rought up on inflight meals and permanently jetlagged throughout my school years, as a kid my only idea of a family visit invariably involved two or three airplane connections. The smell of airplane exhaust clouds many of my childhood memories.

The tiny speck of high-tech industry amidst an ocean of the polar taiga where we lived felt like an island - everyone routinely called the rest of the country the Continent. There were no rail tracks or highways, so everything was flown in. Shopping for clothes was done once a year in Moscow. I remember my Mum bringing groceries from her business trips to the next city on a small commuter turbo-prop. I was a skinny skip of a lad and she would always let me have her protion of Aeroflot's trademark chicken and rice. Her effort did pay off as I have grown to be 6'1".

At the tender age of four, I was flown across seven time zones to meet my grandparents for the first time. My grandpa, a military surgeon, had spent 25 years cutting people's bellies whilst bringing up his three children wherever his country would send him, from Vienna to Kamchatka. His welcome gifts to me were a USSR Travellers' Society badge and an illustrated 4-language phrasebook for Wehrmacht officers, a war booty from Germany. He then got down to teaching me the capitals of the world from his old-fashioned hard-cover travel books. Many years later when he was already dead, I realized it was a rite of initiation into the Secret Society of Restless Travellers.

Unbeknownst to me, the initiation began bearing fruit. It all started off quite innocuously and even without my will. Blessed with summer-long vacations, my parents would take me in tag on their travels. "Lunch in Kaunas, dinner in Riga, then kick back on the lakeside in a national park" - was their idea of roadtrips. My Dad was in charge of the barbecue while my Mum took care of our cultural nourishment. That way, with a grilled steak sandwich in hand, we moved the length and width of "one sixth of the Earth" as our country was called in those days.

We could not travel abroad but there was enough diversity domestically: from Tallinn's medieval towers and the mandarin groves on the Black Sea coast to the snow-capped peaks of the Caucasus and the shamanic beauty of the Lake Baikal, not to forget the sunkissed beaches of the Crimea and Jurmala's pine-covered dunes. Visiting literary places has been my mother's professional penchant, and so all the names that strike a chord in every Russian's heart were on our travel map: Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana and Tyutchev's Ovstyug, Turgenev's Spasskoe-Lutovinovo and Pushkin's Mikhailovskoe...

As a part of my school's tradition, on the last school summer students would go on a 2-month trip to the North and the South of the country. My class went canoeing on Lithuanian lakes and rookie-level mountain-climbing in the majestic North Caucasus. The cozily paddedlife in the Soviet Union had just over a year to go before disappearing for good in the lawless chaos of Yeltsin's Russia.

The two teachers that travelled with us faced a formidable task of holding a bunch of unruly teenagers onto a busy schedule of cultural and physical activities as hormones and a new sense of freedom from parents played havoc in our young minds. It was then that somewhere between Lithuanian castles and Caucasian gorges, I lost my virginity in a mountaineers' hut.

After 18, it became my turn to take people on vacations. My every student summer I would show Japanese tourists the best of Russian culture and nature. It was a fantastic job: sailing mighty Siberian rivers beyond the Arctic circle or touring the museums and palaces of St. Petersburg, going on taiga safaris or showing Moscow' sunbridled nightlife.

I was expected to be the font of information about European art history, geological formation of Siberian lakes, Arctic peoples' ways and lore, menus of Georgian restaurants or how hydroelectric power stations work - in all the minute detail. Doing my own research at night and then pouring all the freshly gained widsom on my tourists in the daytime, I got to know my country inside out - as well as very handsomely rewarded for that.

From my very first pay I bought a pair of handmade cowboy shoes, a camcorder and a Kodak camera - much coveted imported items that had just recently become available to common Russians. As it goes, nothing is by chance - I did my picture-taking debut when escorting a famous Japanese cameraman Yuji Ishii on a tour of Russia. We travelled many thousands kilometres together, he - eternalising the country's beauty on his ridiculously expensive cameras, me - zealously having myself snapshot in front of every worthy sight.

In those days colour photography was expensive and normally reserved for family portraits and special occasions. Taking pictures of trees and houses would have been deemed a waste of expensive film. Watching him tirelessly running around day and night hunting for best sights and views, waiting patiently for the perfect shot of a colourful market vendor or a pack of stray dogs, made a deep lasting impression on me.

My last student summer I won a Japanese government scholarship to go to study for a year in Japan. I landed in Narita after my longest non-stop flight light-headed and drunk on my first taste of foreign adventure. Four years of intensive Japanese studies made everything seem a deja-vu, but I was exposed to every bit of Japanese I saw or heard. Already overdosing on new experiences and impressions, I went around the country visiting all my Japanese friends I had made through my studies and work.

Japan's gentle countryside, bustling cities and exquisite art aesthetics were a revelation. I saw landscapes so different from whatever I had seen before. The baffling diversity of regional cuisines was quite a handful after the drab Soviet diet. It was then that the seeds sowed earlier by Yuji sprouted and I started dabbling at nature and architecture photography. I saw so many beautiful trees and houses that it made me feel like tellng about them to others. I made friends with the owners of a local film-developing shop and shot rolls after rolls of the views of my beloved Japan.

In Osaka, I lived in a colourful community of over 50 nationalities at a foreign students' dormitory. We had a lot of fun, all hanging out together, speaking a baffling mix of languages. Friendships and relationships formed as we discovered our own selves as well as a variety of very different cultures - from Micronesia and Vietnam to Uruguay and Australia. Quite unbeknownst to me, such an exposure in a very liberal environment has had a profound impact on my life attitudes.

At the end of my time in Japan I put together whatever money I saved to go to see Hong Kong while still a crown colony. Headlines were prophesying gloom and doom with the forthcoming Chinese takeover and I went for what I imagined would be a tearful goodbye to the Jewel of the Orient.

So badly I wanted to make it there that, strapped for money, I hitch-hiked from my dorm in Osaka to the British Embassy in Tokyo to get the visa, getting rides from a travelling circus, a limoful of big time gangsters and a hunky truckie with an eye on young fresh meat.

One day later the jumbo jet, my first ever, descended to the good old Kai Tak airport famously right over the surrounding skyscrapers. As if reading my excited mind, Tina Turner was growling on the PA system 'You're simply the best, better than all the rest!'

I was young, vegan, shaven, pierced and completely enchanted with the excesses of capitalist market economy of which Hong Kong is the paragon. Soaking in the vibes of the curious mix of China and Britain in a lush sub-tropical setting of towering skyscrapers and smelly fresh markets, I was walking on air in my steel-toe Doc Martens. Finally this was the kind of exotic adventure from my childhood books.

From the vibrant exuberance of Hong Kong I went on straight to Bangkok for my share of Thailand's typical assault on all senses. I had become a true travel junkie looking for a bigger, huger kick. I had no idea what I was eating, smelling, touching, it all felt so surreally wonderful and intoxicating, I was gorging on the sheer excitement of heady aromas wafting through the sultry heat, elephants on the pavement, clouds of incense smoke from the street altars, weird-looking fruits and always smiling, comely Thais. I seem to have found my perfect fix, the ultimate drug of journeys to distant shores.

Time to leave came too soon and I climbed in the dimly-lit air-conditioned belly of the 747 to get whisked away back to Japan. However, in a fateful sign, a typhoon emergency diverted my flight back to Bangkok. In hindsight, it strikes as a part of that intricate, barely perceptible tapestry of seemingly unimportant events and impressions that stitches together my travels.

 

Little did I know then that I would get my first real job in Thailand and the country would so grow on me that I was "adopted" by a Thai family and got a Thai name. Just like in my Japanese studies before, I immersed myself in the culture and language to the point of stopping just one step from becoming Thai. When I boarded the plane on my first visit home in 3 years, I could see European tourists through Thai eyes - pasty skin, strangely big and thin noses, "discoloured" hair and irises. 'So that's why the Cantonese call White people 'ghosts'!" They all looked like clones, 'How do they tell one from another?' That was a reverse culture shock.

Bangkok proved a hedonistic bitch of a city - chaotic and sometimes unsightly, yet immensely full of addictive charm. All the city temptations and creature comforts notwithstanding, every three months I would travel to a new country in the region. Manila and the Taj, Sumatra and Halong Bay, Malacca and the Angkor Wat - that corner of Asia is like the proverbial box of gourmet chocolates. I was collecting cities and countries like others collect shoes, CD's or antiques.

Plunging into exotic smells, sounds of foreign speech, and unfamiliar vibrations; then at times of leasure in Bangkok savouring memories of visited places, sampled dishes, seen sights - an innocent hobby had turned into my sweetest obsession. My passport became so chock-a-block with visas and stamps that when I went to visit my parents in Russia, the KGB mistook me for a drug courier but fortunately they came to their senses on time.

Six exciting years I lived in the lovely city of Amsterdam where I learnt the language and became a naturalised Dutch citizen. One hundred and sixty resident nationalities make sure that this big cozy village has a bit from every corner of the world. Even neighbourhood supermarket stocks coconut milk, ostrich steaks and pandan leaves - a true paradise for a food junkie like me. Schiphol Airport, the Great Springboard To The World, and cheap car hire make travelling from here an affordable delight.

 

Having seen the insides of the advertising business I don't buy into commercials but I have visited quite a few places because I saw them on Travel Channel or in an Eyewitness Guide. I hold those two responsible for the fact that all my disposable income is spent in foreign countries.

 

As it always happens to me, I went through yet another cultural metamorphosis - I have become one of those Driving Dutchmen whose blue-and-yellow licence plate you will see wherever there is a road link from Holland, be it an abandoned driveway in Liechtenstein’s alpine heights or a steaming hot tarmac in the midst of an arid Moroccan desert valley.

If they cannot travel overland they will bust their last hard-earned Euro on a plane ticket to some weird destination. It seems almost a law of nature: no matter how far you wander off the beaten track in the oddest, most remote corner of the world, there is always someone to say 'Hoi, meneer!' to. After all, Dutch is one of the few languages where the concept of wanderlust is expressed in one widely understood word, reislust.

Having lived in so many cultures I hope I have learnt the best of each. I put my trips together with the Dutch knack for planning, Swiss efficiency, Japanese attention for detail, Thai pleasure-loving and Russian inspiration. When all of those are balanced out, the result is effortless and close to perfection.

Investing months of research lining up the trip pays off with pleasurably intensive trips full of fun and hedonstic enjoyment.

Apart from obvious benefits of convenience, learning the language of the country that you visit opens your eyes to obvious yet profound truths about the humankind. Pimsleur's excellent audio courses are often my first step into a new language.

Hundreds of thousands of kilometres and three decades into my travel quest, it is both an awe-inspiring and humbling experience. Right was the poet saying, 'There's too much beauty upon this Earth for lonely men to bear'.

 

 In Thai Theravada Buddhism there is an exercise called sin khuan hay: one gives away their most prized possessions for the spirit to become liberated. More than just admiring the beauty of God's creation on my own, I feel the need to share my joy with others. Like one can become an endless source of love simply by channelling it onto everyone around, I realize my mission in getting across the message of this world's immense beauty and its fragility to as many people as possible.