This page is part of the preserved legacy section of bauck.com, which has been online since 1998. Some legacy pages date back to the beginning, while others were added later and evolved over time with the site and my life. They remain online as part of the blog’s long continuity and history.
A lifelong passion for travel
From early childhood, travel has been in my DNA. Madeira Island, West Berlin (with a wall running through the city at the time!), and Yugoslavia were in my vocabulary as far back as I can remember.
When I moved to Brussels at the age of 11, spontaneous road trips to all corners of Western and Central Europe became just a normal thing for me. I guess once you are bitten by the travel bug, you never recover from it.
People, cultures, food, drinks, and all sorts of local traditions and peculiarities are what make travel so fascinating to me. Experiencing a new place broadens your horizons and will inevitably teach you something you didn’t know. As a founder of HotelOnline, I have managed to combine work and passion in the best way possible
Business travel has never been just business for me. Whenever I visit a new place, I do my very best to add personal time for exploration, and feel cheated whenever I can’t manage to do that.
Europe
Living at the heart of Western Europe from 1989 to 1993, most places were just a road trip away. Having a diplomatic passport at the time, courtesy of my father’s job, made the continent even more accessible in the years before border controls were removed with the Schengen agreement.
Childhood memories such as standing at a border post between West and East Germany at night, as my father was being implored by a commander not to use his diplomatic privileges to enter due to “sudden changes in the political situation”, obviously stick. Little did we know that night that Honnecker had requested a military intervention by the Soviets. His call wasn’t heeded, which later led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. A few months later, I was in Berlin, leasing a hammer and a chisel to knock a piece of that infamous structure.
Driving along the entire southern Spanish coastline when the place was a backwater with little tourism and the kind of roads you would expect to find in remote parts of Venezuela today was a dive into a world that no longer exists, at least not in Western Europe. I still love Spain, and Andalucia in particular, but today, that is a modern, economically vibrant part of Europe with state-of-the-art infrastructure. Our road trip in 1991 also included surviving a Basque terrorist attack in Pamplona on the way back, so when later in life, I drove a boss crazy with my fearlessness when on business travel, I just told him that I was a product of my upbringing!
The year after, when on one of the longer annual summer road trips, my father and I were supposed to go to Italy after some UN meetings he had in Geneva. With great memories of Yugoslavia, we however decided to go a bit further east and become some of the first people to visit newly independent Slovenia and Croatia (the latter at war at the time). Of course, we tried to stick to the parts that were not affected by the conflict, and visiting the peaceful parts of countries at war means you get to stay at luxury hotels at giveaway prices. Driving up to Zagreb after some amazing days in Istria, however, we found ourselves driving through some bombed-out town, finally realizing that we had accidentally gotten ourselves into the warzone when we got to a UN checkpoint outside Karlovac. That meant that we were exiting the areas we were not supposed to enter, though. The warning came too late, I guess! 😂
The other road trips during those years were far less dramatic but nonetheless epic. Getting to explore places like Poland, Czechia, Hungary, and many, many more before they became big tourist destinations was one of the blessings of my young days!
Africa
When I first landed in Kenya in November 2002, that was my first time in Sub-saharan Africa. That was for an internship that was supposed to last for a year. It is now 2023, and I am still in Nairobi!
We were two Norwegians, both on internships through AIESEC, sponsored by Norec. After three days in Nairobi, we were already on the road to explore Eldoret and Nakuru. After two weeks, we were backpacking to Kisumu on a trip that took us through the Obunga slums, open-air markets, and a police station (tourists sometimes attract the wrong kind of attention). After less than two months, we were on a bus to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania on Christmas Eve, and from there, on a ferry to the magical spice island of Zanzibar!
Throughout 2003, we went backpacking across Kenya to places like Mombasa, Malindi, and Lamu. I guess I fell in love with the country, and the opportunities there, so I stayed on for two more years, running my own consultancy business from Nairobi. Those years also took me traveling to Ethiopia, Egypt, and South Africa. and yeah, Zanzibar again!
I eventually returned to Norway where I ended up handling sales and distribution in Africa for a Norwegian technology company called Vyke. With Angola, Uganda, South Africa, and Kenya among my main markets, I was set for more work-related travel to exotic places. I also used those years to travel extensively in Norway and Europe.
Norway may be one of the happiest countries in the world, etc., etc., but the place gets pretty boring in the long run, not to mention too cold for my taste. In 2010, I helped Norwegian entrepreneur Jon Bøhmer raise funds for his solar energy project Kyoto Energy and moved back to Nairobi to help launch the project commercially. After traveling across Kenya to build distribution channels for six months, the project collapsed as Bøhmer had spent the money much faster than planned, leaving me stranded. Luckily, I was headhunted by a Greek company called Upstream to handle some of their most promising accounts in Africa, and I was set for an exciting job with four years of intense travel!
The years in Upstream took my passion for travel to another level, crisscrossing the continent for four years, two of which I spent living in Nigeria. The last year of the job also saw me effectively moving to the Democratic Republic of Congo, although I never completely settled down there before eventually moving on to my next challenge. Other than that, I spent those years commuting between Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Gabon, Mozambique, South Africa, and Burkina Faso + some few others. With many prolonged stays, I also got the chance to travel and explore, hiring cars over weekends to keep expanding my horizons.
Beyond exciting trips to exotic places, my years of business travel in Africa have also included Indiana Jones-like moments, such as getting arrested by military police in Angola and getting evacuated from Kinshasa at 3:30 am by Bulgarian mercenaries as the city was exploding in riots!
After going full time on HotelOnline, back then a side hustle turned into a risky entrepreneurship project, I have added a few more countries to the list, including Rwanda, Senegal, and Tunisia, in addition to further in-depth exploration of many of the countries previously visited.
Asia and the Middle East
Asia was unexplored to me until 2009, when my colleague in Vyke, Deepak, was getting married in India. There was obviously no way I could or would turn down that invitation, so off I went. While a friend’s wedding, not to mention an Indian wedding in general, is an unmissable experience in itself, I wasn’t going to stick to just Mumbai. Being more adventurous than most of my friends, I gave up on getting a travel companion for a three-week trip to India outside the holiday season and went on my own. One week of wedding parties was a great start, but with an additional two weeks off, I went exploring Udaipur, Jaipur, Delhi, Agra (Taj Mahal), Delhi and Varanasi. Connecting through Dubai, I stopped over there too for my first visit to a city where I’ve since become a regular.
My second visit to India was my first business trip after going full-time on entrepreneurship. I had just left Upstream and was meeting our technology partners, eZee Technosys, in Surat. Surat, a “small town” (in Indian terms) of only 7M people, is home to a lot of textile industry and is also the place where 70% of the world’s diamonds are cut. The immigration officer in Mumbai gave me a very funny look when I told her where I was going, and she noticed my Congolese residence permit! Returning to India later the same year, I was keen to venture further off the beaten track, and added the impressive city of Gwalior to my list of places visited.
Norway has a vibrant entrepreneurship community, and when you do business in Africa, you stand out there. For some reason, that got my business partner Endre and me an invitation to join the business delegation accompanying Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg on an official visit to China. The opportunity to be featured as a “Norwegian” business in front of hundreds of Chinese investors was obviously too great to resist, so off we went to Beijing and Shanghai!
My parents being the obvious origin of my travel bug, we have a family tradition of meeting in all sorts of exotic places, with a particular affinity for Christmas in the Middle East. The same year, the fairytale Sultanate of Oman was the destination!
We repeated the Middle East stunt the year after, in the oasis city of Al Ain in the Emirates. In early 2020, when the world started fretting about a certain virus that had started spreading from China, we were lucky enough to get out on a last trip before the world started shutting down, touring the resplendent island of Sri Lanka!
Family travel involves some sacrifices, but staying less than 5 km from where the bridge scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was shot, without visiting the actual site, was the ultimate one. The whole trip, however, was spectacular and just in time. We barely managed to get out before the world plunged into the pandemic panic, and international flights were grounded, but the memories of that trip at least kept us sane through Covid!
The pandemic was obviously a setback in so many ways, both for the travel industry in general and for the ability to get out and explore. Not least, it was a major blow for HotelOnline, but failure was never an option in our case, and with almost super-human determination, we made it through, and emerged stronger than ever from the crisis!
After two years of not ticking off any new countries, it was a heck of a thrill to add another Indiana Jones site to my list as we visited Petra on a spectacular trip to Jordan in 2022! As a reminder of the pandemic that had ravaged the world of travel for two years, we almost got stuck on the way back due to some residual restrictions into Kenya, removed two weeks later. It went well, but rather safe than sorry, my wife and I wasted time and money on a totally unnecessary covid PCR test before resuming our pre-Covid family tradition of Christmas in the south of Spain later the same year.
As I write this, the calendar says 2023. Three trips to Zanzibar, including an epic road trips to Dar es Salaam, and three visits to the Kenyan Coast. Next new country? Only time will tell, so watch this space!