walk and I remember leaning against a utility pole praying that the light would not turn green because I didn’t think I could make it to the other side without having a panic attack and I remember in that moment telling myself, I have to get out of here. I just have to get out of here. I need to live the exact opposite life in the exact opposite way and I need to take action immediately.
Jonathan Groubert
And Dina took action immediately!
This set her life on a journey - the trip that changed everything.
Hi, I’m Jonathan Groubert and this is the Journey. The Journey is an original podcast from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel.
Dina Kaplan’s story begins in the early 2000s. New York City. Back then Dina was the COO, a top executive, in a company she co-founded.
...an internet start-up called BlipTV.
BlipTV had made Dina the “it girl” of New York’s start-up scene.
Dina
I got to do some really cool things. I got to spend a lot of time with Warren Buffet because I got named one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Entrepreneurs, Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs. So, there is only 10 a year that are named.
I mean I just met everyone because I also started hosting these events called Founders Club. I wanted to bring together the New York community to try to take on Silicon Valley a bit because there was no community and no network in New York.
Jonathan
So she launched Founders Club.
It’s easy to see how Dina could be the center of a scene.
To look at her now, more than a decade later, she’s super fit, impeccably dressed and I’m looking for the right word here: engaged in a way that is both flirty and forceful.
Dina and her club attracted a who’s who of New York types.
Dina
Jimmy Fallon would come, a bunch of other celebrities. We had the mayor co-hosted one with us, Rupert Murdoch came. So it became a big thing.
Jonathan
And for a number of years, Dina was herself a big thing.
You just heard her say that Fortune Magazine called her one of the, and this is a quote from the magazine, “Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs” as well as “Fast Company’s Most Influential Woman of Web 2.0.”
I could read you a whole list of accolades and magazine covers and articles written about her but I think you get the point.
Dina got to this position through grit, ability and determination.
So you’d think she would probably be feeling pretty good about herself.
Right? RIGHT?
So from the outside, you were the very definition of the young female internet entrepreneur?
Dina
It’s fair to say 100% I was held up as a role model for founders and especially for women founders.
Jonathan
And yet, how did you really feel in the middle of all of this?
Dina
I mean the irony of this is that I was completely playing a role myself, 100%.
Jonathan
What do you mean?
Dina
It was all an act because on the inside, I was a mess. I was an absolute disaster.
Jonathan
An absolute disaster.
A few things were going on. First of all..
Dina wasn’t just a workaholic. She had a very acute case of imposter syndrome: the idea that your success is all a big mistake and, at any moment, everyone will realize it’s a mistake, and you’ll be publicly humiliated...
Dina
I think I wondered if I deserved to be there. So I had a lot of people looking at me and I just wondered, are they thinking that I don’t deserve to be where I am and so let me overcompensate for that by just working non-freaking stop.
So one of the big venture capitalists that had put significant amount of money in the company, knocked on my office door one day and said, hey how is it going. And he said, well, I wanted to talk to you. Of course, everyone in the company thinks you are doing an amazing job. Your work, your quality is above rebuke but I am worried about somebody meeting you at a conference and thinking that just based on your appearance that you don’t look like what a COO of a company of this size and stature should look like. So what I would like from now on is for you to drop your COO title, keep doing your job exactly as you’ve done it before but just never use that title again. I wanted to punch him, I wanted to scream, I wanted to slam either his head or mine into the wall. I was so angry. I hung my hat on that title.
Jonathan
What did you do?
Dina
I just looked up at him and I said, okay.
Jonathan
Why? Why did you just say okay?
Dina
Because I didn’t want to cause any problems. It was that old pleasing instinct. Just wanted everyone to like me, just wanted to be pleasing. I mean the company couldn’t have existed without me at that time because I was holding all the operations together and yet, I was still so worried about getting fired.
Patrick McKenna
My name is Patrick McKenna. I had the good fortune of traveling all over the world and meeting people from so many different backgrounds and have traveled extensively with Dina actually.
Jonathan
Patrick McKenna is an entrepreneur himself.
I Skyped him at his home in California and asked him how he remembers Dina from this period. He says she was...
Patrick
Quite a mess.
She was very – very distracted running a million miles an hour, trying to manage every relationship inside and out trying to have total control of everything around her.
I would go to New York in best part of New York and she was very famous for having ten things to do a night. There is an art event that starts at 6 and then we are going to go to this Founder Talk at 6:45 and we are going to stop by and say hi to some people at the Soho House for a few minutes and before you knew it it was midnight and we have gone to six places and said hi to 30 people but that was a normal Tuesday night. It’s almost a sense of not being good at saying no.
Jonathan
And why do you think she wouldn’t say no?
Patrick
This is how you build kind of your ego, your credibility, your sense of self is by going through all of these different places you are wanted, you are needed particularly in a place like New York where you have this never ending loop of network, right. People go to this, go to this, go to this, go to this and they go to a million things and you want to stay in that cycle of external affirmation.
Jonathan
And Dina’s problems were getting worse. Much worse.
Dina
I lost control of my personal life I mean even to the point that I pushed away my best friend and my family and all I could think about was that $10 to $20 million that every founder wants to have to never work again. I was having panic attacks and I wasn’t telling anyone. I didn’t tell my best friend, I didn’t tell my co-founder, my doctor, my parents. I just really didn’t even admit it to myself but at the height of one, I don’t know if you’ve ever had one but you feel faint, you feel like you are about to pass out and it’s like tingles are shooting through your entire body and you are about 70% convinced that you are going to fall on the floor within the next 10 to 20 seconds. It’s terrifying and I was having them constantly.
Jonathan
It makes you wonder, how did we get here? How did this super capable, super smart woman end up such a mess?
Dina grew up in a pretty well-to-do family, mostly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
And it was mostly a happy childhood, but if you ask her about her worst moment growing up, the event that really shaped her in many different ways, she’d tell you about her time at a fancy rich kid summer camp...
You know that one kid who, for whatever reason just can’t fit in and ends up the butt of everyone’s jokes?
Well, that was Dina...
Dina
I was the absolute reject of the entire camp. I mean the kids would steal my clothes when I was showering and the shower tent was a real walk from where our bunk was and so they wanted to make me walk naked which when you are you know, 8, 9, 10 years old is devastating for a young girl. They were threatening to beat me up.
Jonathan
And there was one crushing blow.
Dina
...my one friend this summer was my little stuff Snoopy doll who I absolutely loved and he had like cute big Snoopy nose. So I went on a camping trip for a couple of nights hoping that people would be nice to me because we all wanted to survive the camping on the mountain. So I escaped and when I came back, Snoopy was hanging from the rafters in a noose and it was so sad.
Jonathan
Dina told her parents what was going on, but her dad, a tough guy from the South Bronx, was no real help.
So Dina decided to help herself...
Dina
And at the end of that summer, I remember telling myself that I made a vow to myself that I would never be the reject again, that I would hone my social skills so finely that I would be popular for the rest of my life.
So I watched the popular kids. You could see that there were kids that other kids wanted to be around and I watched how they would act. I would watch their facial expressions, how much they spoke, what they would say, whether they would use colloquialisms and expressions or speak plainly. And I watched their behavior and their gestures and I imitated that and then I just trained myself on a very deep level to never say what I was actually thinking but actually just to try to be pleasing to everyone around me and just honed in me this instinct to say whatever I thought the person around me wanted to hear rather than what was actually on my mind.
Jonathan
And it worked!
Dina a became popular and successful.
In college she even took time to work for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, which led to a stint working at the Clinton White House as her first job after college...
Dina
I mean it was just the coolest thing in the world, right. At the time, I mean it was these young, fresh guys, right. Al Gore, Bill Clinton, it was such a young, vibrant presidency. We took over DC. We took over the restaurants and the clubs and this and that and so to be in that kind of inner circle of that felt like an incredible privilege.
Jonathan
Dina says the White House was great, but her dream job came at MTV..
She worked the Rock the Vote campaign that inspired young people to get involved in politics.
Dina covered the presidential campaign, traveled throughout the US and met many rockstars.
Dina was on fire. She hung out with the coolest people in the country.
After MTV, came an on air gig as a TV reporter.
And then came the call from an old boyfriend who had an idea for start-up. She signed on and, together, they created BlipTV.
If you’re a gamer, you’re probably familiar with BlipTV’s content.
They host shows made just for the Internet, distribute it, run the ads and split the profits with the show producers.
This was cutting edge stuff at the time and venture capitalists were standing in line to invest..
BlipTV’s success brought Dina a ton of public re cognition and a deep private hell.
Dina
I can’t walk down a street because I might have a panic attack crossing an intersection and my fear was that a cab would roll over my body and I wouldn’t even look good for the funeral. So I did my hair great every day. I did my makeup perfectly. I wore designer clothes and great shoes every single day and I couldn’t walk. So I just took cabs, literally everywhere I went, if I were ever by myself, everywhere, for two years.
Jonathan
What was the absolute low point?
Dina
I mean the low point I remember so clearly I mean it’s such an image in my mind. Somehow I don’t remember why I got dropped off across the street from my office, rather than at my office. So it would be maybe a 18-second walk and I remember leaning against a utility pole praying that the light would not turn green because I didn’t think I can make it to the other side without having a panic attack and I remember in that moment telling myself, I have to get out of here. I just have to get out of here. I need to live the exact opposite life in the exact opposite way and I need to take action immediately.
Jonathan
So Dina Kaplan, acknowledged entrepreneur, face of the New York start-up scene, and center of a founders movement, simply up and quit.
She didn’t just quit her job.... She quit New York.
Dina
So one day I just had to book a flight to Bali and fly six days later.
Jonathan
Did you know what you were looking for?
Dina
I had no idea. I knew I wanted to be able to walk again. I wanted to be able to cross the street. I didn’t know anything else.
Jonathan
So it’s a little nuts, you can’t cross the street but you can book a flight to Bali?
Dina
I know and in fact, I do remember I am hanging on the side of buildings thinking you know like, what am I doing? Like now, I am in a place where I am less supported. My community is not here like in New York but I just knew to get healthy, I just needed to live the opposite life.
Jonathan
Her “opposite life” on the road, wasn’t all that different from her life back in New York. Networking, fretting and planning things down to the minute.
Dina
I am talking to people constantly everywhere I am. In Sri Lanka, I am asking people where they’d come from and to, in Cambodia, Bhutan, Myanmar and you end up with this massive list, you know the former COO in me kept everything on Evernote country by country and I just had this endless list of places to go.
Jonathan
It was a frantic, flurry of a world sampler, that was full of the kind of networking and speed that was so very Dina.
Still, it was time away from the pressures of her life in New York.
After three and a half months, at her hotel’s rooftop pool in Koh Samui, Thailand, she became aware that just maybe something very small had changed.
Dina
It was warm and it was beautiful of course cause it’s Thailand and I didn’t think much of it. So I took off my bathing suit cover up and I had my bathing suit on and I am going swimming and I am swimming at sunset and all of a sudden – and I’m gonna get emotional telling this story. I am crying because I feel – I feel safe. I feel safe not only walking, but I feel safe swimming in a pool by myself and I was so proud of myself that I’d overcome that fear of walking at that point. So strongly that I felt comfortable swimming alone at sunset.
Jonathan
This small success encouraged Dina to face her fears head on.
Dina
Well, one of the biggest fears that I had for my whole life was scuba diving. As a teenager with my parents, I’d gone on a scuba diving trip in the Bahamas and a man that we knew we’d flown over with died on my very first scuba dive ever. It was horrifying. It was horrific. So I went to the place that I’d heard was the best, Scuba Junction, and I said, hi, my name is Dina. Someone died on my first scuba diving trip ever and I have panic attacks and I have trouble breathing above ground but I’d like to go for a dive tomorrow. And they just looked at me and said, can you pay? And I said, yeah I can pay.
So I went back. I was very lucky because I got a) A very good looking instructor and b) No one else signed up. So I asked my good looking instructor if he could hold my hand as we went under the water and he said, yes.And when we came up, I had changed. I came up a different person. I had conquered one of the biggest fears in my life, this was one of the steps of the trip that helped me gain my confidence to live my life as a normal human being.
Jonathan
Patrick, who you heard from earlier, had used meditation as a way to conquer his own fears and anxieties. He’d been advising Dina to try it all along.
He and Dina met on her travels in Myanmar. And, frankly, Dina may say she was getting better, but Patrick, he was was less convinced...
Patrick
This was intense. So we were in Myanmar. We were standing on the side of a road and we need to cross the road. It’s like a five lanes, one of these big roads and there is a crosswalk. The cars aren’t coming and I say, let’s go Dina, let’s run across the street like it’s a clear opening and she starts to take two steps and completely freezes. She is just locked in, she can’t move. She is completely paralyzed and I run across the street and I am like, where are you? She is like stuck. Then obviously I run back over and I grab her step back onto the sidewalk and she is like trembling, trembling. And this is where we really started to talk about some of her fear like this is the very specific fear that she had. She had these anxiety attacks that she was really good at hiding but in this case, I was right there with her. It’s just maybe it’s more of a metaphor for bigger things but she just at this moment couldn’t literally cross the street. This is when we really started talking about going inside and dealing with your fear.
My recommendation was to find a teacher, to find a Vipassana retreat, to really give a serious effort to training in mindfulness meditation.
Jonathan
Vipassana is a silent form of meditation, often practiced in a retreat for 10 days or more.
Dina booked a flight to India the next day... with no plans whatsoever.
Dina
I land in India and I am terrified that people get sick and then that it is crowded and it’s hot and I am a woman traveling alone. So I land and there is this cute guy walking off the plane just behind me and he says, so, what are your plans for India and I just looked at him and said, I have no plans and I am scared to be here. And he said, oh, I am going on a 10-day silent retreat. Do you want to come? And so, as serendipity happens, Patrick’s voice which was now less than 24 hours old in my mind saying what he had told me the day before came to me and I just looked at this guy and I said, yes I am in. And he said, what! No, I mean I am really going and I said, no, I – I’m in. I’ll go with you. And I go and it changed my life.
So I walk in and we have to take vows. No lying, no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct even with yourself and you have to sign your name too alright whatever, it’s 10 days. That’s fine. Little do I know that there is no soap and no toilet paper and it’s going to be 120 degrees the entire time. No air conditioning, hotter inside than outside. It was India to the most extreme degree that you could possibly imagine. The conditions were insane.
Jonathan
And then what happened?
Dina
And beginning on day 4, it was like I saw this light at the end of a tunnel which was peacefulness. The first three days, you just want to kill somebody or yourself. I mean it’s really, really hard, the voices in your head are so loud and you can’t escape yourself. There was no one to be charming too. There was no one to work it with. There was no one to distract myself from myself with.
Beginning on day 4, your mind is like glass. There is absolutely no thought. So you could look up at a tree and look at that tree for three hours perfectly happy because there is nothing in your head telling you that you should be doing anything differently at that moment. Beginning on day 5, you start doing open heart surgery on your brain, essentially your personality.
And what I saw was this memory like the Pansy from Harry Potter like that Dumbledore has. It was this memory of me as a little kid at summer camp vowing to be popular for the rest of my life and I realized for the first time as an adult in my whole life that I’d optimized my entire life to just try to be pleasing to everyone at the cost of ever being authentic or saying what was on my mind.
And in that moment, I decided that that piece of the jigsaw puzzle of my personality was no longer serving me and I decided to literally take it out and put in this new piece that was authenticity and at the moment that that happened, it was like this flash of lightning shot up my foot, exploded through my legs, went through my torso and then just had this firework explosion above my head and this voice came to me that said, you are going to come out of this retreat a better person.
And everyone should have the chance to experience this but it doesn’t need to be this hard. So when you come out of this retreat, you will start a company to bring meditation to the mainstream. You will make it beautiful and light. There will be soap and toilet paper and you will call it The Path.
Jonathan
Dina’s 10 days of silence really did change everything.
She felt free to break her fixed patterns of fear. She no longer felt like an imposter and, most importantly, she felt like if she could do it, others could do it too...
She kept on traveling and then finally booked one final flight: back to New York.
Dina
“You guys ready for a little moment before the rest of the day? Let’s meditate”.
Jonathan
And this is Dina in 2016. She actually created a center for mediation called The Path in New York. There is soap and toilet paper.
And while everyone is welcome, The Path’s website shows a group thirty-somethings, sitting lotus position, in suits and business attire.
This is Dina leading a group mediation at a tech conference.
Dina
“At The Path we say there are hundreds if not thousands of types of meditation in the world, we break them down into 4 categories and we teach all 4. Mindfulness, mantra, energizing and then meditation to help you accomplish a goal.”
Jonathan
Patrick says that while most people SAY they were transformed by a 10 day mindfulness retreat, Dina actually became a very different person..
Patrick
When she said, I am going to create something around this experience, this wasn’t about pleasing anybody and that’s a big fundamental change. The need for external validation on what she was going to do in any given day or week or night had dissipated significantly.
Jonathan
Well, when you would go to visit her in New York for example and you guys would go for a night out, how was that different from your previous visits?
Patrick
So different. I was coming to New York and she says, “I am going to organize a dinner for you.” Bring a bunch of great people around the table and we are going to have a dinner and we went to a place in the West Village, beautiful little boutique restaurant that doesn’t have a bunch of cache, had a table for 8 and we had a 2.5 hour dinner and every single person at the table was engaged and talking and we had a depth of conversation. This was literally the first time after I visited her after she came back from this trip. This was how we kind of inaugurated our reconnection. So that’s creating a very different container for friendship.
Jonathan
Dina can now cross the street unencumbered by anxiety. But, if you’d look at Dina, even now she’s not exactly like a Buddhist monk, full of calm gravitas.
She’s still a bundle of energy, ambition and you’ve probably noticed her tendency to use 20 words when 10 will do.
So I asked her, “Dina, after all you’ve gone through to get where you are, are you happy?”
Dina
Umm you do feel fulfilled. I know my next mission. You’re right, I am ambitious. I’m ambitious and I know that I need to write a book. So that’s the next step.
Jonathan
Are you happy?
Dina
I am happy. I think literally my skin looks better because I meditate. I have a – I get my validation much more firm within. So I am aware of my triggers now. I still have this thing where I hate to be rejected and it takes me back to that little kid in summer camp but we all have moments where things happen and now my recovery time is less than half an hour. So maybe I will get upset. We all have things that we will get upset about but I have a huge resilience. So yes.
Patrick
I think she’s never been happier. I think she is truly, truly satisfied. I think that she is feeling equanimous. I think that she is feeling satisfied and that she feels like she is doing the right things and so my bottom line answer is, yeah, I think she is happy.
Dina
The trip was the best thing I’ve ever done. It was the most non-obvious thing that a super ambitious girl has ever done but it changed me. A friend of mine said, you take the fish out of the water,ou learn a lot about the fish.. I learned so much about myself but putting myself in all sorts of difficult and uncomfortable situations and it is by far the best thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.
Jonathan
Dina Kaplan.
If you want to know more about Dina, or The Path check out our website: podcast.klm.com.
You’ve been listening to The Journey. An original podcast brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
To hear more stories about the trip that changed everything, go to podcast.klm.com.
And why not review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners find this show.
Thank you so much for listening. I’m Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
Dina Kaplan has led a life that, on the outside, appears to be one big success. Her school career was outstanding, she worked in the White House under Bill Clinton, and she has been a TV reporter and the head of a successful tech start-up in New York. For years, she was the face of the New York start-up scene. But it all came to a crashing halt one day and she felt like a ‘huge mess’ inside. This forced her to completely change her way of life and… go on a journey.
While COO of the start-up Blip.tv, Dina found herself in the centre of attention and was the face of the New York start-up scene. Here she meets investor Warren Buffett during an event organised by the magazine Fortune: The Most Powerful Women.
Learn more about The Path: https://www.thepath.com/
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Episodes 1 to 6 of The Journey are available via YouTube. The podcast can also be watched with subtitles in Dutch, German, French and Spanish for those who do not understand English.
Jonathan Groubert
Somewhere, deep in the interior of Kenya, in the dusty village of Ugunja, bus brakes squeal to a halt. A tall and lanky young man steps out and squints in the sunlight. His name is Samba.
Samba Schutte
I get dropped off the bus and I am in the middle of nowhere. There is a few people hanging around there and they are all staring at me like I am really strange. I am there with my suitcase. The guy who was supposed to pick me up is not there. And I did not feel welcomed like everyone is staring at me like who is this outsider coming into the village and so we are walking. He takes me to where I am going to stay and we are walking through these dirt roads and all these trees and it’s just empty and isolated and there is no electricity. There is no water and it’s just you know nature. And he shows me where I am going to stay and I am in this hut. And I am like, oh my god, this is what I wanted.
Jonathan Groubert
These are the first seconds of a journey that would determine the rest of Samba’s life.
The trip that changed everything!
Hi, I’m Jonathan Groubert and this is the Journey.
The Journey is an original podcast from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel.
To find out how today’s guest, Samba Schutte, ended up, delighted to be in a primitive hut in the middle of nowhere Kenya, means going a few years back to another African country: Ethiopia.
This is where Samba grew up. And, let's make this even more complicated, he is not Ethiopian.
Samba
I mean I hope you have Google maps on you because it is really like you need to know your geography. My father is from Holland. And my mother is from Mauritania which not many people know but it’s a country in West Africa under Morocco. It’s pretty huge. It’s basically the Sahara desert, they got me, I was born in Mauritania and when I was two, we all moved to Ethiopia which is on the other side of Africa and that is where I grew up till I was 18
Jonathan
Samba’s father was an international aid worker who met Samba’s mother in Mauritania. Famine in the horn of Africa meant a move to Ethiopia and international schools for Samba.
Samba
So it’s really weird at home because we speak French with my mom because in Mauritania, they speak French and we speak English with my dad and I speak English with my brothers and sisters. But all around us, we had to learn Ethiopian.
Jonathan
And because of his father, he also needed to learn Dutch.
Samba
We had a Dutch embassy where they had the Dutch school and every Saturday, a kid’s dream come true, we had to go to Dutch school. So you go to school from Monday to Friday English, French and then on Saturday morning, you have to go to a school to learn Dutch which was a nightmare and I did not like it. And so after the age of 12, I stopped learning Dutch.
Jonathan
His background, his lanky height and mixed race looks made him something of an outsider, not only at school but everywhere really.
Samba
Kids did not know what to make of me. You know I am half black and half white and I was growing up in Ethiopia and so I didn’t belong in the group of Africans but I also didn’t belong in the group of Europeans and so I was bullied because I was different and so what I did was, I developed jokes to make fun of my bully and – I made fun of him in front of the classroom and everyone started laughing and then he stopped bullying me the next day. So it was like humor was my boxing gloves.
Jonathan
Boxing gloves whose jabs and uppercuts were sharpened by the odd VHS tape of American comedians that would make their way from his family in Holland to Samba’s TV. He watched them over and over.
Samba
I did not know what standup comedy was. I just knew that there was something out there where you could stand on a stage and tell stories and make people laugh and feel good and I really was attracted to that.
Jonathan
When Samba turned 18, he decided to leave Africa for college. He had a Dutch passport and family roots, so it was kind of a natural choice to move to the Netherlands. But having a Dutch passport doesn’t actually mean you ARE Dutch, especially if you don’t speak the language.
Samba
I could not even go to like the supermarket and try to speak Dutch because they were so frustrated with how bad it was that they just end up speaking English with me. But I knew I had to learn it if I wanted to get a career in Holland and so I started to push myself to learn the language and what was really strange was this theme again of being the outsider. I started studying theater. Basically I was learning how to direct, write and act and so I studied at the School of Arts in Utrecht. I knew I wanted to be a storyteller and so one day, there was an open stage show and anybody could go on stage and do something like perform and so you know what I said, I am going to do a monologue as an actor and so I wrote this funny monologue. And I went on stage and all they had was a microphone and I grabbed the microphone and I started doing my funny monologue and people are laughing and laughing and laughing and after this monologue, someone walks up to me and he says, how long have you been doing standup comedy? I said, what is standup comedy? You know. He is like, this is what you were doing on stage and I was like, oh, like is that standup comedy? He's like, yes! And so I was like “Oh my God, I just did my first standup comedy show!”
Jonathan
And like most aspirational standup comedians, in 2005 Samba decided to spend his college internship teaching improv... in Kenya?
Samba
They tell you to go on exchange to a country for three months and I really had a strong desire to go to Africa to really get in touch again with my African roots because I was - in Ethiopia, I was not considered African. But I really wanted to go to Africa to experience being an African in Africa and so I found this group in Kenya who does theater with different communities and they basically use theater as a way of dealing with the issues in their societies. They told me you have to go to this village called Ugunja where you are going to work with different kinds of groups I was like, perfect. This is the exact experience I wanted to experience Africa and Ugunja sounded really African and so I was like, let’s do it!
Jonathan
So he did it. Samba traveled to what he called the real Africa, truly far from everything familiar. He was ostensibly there to give theatre workshops, but he could have done that anywhere really. Samba, the eternal outsider - chose Kenya to find a sense of belonging...of home. As it turned out, this was the trip that would shape the rest of his life.
Samba
So I take the 7 bus ride to this very remote village and I get dropped off the bus and I am in the middle of nowhere. There is a few people hanging around and they are all staring at me like I am really strange. I'm there with my suitcase. The guy who was supposed to pick me up is not there. And I did not feel welcomed like everyone is staring at me like who is this outsider coming into the village and so we are walking. He finally shows up and he takes me to where I am going to stay and we are walking through these dirt roads and all these trees and it’s just empty and isolated and there is no electricity. There is no water and it’s just nature. And he shows me where I am going to stay and I am in this hut. And I am like, oh my god, this is what I wanted. It’s basically just a bed in a small hut. The toilet is about 100 meters away and I go to check out the toilet. It’s a hole in the ground with cockroaches coming out of it and then there is a little shower where you use basically seven cups of water, cold water to shower. That’s all you get, seven cups of water. And I was like this is it. This is what I wanted.
Jonathan
Samba says he wanted the Africa where there were no tourists, no internet and no comedy tapes. He wanted to be just an African amongst Africans. Well, you know what they say, “Be careful what you wish for...”
Samba
The first day was terrifying. Everything in me wanted to leave because I never grew up with that even though I grew up in Ethiopia because my dad is Dutch, we still had a better life than a lot of my friends but there was something inside me that African side of me that really wanted to experience being in this in having this to know what it is, to understand my roots better and so as terrifying as it was with the lack of everything, I still felt this would enrich me somehow. They had their way of life. And I was entering this way of life for the first time as an outsider but I wanted to be a part of it And yes, there was poverty, absolutely and in this village, one in three people were infected with HIV and in my first night sleeping there at 4 in the morning, I heard death wails you know people chanting at night and everything. So yeah, the first night was terrifying but I was like, you know what, I can survive here. I can make it here for three months because this is a part of me too.
Jonathan
Samba got his wish. He got a simple hut to live, sweat and contemplate in. He got sick from the food. He got malaria. And he got a roomful of fellow outsiders: underage criminals and people who were HIV positive. They were all lumped in together, to make....something...
Samba
I worked with juveniles, you know people who were being punished for a crime, little kids and I did not know what crime exactly until I finished working with them and then people told me by the way that guy you are sitting next to, he murdered his parents. You know that kind of crime, but for me, it was about the connection I was having with these people. I did not see him as a murderer. I did not see that person as having HIV. I did not see this person as being a refugee. I was connecting with human beings who were telling me their story, who were using theater and art as a way of connecting with one another and that made it all the worthwhile.
Jonathan
When rehearsals were done, this group of outsiders, shunned by their society, had created a play which they performed in the center of the village.
Samba
They start hitting pots and pans and dancing and making music and then people are attracted to the noise so they come check it out and slowly start attracting the crowd around you and then you do your performance.
Jonathan
Samba would leave work at the end of the day and retire to his simple hut. He says he was inspired by these people, and how, despite their extraordinary differences, they made a real connection, with each other and their village, through theatre. And then... then he’d think about himself.
Samba
And so I slowly started to realize what do I have to offer. I have this weird advantage of being from both worlds, of being the outsider and the insider. My father is European and my mother is African. So I have the European coming into Africa and I have the African coming into Europe. My father is white, my mother is black. So I have the white man coming to Africa and I have the black man coming to Europe. I have my father who is a Christian and my mother who is a Muslim and I was raised with those two religions and they were able to live together and so I was like, I have all these different cultural differences but still I am united with them inside me and so I can be the ambassador for all these different cultures to exist together in peace. It’s possible. Look at me, I am fine. My parents are fine and so if I can use theater or something like comedy to connect all these people and to show how similar we are despite how different we think we are, that’s the key to really pursuing my dream and what I want to do. And so if anything, that village experience as traumatizing as some people may think it was, it was so profound because that’s where I realized my role in what my role could be for being comedian, being a storyteller.
Jonathan
Samba was inspired by his insight. His fragmented identity was no longer a weakness, but a strength.
Samba
I think it was one of my last nights and so you know, there is no electricity. So as soon as the sun sets, everything is pitch black and I remember just sitting outside my hut and there are little fireflies out there by the trees and then there is billions of stars in the night sky and there is sounds of nature popping up at night and something in me told me, you know just write something. It was that night that I was like I need to create a plan. I need to go back to Holland with a mission so I don’t forget what I achieved here in these three months. Basically in that hut is where I realized what I have to offer as a performer. So, I developed my identity as a comedian in that hut. In a dark night with the mosquitoes biting my feet, writing this plan by candlelight in my diary.
Jonathan
And Samba was serious about this plan. Really serious.
Samba
I made a plan for the next five years of what I wanted to achieve in my life and how I would achieve it and the last thing after those 5 years was move to LA. I am going to go back to Holland after Kenya. I am going to do my standup comedy in Dutch. I am going to participate in a competition that will launch my career as a comedian with this new message. I will build on that and eventually the end goal will be to move to America to Los Angeles to continue giving this message
Jonathan
A few days later, Samba returned to Holland. The speed of life in the west was an overwhelming culture shock.
Samba
Everything was moving so fast in Holland and there was internet that worked very fast in Holland and there was distractions on mobile phones and everything but I was like, I am not going to forget, I am not going to forget. So I printed out my 5-year plan. And so I started to do standup comedy in Dutch with my new identity. I used to just do standup in my regular clothes but when I came back to Holland after Kenya, I started doing standup comedy wearing an African shirt and jeans to symbolize me coming from two worlds and barefoot because I wanted to remember the feeling of walking barefoot around in that village.
Jonathan
He wrote a one man show about his life and struggles. It went so well, he entered the country’s biggest showcase, the Leids Cabaret Festival. If you win that, you can basically count on bookings in the whole country.
Samba
The show was called ‘Kun Min Woni An’ which is Mauritanian for ‘I am who you are’. And that was the theme of the show. I wanted to do a show about coming from two worlds and how my whole life that made me feel like an outsider but then by the end of the show, I realized that it’s a gift that actually brings people together and so I wrote the show, I practiced it. And when I was accepted to participate in the Leids Cabaret Festival, I remember on the final night, I was sitting on the stage and I remember that moment in the hut where I had visualized this moment – that I am about to launch my career in Holland as a known comedian. This is the moment where everything happens. I did not expect to win but the results came in and 90% of the audience had voted for me for the Audience Favorite Prize and then the jury had no criticism on my show which was the first time that happened in the history of the Leids Cabaret Festival. We have nothing to say. You are the winner of the Leids Cabaret Festival and so that night, I won both the jury and the audience prize and boom! The dream came true.
Jonathan
This was a big deal. Samba’s win was even the top story on that evening’s news. So, when you heard that you’d won, what went through your head?
Samba
I have the video of that too and I – you see me on stage so confused and so in disbelief because this moment that I had focused on for three months so specifically in that hut and that I’d worked so hard on when I moved back to Holland after Kenya after that trip and seeing it come true, the moment that would help me make my dream come true on moving to LA, it was – I was in disbelief. So after that, everything exploded. From the next day onwards, I suddenly was on different interviews for TV shows and magazines and newspapers and I was touring with my show that I’d won the final with around the country and I was booked to do a one man comedy show. So I had to write that and I wrote 80 minute show that I did with that same theme of coming from two worlds but still being united and that show did really well and I toured around the whole country of Holland for three years with that show doing at least 120 shows around the country in different theaters and at the same time, for Dutch people who were living abroad.
Jonathan
Samba performed in Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Curacao and even Libya before the fall of Gaddafi. Everywhere he went, people laughed at his self-deprecating humor and understood his message of the joys of diversity. Samba was hit! He was a star! He was making good money! And he was ready to give it all up because he still had a 5 year plan, written by candlelight, in a dusty Kenyan hut.
Samba
Yes, the fame was fantastic and the money was fantastic and I was living such a comfortable life but I knew that my message was not just for Holland. I have to move to the market that has the biggest reach which is Hollywood. This is where messages are heard loudest around the world, Hollywood.
Jonathan
It wasn’t an easy decision. In 2010, Samba had a new show in Dutch and 80 dates booked. He took a trip to Portugal to mull things over. And there, walking in the woods, he came upon...a tree. This tree reminded him of the trees near the hut in the village in Kenya. The place where he’d made his other big decision. So, and Samba admits this sounds a little nuts, he sat down and he asked the tree what to do.
Samba
...and the answer was, trust life. Trust life that when you follow your heart, everything will work out for you. I had no idea how I would get to Hollywood. It’s not easy just to move to LA. You need a visa, you need an agent, you need some kind of connection to start your career and I had no idea how that would work out but I knew I had to make a decision first and then trust life like I did in that village and just let go and keep it simple and follow your heart. So I went back to Holland, told my managers in the theaters, I am stopping, I am moving to LA. And they all called me crazy and what are you doing, you are star. You have all this stuff. Are you crazy? You’re gonna lose it all. And so they said, you will never perform here again, your career is over. But I knew I had to still listen to myself and follow my heart.
Jonathan
His Dutch agents weren’t the only ones who thought moving to LA was a bad idea.
Samba
Everyone called me crazy.
The people who were close to me did not want me to lose all of this because they were afraid for what would happen for me in LA because you hear these stories of people who fail miserably and have nothing but I knew that I had made it through the roughest, toughest time in the village.
Jonathan
So in 2010, Samba packed up and moved to LA. Once there he signed up for a showcase in which a whole bunch of aspiring stars perform for a whole bunch of hungry agents looking for talent…
Samba
So basically you present a monologue to agents and if they like you, they will represent you and so I could not find a monologue that represented who I was as a person. So I wrote my own monologue about coming from two different worlds and how all these cultures are inside me that how no one knows what I am because of that. And so I performed this monologue in front of 21 agents and 7 of them wanted to work with me. And so I was like, boom! My message has resonated with these people.
Nikkolas Rey
My name is Nikkolas Rey. I am the owner agent of the AlvaradoRey Agency in Los Angeles.
Jonathan
Nikkolas Rey is the agent who signed Samba after the showcase. We reached him on the phone in LA.
Nikkolas
I saw him in the showcase there. And when I saw him, I thought, wow, this guy’s great. So I invited him for an interview to the office and here I have him do a call reading and some improvisations. And then I realised I wanted to work with him because he was so talented. And I’ve been working with him ever since.
Jonathan
And what exactly was so special about him that you thought to yourself ‘I have got to sign this guy’?
Nikkolas
Ah, his energy. He energy was very, very high. And he was very happy. And he was very present. He’s very unique because of what he represents. He’s a combination of races and he’s very tall and he’s very funny and he’s very quick.
Jonathan
Samba’s standup is getting noticed. Like a steady gig at the iconic Comedy Store.
Samba
It’s one of the biggest comedy clubs here in Los Angeles... where artists like Rich Pryor started and Jim Carrey and Robin Williams and I participated in a competition there and I won that contest and the manager saw me performing and he is like, you know what kid, you got something. I want you to perform here every week on the stages and so that’s how I got into The Comedy Store working as a comedian.
Jonathan
And while American comedy is often edgy or profane, most people get Samba’s message of positive inclusivity.
Samba
I think it’s a wonderful thing to have...a mission, to have a goal to do besides acting. It’s good because it was becoming that. You see, we’re all coming together and uniting into one thing. So I think that’s part of that.
Jonathan
And Samba is no longer an Alien of Extraordinary Ability by the way. He just got his Green Card, which makes him a permanent resident of the US. He also recently got married. He and his American wife now live in the place he always dreamed of...
Samba
My studio apartment is in like Hollywood. So we are here but you can see the Hollywood sign from my backyard.
Jonathan
What’s the building called?
Samba
This is the Harlow. All the buildings on this street are named after actors. There is the Monroe, there is the Clark Gable, there is Harlow where we are living. So yeah, it feels good to be among the stars.
Jonathan
An agent, an apartment close to the Hollywood sign, a Green Card… Samba says he’s ready for his next step: major tv and movie productions.
Samba
There was a couple of films I did right now the Tiger Hunter which is about an Indian immigrant moving to America I play one of the characters there.
Jonathan
Samba says it was tough coming to America on his own.
Samba
You have to find your way and you have do it by yourself but I think because of the experience in Kenya, I was already used to that and knew that I would be fine. I would survive.
My ultimate goal is to be very successful in my career as an actor and a comedian spreading this message of unity to make a lot of money and to have enough influence that I can help poor societies and people who are suffering to come together to help them sustain themselves and not only have this message of unity but to actually do something about giving equal opportunity to everyone.
Jonathan
But Samba, you are just one person, what makes you think you can do something about it?
Samba
I know, it is. It’s one person but if anything that village taught me is that it only takes one person to tell you something good about yourself or something positive and inspiring and it can change your life one person at a time and if I can change a few minds in my life time, I have achieved what I wanted to do. Hopefully that person whose mind I have changed will change someone else’s mind and then spread it out that way.
Jonathan
And how will you know you’ve succeeded?
Samba
I think when at the end of my life, I get to talk to a tree and he tells me, you know what kid, you did it.
Jonathan
Samba Schutte
If you want to know more about Samba, go to our website: podcast.klm.com. You’ve been listening to The Journey. An original podcast brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. To hear more stories about the trip that changed everything, go to podcast.klm.com. And why not review us on iTunes. It helps other listeners find this podcast. Thank you for listening. I’m Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
Ever since he was little, Samba Schutte has felt like the eternal outsider. His parents are from different nationalities and have different ideologies. He grew up in Ethiopia, but lived the life of an expat. Thanks to his Dutch father, his life was a far cry from the daily reality and he enjoys a much higher standard of living.
After Samba moved to the Netherlands he studied theatre studies. For his internship he decided to go to Kenya in search of his African roots. Little did he know he was about to embark on a life-changing journey.
This village lies in the middle of Kenya, about a 45-minute drive from the border with Uganda.
No electricity or air-conditioning. His showers consisted of several cups of cold water.
This is a historic place for Samba. During one of his last pitch-dark nights there, he laid out a multi-year plan for his life.
Using improv and theatre, he helped them develop a different perspective on everyday problems. Juvenile delinquents and people with HIV are often forced to live outside of the community. This is a way to bring them back into community life.
Song and dance are a way to attract the attention of the villagers.
He wins both the jury and the people’s choice award at the Leids Cabaret Festival, the most important comedy festival in the Netherlands.
On the day that Samba won the Leids Cabaret Festival, he was the opening feature on the NOS Journaal, the most important news show in the Netherlands.
The theater poster for his very first show. "Kun min woni an" is Mauritanian for "I am who you are".
An iconic theatre where many famous stand-up comedians kick-started their career. After moving to Los Angeles, Samba beat out over 60 other participants to win a comedy competition. His reward was a weekly regular gig.
A film that tells the story of an Indian immigrant who moves to the United States. The story resonates with Samba as he is often mistaken for an Indian immigrant. The movie is available on Netflix.
Check his YouTube channel for more sketches and film excerpts.
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Episodes 1 to 6 of The Journey are available via YouTube. The podcast can also be watched with subtitles in Dutch, German, French and Spanish for those who do not understand English.
Linda Nijlunsing
I just knew I had to cross the river, which is about a mile wide. And I was going like in one direction down river. And I realised, I cannot cross the river. Because if I cross, the waves will just go over my boat and I will be full of water and if I turn it upside down, I’m dead.
So I thought ‘how am I going to do this? ‘how am I going to do this?’
Jonathan Groubert
This is Linda Nijlunsing.
And in this very first episode of The Journey, we take you along Linda’s odyssey around the world. A journey that led her to a life and death decision on a wild river in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness…
A defining moment of the trip that defined her life.
This is a story about the trip that changed everything!
Hi, I’m Jonathan Groubert and this is the Journey. The Journey is an original podcast from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines where we meet extraordinary people whose lives are transformed by travel.
This story starts in 1983.
Linda
1983. Oh boy
Jonathan
Linda Nijlunsing is in her mid-60s. Has short, gray hair, a body that is muscular, not like someone who hits the gym, but solid from physical labor. She served us tea in her homey houseboat in the Dutch city of Groningen.
And she told us that back in 1983, when she was just 27 years old, she worked as a school teacher, and… was not happy.
Linda
I had a great job; wonderful job. But after my mother had died, I kind of felt a little lost. And it felt like my life was just getting up in the morning, driving to work, working with the kids and then go back. I didn’t feel real good. I was like, unhappy. So then I thought, you know, something needs to change. And how are you going to change things? Well I couldn’t think of anything else than change my environment, really.
That’s what I did. So I left in... I think I left in nineteen eighty-four. Yeah.
Jonathan
So Linda hit the road.
The first port of call was Cuba, where she watched Fidel Castro speak, talked her way out of arrest and secretly saw the island.
She panned for gold in New Zealand. And partied with Maoris.
She lived off her wits, her muscles, and her ability to create good will in people everywhere. Linda says it was...
Linda
...total freedom. Total freedom.. That’s the best feeling ever that you… don’t know what’s around the corner. That’s the best feeling. Yeah.
Jonathan
Linda worked as a tour guide and for years she traveled to almost every corner of the world. But Alaska… was different.
There was a deep connection and she kept coming back. Again and again.
Linda
Well, imagine, clear skies, stars, pristine snow, thundering rivers, fresh fish, a big salmon on your plate that you just caught, the elements; winter, snow. Yeah, you feel alive. That’s pretty much it. And the people, they also feel like one big family.
Everybody’s there for a reason. And the reason mostly is they want to get away from it all. One guy once said to me like ‘I’m better off without the world and the world is better off without me’. So they’re all looking for this basic kind of lifestyle.
Jonathan
Linda says Alaska will feed you, make you happy and, if you don’t live by its rules, it will kill you. Only the strong survive.
And that brings us to the other main character in this story. The mountain man with the moustache: Big Jim.
Linda
Jim! Yeah!
Jonathan
When did you meet Big Jim?
Linda
Well that was... I think that was the Christmas nineteen-ninety. I was living with Cathy and her husband and her child. And she’s a very sociable person and she has many friends.
Telephone rings
Jonathan: Hi Cathy.
Cathy: Yes. Can you hear me okay?
Jonathan: Yeah, I can hear you okay. My name’s Jonathan by the way.
Cathy: Hi Jonathan.
Jonathan
Cathy is probably Linda’s best friend from her days in Alaska.
And Cathy sort of set up her friend Big Jim and Linda on a date.
Telephone conversation
Cathy: ...You know he was always a bachelor. You know he was tall and for some reason we thought they would hit it off.
Jonathan: For some reason?
Cathy: Yeah, well, you know... he was living the lifestyle that Linda had come to love. But they did hit it off right away.
Linda
For Christmas nineteen-ninety, they had invited a friend that lived as a trapper on the Yukon River by himself for a long time already. For twenty years I think. And he was a friend, so they invited him over and I was of course invited too.
I got there and there he was outside waiting for me which I thought was really kind of stupid. Because it felt like, you know… he was looking for a woman. That was obvious, yeah.
Jonathan
What did he look like?
Linda
Ah, six foot four. One metre, ninety-six. Huge guy. Of course. Imagine a guy who’s living in the bush in Alaska, chopping wood and doing heavy work all the time. So he looked pretty good, except for his face. He had this terrible moustache. You know like the one that sailors have sometimes? Like the drooping moustache. Right. Yeah.
Jonathan
When Linda Nijlunsing met Big Jim, it was NOT love at first sight.
Linda
No way. No way. It was the opposite. It was like yeah, I want to go there and I want to learn everything, but I don’t want you.
Jonathan
When Linda says “go there” she means to the wilderness with Big Jim to learn his way of life.
Jim regaled Linda with tales of his lonely but fulfilling life as a self-sufficient, self-reliant hunter of pelts, far away from civilization in the wilds of the Alaskan forest.
She was intrigued and he saw that.
Linda
He said ‘well, why don’t you come up and spend a couple of weeks with me and I’ll teach you everything I know’. Because he’s a very smart man and he knew that I was triggered by curiosity. And so he said ‘yeah, we’ll go hunting and we’ll go set some traps and...'
Jonathan
And cut to a few weeks later.
Linda is on an airplane, flying to a tiny airport somewhere west of Fairbanks, just the first leg of the trip to Big Jim's cabin in the woods.
The pilot lands. Dumps her pack out in the dark, cold runway and takes off again.
No Jim.
Linda
There were a few guys with a truck and they said ‘are you Linda?’ ‘Yes’. He said ‘well, Big Jim told us you would come, so why don’t you jump in the truck and we’ll take you to the village’.
Half an hour later, [sound effect], there comes Jim. ‘Hello’. Not like ‘oh, I’m sorry for not picking you up. Sorry for being late’. Nothing. No. ‘Ok, there you are. Let’s go’.
Jonathan
“Let’s go” meant a raucous snowmobile ride down the mountain, in 30 degrees below zero, to Big Jim’s camp. An utterly isolated place known as Birch Creek. The center of it all was Jim’s cabin.
Jim showed Linda around his lonely kingdom and then brought her inside the main cabin.
Linda
...then he says ‘ok, well this is where I live. This is the kitchen. This is my bedroom. This is my bed. And that’s about it’. So I looked around and said ‘ok, so where am I going to crash?’ He said ‘in my bed’. Said ‘oh, great, so where are you going to sleep?’ He said ‘in my bed’. So I said ‘no, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s an option.’ So he said ‘well, ok. Good enough. You can sleep on the floor.’ And that’s exactly what happened.
I got one of those little rotten little mattresses to sleep on and it was of course very cold. And so I’m in the sleeping bag on the floor and he’s in his bed.
Well, he obviously had his mind set on having some good loving warmth and whatever goes with it, I guess.
Jonathan
It sounds like you’re talking about sex.
Linda
Is that right? Yes, that must be it then. Yeah. Yeah, that was it. Now you mention it, that was it.
Jonathan
And when you told him, ‘oh, no Big Jim, that’s not going to happen’, how did he react exactly?
Linda
Well he got a little pissed off. He said ‘well, why are you here?’ I said 'well, I think we discussed it profoundly. Like you were going to teach me everything and you were going to show me things, how to do.' Well it was not very pleasant situation. No. He was annoyed. He didn’t try to hide it, let’s put it that way.
And I got pissed off, of course. Well then there was a little bit of argument going up and down and he said ‘ok, well that’s the way you want it. Fine’. So that’s the way I want it.
And from that moment on it was great because then that was out of the way and so he was starting to explain things to me, how to set up a rabbit trap and we went to look at the marten traps and he explained to me about the greenhouse, about the generator and how to conserve fish and all that. And we had a great time. And fun. I mean he had a really fantastic sense of humor. So we laughed a lot.
Jonathan
With the sexual tension out of the way, Jim and Linda got to know each other. Jim was originally from upstate NY and he fell in love with Alaska during a trip there in the 60s.
A loner by nature, he hand built his little kingdom.
About 10 days into her visit, Linda realized something was different between them. This was confirmed when she woke up one morning to discover that the mountain man, Big Jim, rugged individualist, had shaved off his moustache.
Linda
It’s often like that when men have moustaches and they shave them off, then their face kind of lightens up, I find. And suddenly I thought like ‘wow, what a nice face’. ‘Ha, kind of attractive’. And we had fun. And then pretty much one night I made the move myself.
Jonathan
Jim changed. He was more fun and open...
Linda
He showed his vulnerability and he was relaxed. He wasn’t trying to be macho or be this guy. He started talking about his loneliness. Oh I recalled a night, yes we went on a trip. We went to go hunting; trapping. And that’s when we spent a night in the trappers cabin. Imagine that you live in a cabin, but when you go trapping, you make a lot of miles, right. Because you could go twenty miles and you don’t want to go back in one day because it’s a lot of work. I mean, you go really, really where nobody goes. And there was a little lake all frozen. And there was this little cabin and, you know, there’s nobody there. And he opened the door and you make a fire, you unpack your gear and your food. And that night we started talking, you know, these conversations about his fears and about his hopes and his dreams and why it was so difficult for him to be with people. That’s the night that the northern lights came out. Yeah. We’d walk outside and you see this otter tracks and the northern lights come out. It’s brilliant.
Jonathan
So you guys get together. Is it a passionate romance at that point? Could I describe it like that?
Linda
Yes, yes, absolutely. It was very passionate, it was very together, it was very fun and...
I was completely in love. I was smitten, totally struck. And you know like the feeling that you can't stop smiling and all that.
I really thought we were meant for each other. Yeah. I thought so. He said, you know, ‘I want you’. So we got married six weeks later.
Jonathan
It was a whirlwind romance and marriage and everyone was happy. Even Linda’s family....
Linda's sister
My name is Mary Ann and I’m the sister of Linda.
I was glad for her because she really liked the guy and she was happy. So... well it was good news. This was the first time she did that, in that way. Ja.
Jonathan
And so Linda Nijlunsing of the Netherlands and Mountain Man Big Jim had found each other.
And Jim helped Linda find a side of herself she didn’t even know she had.
Linda
I became a bigger person. I mean, I was daring things and I was learning things and I was... yeah, we were partners doing things together. Hold this, get that, let’s make some moose meat. We had a lot of fun together. We’d sing songs together. And he would listen to my stories and I would listen to his stories. And of course he was impressive and he knew all these things and I was learning and... of course you’re also alone. Just the two of you. So, yeah good company.
Jonathan
Daily life followed a fixed pattern of hard work. Fixing stuff, smoke fish and cut trees.
And then of course there was hunting for pelts and skins, Big Jim’s stock in trade.
There were the rabbits and martens. The Salmon. The occasional moose for meat. The bears.
And then there was the time a wolf got caught in a foot trap. It was alive.
And it made painfully clear that Linda and Jim were still in two totally different worlds.
Linda
And the wolf is laying there because he can't go anywhere. And then you have to kill it. You get off the Snow Go and you pick up the gun and Jim would wait for the animal to not move and the animal is just fixated on you because he knows this is going to happen.
And the wolf kind of jumps up and falls down and blood streaming out of his mouth and foamy blood. So then you have to go there, but you don’t know how dead is he, because he’s not dead, he’s breathing, he’s like [gasping sounds], heavily breathing. And so we walk up there carefully and Jim tells me to stand on his neck so he can give him the final shot. So this animal’s laying there and I’m standing on his throat to suffocate him so he won’t move, yeah with my full weight. And he’s breathing blood. And I remember that he was getting up under my feet. I mean, I’m not a light person. But he was like getting up so strong. And then Jim shot him from close range and he killed him.
Yeah, that was not a fun experience. So he said ‘I don’t need you to come with me next time’, because he wasn’t emotionally involved. He was just happy. He got a wolf.
Jonathan
Mercy killing wolves notwithstanding, Big Jim started off as a very good husband.
Linda
Sometimes if it was a very nice summer evening, for instance, we’d get in the boat and we’d take our fishing rods and we’d just go across the river and beautiful. You’d see beavers and it’s quiet and we go fishing for pike. He loved being out there. Me too. I loved it too. As long as... pretty much as long as I was with him, I was happy.
Jonathan
Despite this wedded bliss, something happened that led Linda to wonder if she’d made the right decision.
Linda
So one day we would have some fishing nets in the river and one day I would go with the boat and check the fishing nets and take out the salmon. The next day he would go out. And so we kind of swap. And one day it was my turn and the river was really, really, really rough. I mean, there were big waves and it was cold and the wind was blowing. And I kind of looked at it and I thought, then I said 'I don’t know, I don’t feel like going on this river' and… so I was looking at him thinking like surely he’ll say like ‘yeah, let’s give it a miss today’ or something. But he didn’t. So when I said like ‘well, I guess I’ll be going then’. And he’s kind of ‘Yeah, ok’. Not responding.
So I went into the boat and I tried to cross the river but it was just so dangerous because there were big waves. And I just knew I had to cross the river, which is about a mile wide. And I was going like in one direction down river. And I realised, I cannot cross the river. Because if I cross, the waves will just go over my boat and I will be full of water and if I turn it upside down, I’m dead.
So I thought ‘how am I going to do this? ‘how am I going to do this?’ So I’m going like down river and I figure if I pass the net, just wait and then turn around real fast, and then go back with the waves the other side, I can make it. So that’s what I did and then I got there and it was so wild. And I was going up and down and it’s cold water and the salmon have really big teeth. So my hands were bleeding and the water’s pulling on the net and I get stuck. It hurts. So I must have been busy for an hour working, trying to get the salmon out and then go back home. Which was scary.
So I got back home and I did the cut and all that cutting. And the next day the river was kind of quietening down some. And he wasn’t getting ready to go and do the nets. So I asked him ‘well, when are you leaving? When are you going to check the net?’. He said ‘with this weather, I’m not going. I’m not crazy’. And that really pissed me off. And I said ‘what? Yesterday it was way worse than this. You let me go’. He said ‘yeah, well, you know. I thought if she thinks she can do it, you know. I wouldn’t go out with that weather’. And that’s when I thought this is really strange. I could’ve died there on that river easily. If I hadn’t had all my wits together, I would’ve died that day.
And we had an argument about this. I said ‘well, I can't understand how you take that risk with me’. So that’s pretty much the first time that I thought something’s wrong here.
Jonathan
Linda grew slowly discontented with her life. This only got worse when her sister Marion and her husband came for a visit, but left early.
Linda's sister
There wasn’t so much to do for visitors because you couldn’t just walk off the ground because then there were those bears. Black ones. Yeah after a few days, there was not so much for us to do because Linda and Jim were working very hard. It was in the summer time so they had to do a lot of jobs; everything to prepare for the winter time again because they have a very short summer in Alaska.
Jonathan
Linda says her sister’s sudden departure held a mirror up to her life and it wasn’t pretty. She saw her life was one of heavy, repetitive labor and danger.
And then, Linda announced she was pregnant.
Linda
I had this little thing, the blue stick and I thought he was going to be happy and I was driving back home real carefully because I didn’t want to go bump, bump, bump. And he was not too happy. No.
Jonathan
And he reacted. Exactly what did he say?
Linda
Can't be. Can't be. No. Not possible. Not possible. I have had women in my life and I’m sterile. So it can't be. And pretty soon after that it was like, it’s not mine. It can't be mine. So like I would be sleeping with other men or something. That’s pretty offensive to hear that.
Jonathan
Big Jim even suggested she get an abortion.
Linda
No way I’m going to get rid of it. So that’s when I left. That’s when I left him and I went to live in the village. And that’s when I spent the three months of my pregnancy alone. And then he came to see me and he told me he had thought about it and he had kind of come to terms with the idea and that it was ok and we were going to make it and we would work it out.
Jonathan
Jim and Linda went back to the camp and continued along like nothing had changed.
No baby bed came. No birth plan. Jim continued to live his life.
Linda
He’s not very much into your needs. And pretty much doing his own thing and you can come together with him but he’s not going to change his ways because of you, kind of thing. I thought love would conquer all that. I thought, you know, once you’re together, you’re a team. So you both adapt. But it turned out that I was adapting to his lifestyle and he was not adapting to my needs. I just accepted him for what he was and the way he was. And I adapted myself and that worked out really good for him. But then your life changes, as in becoming a father and a mother; a family, then that asks for different skills.
Jonathan
Close to the due date, Linda went to town to a cheap hotel close to the hospital to wait for the contractions to start. She wanted Jim to come too.
Linda
He didn’t want to go. He said ‘there’s lots of work to do and this is the busiest time of the year and I have to get stuff ready and don’t you understand and da, da, da, da, da’. So that was already not very nice. But I made him go. So he arrived two days before I actually gave birth. And imagine you have to stay in a hotel. And he didn’t like to spend money, so I was in this dungy not very clean nasty hotel room, having my first contractions.
He was there. And he didn’t want to come, as I said. So you’re in the hotel room. I’m having contractions and he’s saying to me ‘can you keep it down a bit. I can't sleep’. And here I’m trying to keep my voice down while I’m having contractions, right. Because he wants to sleep. So he was dragging his feet all the way.
And finally go to the hospital and it turned out that I was so muscled strong. Like your pelvis has to give way for the baby of course, but I had muscles like iron cables more or less. It was really slow and it was really painful. It took two days.
Jonathan
Linda required a lot of stitches and a long recovery time.
Big Jim was not pleased.
They stayed with some friends a few days and then moved back to Jim’s cabin in Yukonville.
The cabin is closer to civilization but, just barely. You need to cut firewood and get water, all things Linda was in no shape to do.
She was still recovering from her stitches when it became clear Jim was getting ready to leave…
Linda
And so we’re in this village in this crappy old rotten cabin without any water or firewood. And I see Jim packing his gear. And I ask him like ‘what are you doing?’. He says, ‘I’m going home’. I said ‘you can't go home. We agreed to stay here. I need you to stay here. I need you to get water. I need you to cut firewood. I need you to do everything’. Yeah. Yeah, so I begged him, I begged the man not to leave me alone because I was completely...
Well I was devastated. I was completely devastated. And I begged him not to leave me and to help me and take care so that I could just survive there. He turned around, he got his gear and he left.
And so I stayed behind with... I had to cut firewood which I couldn’t because every time I raised the axe, my stitches would come undone. And I had to get water and I didn’t have anything. I didn’t have anything to transport the baby because I wasn’t going to leave the baby alone. So, I had an apple box. I remembered it because I have a picture of it. It says ‘apple box from New Zealand’. And there was an old truck. But the truck was… the windows were broken and it was burning oil. So and there was no upholstery in the seat. So I would tie my baby in the box and to stop it from breathing the oil; the burning oil, I put a blanket over it. And I tied it down with electrical wire, yeah, to get water.
Jonathan
Kathy saw Linda and Jim’s relationship unravel right in front of her eyes.
Linda's sister
I was shocked. It was appalling. You know, because they seemed to get along. He seemed to really love her. And the fact that he now is not into being a father and he left her in this village with a newborn baby and no firewood, I was totally shocked.
Jonathan
Linda suffered alone for two months. So, she called home, to her sister.
Linda
I thought this is bad news because I only had my first child half a year before so I knew how much you need the father of the child when you’ve just given birth. Yeah, it was bad news.
Her being alone in that village without anybody to help her. I remember it very well how it is to have a child and how much you need people around you to help you take care of a baby because you have no experience.
We had phone calls during several weeks; maybe two weeks or so. And it didn’t change. Things didn’t get better. So I think in the end I said ‘well, be wise and come back to Holland. We can take care of you and you’re better off in Holland’.
Jonathan
When Jim finally returned to the cabin, Linda asked for a divorce. All she wanted was the baby.
When the judge heard her story, he was outraged. He granted her the divorce, the baby and 10 thousand dollars.
And then… Linda headed home.
When you got on that final plane home to The Netherlands with your baby and your life with Big Jim and the hut and the deprivation and all of it behind you, what’s the first thing that went through your head?
Linda
Failure. Failure. Didn’t work. Yeah. I tried. Didn’t work.
Jonathan
Linda’s family had a house filled with food and baby articles and warmth waiting for her.
After years of travel and adventure, home was no longer a place to escape from, it was a safe haven for Linda and her new baby.
Linda
It was just happy. Yeah. Happy also sad. I think there must have been tears. Can't imagine anything else. I mean there was sadness because of the fact that it didn’t work, but there was... I was so grateful to have electricity, to have running water. Small things like that. They had a house for me. They filled it up with a baby bed and a baby bath and wine and eggs and coffee and sugar. And I remember turning up the heater and this feeling of happiness. Like warmth without work. Water without work. Light without work. I could just relax.
Jonathan
More than two decades have passed and Linda has her new life.
She lives in a lovely old boat on a canal in the northern Dutch city of Groningen, close to her family. She went back into education but also lectures about her life in the wilderness, proudly holding up a wolf pelt and a marten trap.
And her son Michael has grown into a handsome young man. He’s big, like his father. And has a powerful wanderlust, like his mother.
Big Jim has come to visit over the years.
The visits didn’t go so well.
Linda
He gets here and he’s completely lost. He panics. He has panic attacks. He can't drive a car. He can't... He cannot deal with this...
Jonathan
Does he have a relationship at all with Michael?
Linda
Ha. I asked him one time about his relationship with his father and he said ‘we never talked, we built houses together’.
Jonathan
Closing questions. If you could do it all over again, would you?
Linda
Of course.
Jonathan
Seriously?
Linda
Of course!
Bad experience is experience too. I had a great time. I learned many things. I have great friends. I have a fantastic son. Why regret something like that? No. A big love in my life. A good experience. It has made me more humble, more understanding of other people. It has taught me what grief is. So I have better understanding and empathy with other people. I’ve grown as a person. I’ve seen fantastic things. No. No. Not one second.
Jonathan
It was worth it?
Linda
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt about it.
Jonathan
Linda Nijlunsing. At Linda’s request, we changed Big Jim’s name and a few details regarding his whereabouts, to protect his privacy. We’ve tried to reach Big Jim for an interview, but during the recording of this episode he was out in the forest on his trapline. Linda wrote a wonderful book about her travels and her life with Jim called Wilderness Years. We’ll link to it on our website: podcast.klm.com. You’ve been listening to The Journey. An original podcast brought to you by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. For more background on this story and to hear more stories about the trip that changed everything, go to podcast.klm.com. And why not review us on iTunes. It helps other listeners find this podcast. Thank you for listening. I’m Jonathan Groubert.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
Linda Nijlunsing, (1955), has never chosen the easy road. She travels around the world for many years until she meets Big Jim in Alaska. They fall in love and she decides to move in with him, far from civilization. But they soon discover that their ideas about the relationship are not compatible.
Linda Nijlunsing from the Netherlands has explored all corners of the world. But nowhere has she felt so at home as in Alaska. When she meets Big Jim, she does not hesitate for a moment to move in with him. They marry and live together in the vast and pristine wilderness of Alaska. Theirs is a life of tremendously hard work. Light, heat, water, food... nothing comes for free in this environment far from civilisation. Much effort is required for the simplest of things. In Alaska, you live on the very edge. With temperatures of -30 Celsius, losing your gloves can mean losing your hands. And leaving home without a rifle can be fatal if you encounter a bear.
In The Journey, Linda tells a breathtaking story about the years she spent in these harsh conditions. The pictures below give an idea about her life in the Alaskan wilderness.
All vegetables to be eaten throughout the year must be grown, harvested and canned during Alaska’s short summer. The closest shop is dozens of kilometres away in a small village that takes more than a day to get to.
It is a Native American custom in Alaska to refer to a house as a camp. Yukon River in the background.
They can only hear about what is going on in the world via a radio station. A special transmitter is used to pass on short messages to those who have retreated to the emptiness of Alaska.
Every so often, Jim and Linda shoot a moose. They freeze the meat, providing them with food for a long period of time. The hide is then sold. Contrary to what many may believe, living in the wilderness does not mean that you do not need money. Not everything can be trapped or grown and you will always need items that can only be bought in a shop, such as ammunition, sugar, coffee and nails.
During her time in Alaska, Linda develops a special relationship with dogs: her very first job in Alaska is as a dog groomer. She later learns to hitch the animals in front of a sled and race across the icy plains.
Incidentally, Linda and Jim’s action radius is generally quite limited. There is work to be done daily in and around the house to meet their most basic needs, such as carrying out repairs on the house, chopping wood and smoking fish. Besides, danger is always lurking outside, this being bear country.
They catch salmon in the Yukon River using a fish wheel. During one of her trips to empty the fish wheel, Linda’s boat nearly capsizes in the inclement weather.
She also often gives lectures on the adventures described in this book. At this point, Linda’s book is only available in Dutch. Find it in webshop Nobelman.
Note: 'The Journey' is a podcast made to be listened to. The voices of the speakers, music and audio effects provide an experience that cannot be replicated when only reading the text.
Note: Here you can find extra information on this episode. We recommend listening to the podcast before viewing this page.
No experience in listening to podcasts? No problem. It’s not hard to enjoy the unique audio stories of ‘The Journey’. There are various ways to listen, which we explain below.
'The Journey' is an original podcast from KLM that can be listened to by anyone free of charge via all major podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Play Music.
'The Journey' shares true stories about people who went travelling and returned as a different person. These travellers share experiences that changed their lives. In every episode, the listener is taken to that special moment that changed everything.
Questions or comments? E-mail them to podcast@klm.com.
