Corona Times - Travelling the world with my father

Seeing Spiderman climb New York’s World Trade Center, exploring the Algerian Sahara with a Touareg and literally drinking Scotch on the rocks at the End of the World have one thing in common for me. I did it with my father! My dad loves to travel. His parents took him camping in Switzerland, not so common in the nineteen fifties. As a youngster he joined the Jamboree, the international gathering of Boy Scouts, in England. As a student he worked on the Holland America Line and on a cargo ship along the Western African coast. Once my father had his own family he took us all to Gabon and Tanzania and back home in Europe we went cycling in England, exploring Belgium by motorhome and camping at farmers in the Netherlands.

At some point my father must have realised he simply had a bigger yearning to see the world than my mother; so next to romantic trips with her, family vacations and travelling alone, he started planning trips with his three children. To combine the useful with the pleasant he promised each of us a trip after finishing primary school. My sister went to London, my brother to Israel and I went to the USA and Canada. In this line of thought, the next logical station was a trip after finishing secondary school. My sister went to India where quite some camels were offered as dowry to marry her with her long blond hairs. My brother went to Scandinavia and my own second voyage led to Algeria and Tunisia.

By now, my sister was in a steady relation (she had picked a very nice Dutchman), but my father still had me and my brother as willing participants for some more travelling. My brother went along to Poland and Canada. And spread out over two trips me and my father discovered Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. There is really no limit if you like to travel like my dad. In recent years he is taking his grandchildren traveling, seven of them and they all go to primary and secondary school…

If that is not enough, my father also travels for work. Working is another hobby of his. He could have been retired, but he likes his work so much that he keeps on going. All in all, he normally travels once per month, mostly by plane, keeping an excellent frequent flyer status with a well-known blue and white airline. My father has flown with more than ninety different airlines to more than hundred and eighty airports, but, to put it in perspective, in the “non-travel section”, my parents live a modest life. They have a regular, energy saving house without unnecessary luxury. They do not own a car since I was a little boy and they travel by bicycle and train whenever possible. Also they spend quite some money on development projects. Nothing can stop my dad from travelling really, well that is except for Corona. 

My first trip with my father, at the age of eleven, was to the United States and Canada. My father had a congress. I flew to New York as unaccompanied minor at the time he was finished. The flight, in a DC8 by Transamerica Airlines, no longer existing, was nice as I had a lot of sweets with me and an American boy my age and his father were sitting next to me. When we arrived in JFK, the father and boy took the US citizens lane, there was no ground staff escorting me, so I was on my own. I couldn’t really tell customs where I was going and somehow this part hadn’t been organised very well, so it took some time before customs would let me out. Big tears when I finally saw my dad. He had come to pick me up with his sister and her son who live in New York. We lived at my aunt’s apartment in Manhattan near Washington Square, a very lively area where sidewalks were populated with people playing chess, kids roller skating, street artists performing and hippies selling homemade jewellery.

What I typically remember from New York are the sausages that my aunt made for breakfast. She was really very welcoming. We visited the little fair in Coney Island and I sat in a carrousel with my cousin and a friend of his. My father, me and my cousin tried to see the latest Star Wars, Return of the Jedi, but somehow it was sold out and instead we saw Spacehunter, a pretty weird science fiction. I further recall seeing the High School of Performing Arts, the location where ‘Fame’ was recorded, a series that my family loved to see on Friday nights. I will never forget the donut café that was open 24/7, 365 days per year. I couldn’t grasp the idea of a store being opened permanently. It was really out of my scope, still is by the way. One time we took the subway through Harlem and saw burned out cars on the streets. On some stations the subway wouldn’t stop.

The real highlight was the World Trade Center, which we visited on Memorial Day. On that exact day on 30 May 1983 a man named Dan Goodwin was climbing the North Tower like some kind of Spiderman! He had started early in the morning when no one was there, using suction cups for the first four floors before switching to a camming device he connected to the building’s window-washing track. We first watched him from ground level. Then we went the five hundred metres up to the South Tower visitor’s deck, to see Spiderman reach the top and attach an American flag. After being arrested mister Goodwin stated he made the climb to call attention to the inability to rescue trapped occupants from the upper levels of skyscrapers… How bizarre! The second time I was at this location was in 2002 as a travel guide with a Dutch group on my way to Costa Rica. We had missed our connecting flight, had to spend twenty four hours in New York and visited Ground Zero. The third time I was there with my wife and kids in 2017, again staying at my aunts, this time in Brooklyn, the Freedom Tower had already risen.

Back to the trip with my dad. We took the Greyhound bus to Montreal where we visited an uncle and aunt of my father. Together with them we travelled to Ottawa. For me the real highlight was going to their little country house at the shore of a beautiful lake which I could discover all by myself using their pedal boat, a very nice experience. My dad’s uncle also let me drive his speed boat, safely sitting in the back himself. The main lesson he told me did not concern the water though: “never go into the forest alone”. “You could easily get lost and it’s really not like the Netherlands where the next road or village is always in sight” he said. Continuing our journey we travelled around Lake Ontario to Toronto where we went up the CN Tower, the highest building in the world back then and stayed in the YMCA. We further visited Niagara Falls where we made a spectacular boat tour, wearing heavy rain coats against the spray. I remember being impressed by big American trucks we saw on the highway. I was also amazed to see guards collecting money form a bank with their weapons drawn. You really don’t see that in the Netherlands. We continued to New York before flying home. 

For my second trip, after graduating from athenaeum at eighteen and now being a bit older and wiser, my father let me decide the destination. I chose to see the desert. We picked Tunisia and Algeria. We flew to Monastir with Dutch Martinair. I could not know back then that I would later work in aviation and get to know one of Martinair’s strong CEOs, Paul Gregorowitsch, after he had to close down the passenger service of this airline which once promoted itself with the smart slogan “The other Dutch airline”. We stayed in a hotel in Sousse which was rather focussed on German tourists. No matter how hard my father and I tried to speak French (the second language spoken after Arabic), the Tunisian waiters would answer in German. There was a little tourist train driving along the promenade, the colourful type driving on the streets that you see in tourist centres all around the world. We made quite some fun about it. Mind you, I don’t want to be condescending and have to admit enjoying such trains later on with my own children, but while travelling the world with my dad, that tourist train just seemed too silly. We visited Kairouan, a holy Muslim and Unesco World Heritage site and then continued our journey to Tunis. In Tunis people kept asking us where we were from and if we wanted to change money. At some point my father and I got fed up with it and stopped any conversation by mumbling we were Russian and wanted to change Roubles.

We continued our journey with a flight to neighbouring Algeria. From this point on our trip really turned adventurous. It changed from going on vacation to travelling, if you know what I mean. On board of our Air Algerie flight to Algiers I sat next to an older Touareg man wearing traditional veil and turban. I was still smoking at that time and I lighted his cigarette. In case you are a bit confused now. Touareg is not just the brand name for a luxury German SUV. It primarily refers to a large Berber ethnic confederation inhabiting big parts of the Sahara from south western Libya to southern Algeria, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and parts of Nigeria. Touaregs were and many still are a nomadic people who used to control several trans-Saharan trade routes. They still move freely between countries as there are no real borders in the middle of the dessert. They are a very tall and proud people sometime referred to as the "blue people" for the indigo dye coloured clothes they traditionally wear and which stains their skin. Many young Algerians on the flight wore modern T-shirts, often more than five T-shirts on top of each other, and brought loads of other merchandise they had obviously bought in Tunisia. They asked us to take some of it through customs because it would be easier for us as tourists, but we didn’t.

After Tunisia’s tourist trains and topless tourists, Algiers was a completely different experience. The atmosphere was kind of tense. We spend one and a half days in the capital and never saw anyone looking remotely foreign, meaning we were the attraction and people would stare at us. I had never witnessed that and it let me realise how people back home may feel when looking different than the majority. There was quite some military in the streets. It was 1991. The First Gulf war had just ended. The new FIS, Front Islamique du Salut or Islamic Salvation Front had just won their first elections, changing the political landscape and it was summer, several reasons not to go to Algeria at that time. In retrospect it was a daring trip. Less than six months after our visit a military coup brutally dismantled the FIS party and several travellers have been kidnapped in later years.  

We flew on to Tamanrasset, the biggest oasis in the South of Algeria at the edge of the Hoggar Mountains in the middle of the Sahara. ‘Tam’ as people refer to it, is an important centre in a network of camel caravan trading routes, a predecessor of modern time airline hubs if you like. The original idea was to go into the desert by camel, but because of the political situation there were hardly any tourists around and all camels were far away in the desert. We met a Touareg guide who was willing to take us along with his Toyota four-wheel-drive but only if we would do as he said, mainly referring to safety, drinking enough water and staying together.

Most vacations and journeys have a certain highlight or best moment and if you look back at all the trips you’ve made, there are some that stand out. This tour was going to be one of my absolute highlights. We drove through the desert, mostly rocky and mountainous in this area. Our Touareg guide gathered wood and herbs on the way for cooking. The wood was stowed on the roof rack of the land cruiser next to water bags made of goat skin. He cooked on an open fire for us.

At some stage I must have forgotten the guide’s advice, or by now maybe he trusted us. I remember climbing a mountain slope on my own and finding some plants at the top where water must have floated in other times. Obviously there is not much water to be found in the desert, but if there is, it comes in great quantities and rivers can appear out of nothing which can be lethal. It is said that more people die of drowning than of thirst in the desert. That did not happen to me. However it was a funny sensation to be so far away from civilisation and even one kilometre away from the only other human beings around, being my father and the guide. When jumping from rock to rock, I realised that when I would stumble, fall and break a leg, it could really become problematic for me. I had brought some water, but soon found that in this climate with temperatures up to forty five degrees Celsius (hunderd and thirteen degrees Fahrenheit) you really get thirsty fast. Lucky enough I am a bit like a cat with nine lives and landed on my feet like I mostly do.

One night we stayed in the guide’s little mountain village. The women cooked a simple meal and we had dinner with the man of his clan. We all ate couscous from one big pot and put our spoons back in the pot when we made a pause. At night we slept under the open sky with a fantastic view on the stars and by miracle got some raindrops on our heads. The next day we got up very early and stumbled up a dark mountain path to see the sun rise above cloudy mountains. At some stage during the day we saw Touaregs slowly rising behind the next hill, riding their camels in perfect harmony coming to us. It truly was a mystic sight I will never forget. 

From Tamanrasset we flew back north to Constantine, a rather dirty and hot town. Next morning at four we continued our journey with a southbound train to Touggourt. At eleven it was so hot the train had to pause in a little village. The heat was so intense that the reflection of the sun on the tarmac would nearly burn you. We took a hotel room for a few hours just to take a lukewarm shower. In the late afternoon the train continued to Touggourt. We stayed in a hotel as the only guests and had the pool to ourselves. It was fifty five degrees Celsius (hundred and thirty one degrees Fahrenheit). My dad loved it. He hardly ever swims, because he is rather thin and gets cold very easily. For me it was to hot. It made me dizzy, maybe also because I was getting sick. 

Next day we took the bus to El Oued. We had the front seats, but I couldn’t really enjoy the view of the sand dunes that would sometime block the road, as I had a fever. At some point the bus had a breakdown and all passengers had to leave it. I stayed in my seat. That was one of the lesser travel moments that also belong to travelling. El Oued was kind of spooky to us. There were a lot of military around with roadblocks with sand bags and big automatic guns, a bit exiting but also frightening. All women had their full body covered with a veil, leaving only one eye to see. Around El Oued we saw the typical kind of desert you imagine by seeing movies and books with beautiful big sand dunes. We found some desert rose and I made a picture of my dad sitting on a huge sand dune all alone and later enlarged this photo for his birthday and wrote “Le Penseur” below it as it reminded me of the sculpture by Rodin.

Quite contrary to the women of El Oued we encountered a blond lady in a little travel agency who seemed to speak French fluently, at least to my ears. Between two sentences she said “uuuh” in such a way I directly heard she was Dutch and told her so. It was a funny moment so far away from home. We also met three young men, two Germans and one Dutch, who were travelling with a Unimog army vehicle. Unimog is an impressive truck by German Mercedes-Daimler and I later found out the name is an acronym for ‘Universal-Motor-Ger?t’. They had carefully planned their Sahara crossing with all imaginable equipment including four spare tires, two big barrels of water and one big barrel of fuel. Unfortunately their tires were of bad quality and didn’t stand the rocky desert and they had already destroyed three of them. As they couldn’t get any new spare tires, they had to terminate their crossing and drive back very slowly. From El Oued we flew to Algiers and then on to Tunis, this time with Tunis Air. We continued by train to Monastir where we had to acclimatise to the Ballermann mass tourism again before flying home.  

I made two more fantastic journeys with my father, both to South America. Even though I was born in Africa, grew up in Europe and love mystic Asia, South America is my favourite continent of all, so it only seems fair to write a separate article about those two trips. I also travelled with my mother, totally different experience, and want to write about that too.

In recent years we reversed the roles and my father or both my parents started joining me and my own family on several occasions. They visited me when I did my traineeship in Costa Rica, joined our family vacations in La Gomera and Sardinia and participated in yoga retreats in Mallorca, organised by me and my wife. Some time ago my brother and me invited my father to join us. Nothing fancy, just a weekend on the Dutch Wadden Sea Island Terschelling, but very nice nonetheless! Who knows how traveling will evolve post-Corona? 

P.S. If you enjoyed reading my article, don’t forget to like, comment or even share it! Take a look at my other articles down here and follow me if you are interested any upcoming articles! I try to publish one each Friday. Photos by myself and my father Woet Gianotten.

? Bjorn Gianotten 2020