Who’s Marco
it takes a long time to count every albatross nest on Midway Atoll!
I became a tour operator almost by accident. If 21 year old me had stuck to plan I’d have been an architect. Instead, after three years of community college, and 3 majors, I ditched California for Washington with the intention of establishing residency and studying architecture at UW. Meanwhile I worked in the photo department of a department store and thought not a wit about applying to UW. Instead I had the opportunity to travel to South America for 7 months, visiting all but 2 countries, and I never looked back!
I’m jumping ahead though. I’m told my first international trip was to Mexico when I was still in diapers! I got heat stroke. Later there were annual month-long family summer vacations, usually spent driving around the southwestern states and camping. When I was 15 we spent the summer in London and I got a taste of European travel. At 16 I was helping drive a 3/4 tonne truck & camper around Mexico on the annual family vacation. At 21 I took my first solo trip, to New York, where I squeezed in 9 broadway shows during a 7-night stay.
In my late 20’s, with my husband Mike, we would spend most of a year living in the UK. That really kick-started us on our international travels (he’d traveled even more than I had as a child, including living abroad for 3 years). We had more time than money so our early international travels together were independent and on a budget. Along the way my restaurant job morphed into being an event/wedding planner. Then, at 35, the restaurant closed… so I left for Ecuador to finally learn Spanish (my mother’s first language, which I had not been allowed to learn as a child) in an intensive program. I skipped a week of classes to play hooky on a discounted tour to the Galápagos Islands. Back in California it was time to find a job again, and that’s when I stumbled across a newspaper want ad (remember those?) from a company called Galapagos Travel. I had none of the requirements of the job, but I was also the only candidate who’d actually been to the Galapagos. I started 2 days later!
Right from the start I was, I suspect in equal measure, a thorn in the side of the owner (I had no interest in being an office assistant), and a blessing because I would take on any job that needed doing. After 7 years the owner moved away leaving me in charge. 7 more years passed before Mike and I bought him out.
Mike’s and my own travels occasionally turned into new offerings for Galapagos Travel: Cuba, Midway Atoll, Papua New Guinnea, Easter Island… Other destinations we might not have thought of if not for offers presented to us by other specialty tour operators - the Russian Far East, Norwegian High Arctic, Greenland and the Canadian Northwest Passage, Melanesia, Indonesia, Madagascar, and even Central Amercia.
Now, 30 years later I look back on an unexpected career in the travel industry. Galapagos Travel lives on under fabulous new ownership, my two amazing coworkers are retired, and Mike and I keep traveling on our own.
Retirement is good!
Travel is by nature an adventure – it is putting oneself outside of your everyday life, to see and experience and learn about new things. With that in mind I have traveled on more planes, busses, boats, canoes, trains, trucks, horses, motorbikes, bikes and ox carts than I can count.
I’ve stayed in everything from the very occasional luxury hotel or small ship, to converted research vessels, local homes, simple hotels, tent camps, school dormitories, B&Bs, $4 a night shacks on the beach (that were overpriced), to bamboo huts in the jungle.
I’ve… carried a 6’ Massai spear onto an airplane;
• been taken off a bus by machine gun toting soldiers to have my pack searched (always keep your vitamins in the original packaging);
• been smuggled into Cambodia by a tour operator under the false guise of Red Cross inspector;
• volunteered for U.S. Fish and Wildlife on Midway Atoll counting albatross;
• stood at the edge of a molton lava flow as it reached the sea in Hawaii,
• peddled my bicycle between San Francisco and Los Angeles (6 times);
• driven a motorhome in Mexico at 16;
• eaten things for breakfast in Asia that I wouldn’t consider for dinner at home;
• gone to the police at 2am for help finding a room in the southern-most city in the world;
• had food poisoning in 8 or 9 countries (to be fair once was right here in California);
• landed on Elephant Island where Shackelton’s men were stranded;
• experienced 3 solar eclipses;
• had X-rays in a small-town hospital in Madagascar;
• flown in a military plane where the copilot served Tang mid-flight, and a monkey roamed free in the cabin;
• been completely ignored in Turkey where they thought I was a local guide;
• slept on the ice in Antarctica, where is never really got dark and the sounds of whales nearby kept us awake;
• learned to almost like coffee when I travel (but still never at home);
• rented motorbikes in Greece;
• snorkeled with a baby sea lion riding on my back,
• watched out the plane window as one of the jet engines was engulfed in flames,
• been stung by a Portuguese Manowar;
• swum with whale sharks;
• eaten live Lemon Ants, dried Watrass (still don’t know what that was!), and fresh Piranha;
• been striped to my underwear on the side of the road, rolled in the dust and had flames passed over my body to burn off buffalo bean hairs;
• purchased Turkish rugs our first day in the country, which then had to be lugged around the rest of the trip;
• watched sunrise through the standing Maoi on Easter Island,
• drunk more pisco that absolutely necessary…
