2007

students' stories 2007

GS A Story from Life  As a child I always was dreaming to travel through the whole world. Seeing different landscapes, meeting people and getting a wider spread mind was certainly a key issue. My families background is very traditional and they never moved farer than 500 km around were they were born. My father was in fact so busy with his job, there was no time to go travelling.  Right on the day when I became 18 years old, I bought myself a huge backpack and a ticket for the train to travel through Europe. My parents could not understand that I was so eager to see the world or just looking for new adventure. Nearly every year I took more or less a time out for 4 – 5 weeks to travel through different part of the world.  When I meet my later husband, he was also a passionate traveller; we decided to start our outback journey. We hired a jeep and all sorts of survival equipment and headed off to the dessert through Alaska, Canada, parts of Africa, Asia and of course Australia. To sleep in a tent with nearly minus two degree or walking through the forest in Canada with plenty of rain certainly was not always fun. Hundreds of thousands of flies in Alaska and sometimes bears in front of you – I had to handle all these situations.  12 years ago we decided to invite two friends of ours to be part of our next journey to Canada. We started in Port Headland east coast of Canada and the route lead us through 8 territories to the west coast British Colombia. Unfortunately the weather turned out as not as good and it was raining for nearly two weeks. But I decided to go as we always did, use the tent no matter what the weather looks like. Because otherwise we had to choose a total different route and we had missed out all outstanding part of this beautiful country. Our friends coped well the first couple of days. We had to sit in the car several hours per day to keep on going and we couldn’t really dry our clothes and tents. The fifth day I decided with all the others to do a mountain tour. Mount McKinley offered an outstanding scenery written in one of my books.  One of our friends, a single lady ( sort of sensible girls ) turned out to became a real problem. She couldn’t cope with all the environment and she always expected that I should play her personal tour guide. During the mountain tour I realised she was not fit at all, very slow and had some breathing problems. After 10 km walk I took her backpack to make it easier for her. But in the end she couldn’t do that anymore.   I told her she should go back to the car because three of us were focused to finish the tour. But she was too afraid to find the way back without us and in the end I guided her back. In the evening on the campground this particular lady vanished in the evening. She was supposed to go to the toilet but she couldn’t find her way back to us.  So once again I was looking for her everywhere like a kindy teacher. The two others by this time were also already upset. The key issue was that the lady couldn’t get along with the camping, was struggling with all the strange environment and to travel on her one responsibility and of course the lack of language. But the worst was that she messed up our whole journey through on of the outstanding part of the world and she did not understand an single part of it.  That was the first and the last time that I took people on any kind of journey und sadly realised that some people should not travel so much. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 200%;">