WHERE I GOT MY ADVENTUROUS SPIRIT FROM

Most people in the USA have never heard of Tintin and his white terrier, Milou, or Snowy (as he is called in the English versions of their adventures).

Tintin, his sidekick Captain Haddock, and the other characters remain wildly popular in Europe. The author, Hergé, was actually a patient of my dad during WWII in German-occupied Belgium, and as a child, I grew up avidly reading all of his adventures.

Even in Vietnam

Did you know that Tintin was the first human to step on the moon, decades before the Americans planted their flag there? Check it out in Destination Moon and Explorers of the Moon. Eat your heart out, Neil and Buzz. That young Belgian reporter beat you to it...

The adventures that really left a profound impression on me were Tintin in America, which probably planted the seed of my desire to move to the USA from my native Belgium; King Ottokar’s Sceptre, which inspired my flotilla sailing trips to Croatia and Montenegro; but the ones that impacted me the most were The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun, which brought Tintin to Peru.

I became fascinated by that country, and it has been on my bucket list ever since I was in my early teens. I knew the song “El Condor Pasa” years before Simon and Garfunkel decided that they would rather “Be a Hammer than a Nail”.

The Lovely “Admiral”

Not only did I finally make it to Peru (a business trip was the excuse to go), but I also had the opportunity to get involved in humanitarian work there (which was often quite adventurous) and visit fascinating places like Cusco, Machu Picchu, Paracas, Sipan, Kuelap, and the Amazon jungle. I hiked the Inca Trail twice and eventually married a lovely Peruvian, our flotilla “Admiral” Mila (an interesting adventure in itself and the subject of a book I’m in the process of writing).

I am always looking forward to new discoveries in that country and have a long to-do list for future explorations.