The first time I went abroad, I was three months old. Dad, mom and me were going to Karpathos, Greece, and I slept all the way on the flight there. A year later, we went again. That’s when I learned to love olives.
When I was five, we went to Zimbabwe. My mom was working with Zimbabwe then, and just before we landed I claimed that I saw a giraffe being chased by a lion through the airplane window. I might have been a child with a lively imagination, but later, when we drove south from Harare to Cape Town, we went through a national park and I yet again claimed to see an animal. This time, it was an elephant in a bush. The adults in the car didn’t believe me. My dad thought that since I was listening to Astrid Lindgren stories in my walkman, I couldn’t possibly be able to see animals at the same time. But I insisted, so finally they drove back. And there it was. A huge African elephant, eating away at an entire bush.
We also visited Victoria Falls during that trip. A group of small monkeys lived outside our hotel, and one afternoon I got some bread crums to give to them. They were cute and happy for my bread, but when they had taken everything, there was one monkey that wanted more. He must have thought that I still had some bread in my hand, because he grabbed it and bit my finger. He was probably as chocked as I was of the drops of blood that started flowing. I got it cleaned and it didn’t get infected or anything, but still I sometimes think that I caught something from the monkey that day. A subtle monkey disease that sometimes takes hold of me and makes me do strange and crazy things. It’s nice to have something to blame when people look at me strangely.
And that’s how my childhood continued. With a mom who worked for the Swedish international development agency and a dad who was a travel journalist until I was 17, I got used to traveling as other kids get used to visiting their grandparents on holidays. At 9, we went to South Africa and Botswana and parts of my journal became the first of my writings to be published in a newspaper, included in a piece dad wrote about traveling with children. Later, parts of my journal was included in pieces from France, Italy, Vietnam, Norway, Iceland and New York. And at 11, I lived with my mom in Tanzania for a little more than a year, uprooting my sense of home even more.
So maybe it isn’t that strange, this impulse that I have. When I don’t know what to do, I go traveling. That I automatically think of strange and foreign places when I feel the need for clarity and inspiration. And that it comes naturally to me to write about my experiences on the road. Because, when you think about it, that’s how I was raised.
Katja Malmborg 