I was born in Elkhart, Indiana, USA, but I was on my way to Indonesia by the time I could walk and I haven’t been back since. My family crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, and then traveled on a Polish freighter through the Suez Canal to Singapore and onto Surabaya, Indonesia. Three of my first four years were spent in Java, and maybe that is why I feel a sense of recognition and homecoming whenever I return to Asia. We left Asia in 1965, as  Sukharno’s left leaning government fell to the military regime of
Suhaurto, and the usual suspects - the Christians, the Chinese, and the foreigners - were being targeted.  Even before I finished high school I was back on the road, traveled around Europe with my friend Doug at the age of sixteen. I was back the next year, hitchhiking around the Mediterranean, and spent my 18th birthday on a bus in the desert near the Moroccan/Algerian border. When I was 18 I hitchhiked west out of Winnipeg, to the coast and Baja California, and island-hopped through the South
Pacific to New Zealand and Australia.  I worked in Perth long enough to replenish my funds and in 1982 returned to Indonesia for the first time in seventeen years. On that trip I backpacked through Bali, Java and Sumatra, crossed into Malaysia and went out to Perhentian island when it was still uninhabited, Koh Samui in Thailand while it was still inhabitable, Khao San Road in Bangkok when it only had four guest houses, and Burma before the military stifled the aspirations of that beautiful country.

 Twice I had been on my way to India: in 1979 I ran out of money in Istanbul and thought better of it; and in Bangkok I was bogged down by ill health and forced to return to Canada.  I finally made it there in 1985, on a trip that took me overland through central China to Tibet, then across the Himalayas to Kathmandu, Nepal.

The first thing I saw when I crossed the border into India at Saunali
was a bicycle in the back of a rickshaw. The second thing I saw was the bicyclist dead in the middle of the road. It is this intensity of experience that makes India unlike any other place, and I was fascinated by it.  On that trip I spent three months studying Tibetan Buddhism in Dharamsala, and when my visa expired I trekked around Pakistan and the Hindu Kush for another three months.

Many more trips to India and other parts of Asia have followed, and they have been especially enjoyable since meeting Katheryn and traveling with her in 2001. I now have the great good fortune of what I love with the one I love. May we all be so lucky.