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Eric Magnusson is here to connect with new people and old friends. He would especially like to meet writers, travelers, and all people taking Christian faith and God's glory seriously.
"In the heart of every man, there is one small corner which is Italian" - Luigi Barzini
I grew up in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, a few hours' drive from Venice, between the Mediterranean Sea ...
I learned boating in this small Mediterranean city
... and the southern side of the Alps. These are some of the mountain peaks my father took me to on weekends in high school. I love mountains!

Yeah, this fantastic landscape is REAL!
NORWAY: Lofoten Islands in northern Norway are so intensely beautiful that I didn't want to end my vacation and go home. I had to stop my car at almost every bend in the road and take a picture of yet another spectacular view. That's Norway for you, in a nutshell! Thousands of spectacular views everywhere.

Copenhagen, Denmark
I lived in Sweden, 15 miles from Copenhagen. -- I love the Danish language almost as much as Italian. People in Denmark are very sociable and they love brightly colored buildings, similarly as the Italians. The picture shows a harbor street in central Copenhagen.

With some of my Vietnamese Christian friends

Eric lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city straddling the Mississippi River, in a metropolitan area of 3 million people
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Get your own map and more at BlingyBlob.com

At a mountain lake in Glacier National Park, Montana, USA, in April 2008.
"I learned that sometimes the best trips in life and travel are not those on roads less traveled, but those without visible roads at all."
By Eric Magnusson (Eric Explorer)

How I became an adventure traveler

How did I start my lifelong love for travel adventures? Well, I can tell you it was completely unplanned. It all began with a sandstorm in France that changed my life. Here is the true story what life lessons God taught me through my first adventure trip, here is my traveler's tale from Africa.
When I was 18, the summer I graduated from high school, I stayed with my uncle in Rome. After a few weeks of fun, I left for France to visit friends from our high school dorm in Paris. You could say I was a very neat, well-behaved kind of young man, but my heart was burning secretly for big travel adventures. At that time I hadn't been outside Europe yet, but I had some travel experience from traveling alone in Italy, France, and Germany the years before.
"I got so overwhelmed by a sudden yearning to see Africa..." While I was in the city of Arcachon in southern France, we were suddenly hit by a terrible sandstorm brought by winds from Sahara. Desert sand blanketed the entire city, it even penetrated my clothes. I had never experienced a sand storm before, let alone fine sand from Africa, and in a European city at that. I got so overwhelmed by a sudden yearning to see Africa that I decided to fly to North Africa on a one-way air ticket. Italians even have a name for such intense longing for Africa: they call it "mal d'Africa," sickness for Africa.
"I'm stranded alone in Africa. How will I return to Europe on $60?" I flew from Bordeaux to Tangiers, Morocco, with enormous thrill and expectations, but with only $60 in travelers checks. That was all money I had left in my pocket. I said to myself: "I'm stranded alone in Africa. How will I return to Europe on $60?" I had no idea how to cross North Africa to come back to Italy. I had jumped into a river, so to say, and I'd better learn to swim at once. But I was young and eager to test myself, so I decided to just do it. Outside Tangiers I started to hitchhike, which I had never done before. At that time Lonely Planet guidebooks didn't exist yet, so I had no practical info on my way. I had no planned itinerary, just an objective to hitchhike across North Africa all the way to Tunis, which is located close to Italy across the Mediterranean. At that time, I wasn't a Christian yet.
Morocco's cities and landscapes were much more exotic than I had imagined. The intensely red mountains and old cities with their beautiful buildings and large bazars were spectacular. It was quite a sight to see camels walking down a street and peek their heads through open store windows! You wonder how I passed the nights? I bought a cheap second-hand djelaba, which is a Moroccan dress in form of a woolen robe with a hood, and slepl like many other people that summer: in the open air, wrapped in my soft djelaba.

One of the most romantic and exotic places in Morocco is the incredible red oasis shown above, called Qsar Ait Ben Haddoo. Because of its location at the western edge of Sahara, it served as a stop for desert caravans carrying gold, ivory and salt. The place looks like some fantasy castle out of a fiction story from the Thousand and One Nights. (Parts of the movies "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Jesus of Nazareth" were filmed there.) I also loved sleeping in Sahara under the stars, with a flat stone as my pillow. So, that's how I discovered that I loved travel adventure - and I wanted more of it!

It took me weeks to hitchhike through the mountains and deserts of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. In Sahara there was not much road traffic, so I had to hitchhike with caravans, riding on camelback. (My travel tip: I connected with caravans at camel markets in each oasis.) Sometimes a caravan changed course in the desert and I had to wait for days at a water well for another caravan to pass by and give me a ride. (Deserts are known to be a good place for self-examination and soul-searching, as I found out myself, too.)

I entered southern Tunisia via Sahara's largest dune desert, the Great Erg Oriental, got sick in a small oasis but was taken care of by a Moslem tribal leader and his family (my "good Samaritans"), rode with a camel caravan along Sahara's largest "lake" of solid salt (Shott El Djerid), reached the fabled island of Djerba on the Mediterranean, and eventually arrived to Tunis, a bustling city.
Yeah, yeah, I made it! I passed my own test! I had crossed three African countries on $60, I had a ton of adventures to tell, I felt like a true adventure traveler. After two weeks in Tunis, my Italian uncle paid for an air ticket to Rome - oh, I was so happy to eat my aunt's homemade Italian food again, especially because I had lost much weight and looked just skin and bones.
So, this is the story how I acquired a lifelong interest in adventure travel, in remote places, and in unplanned side trips. Some of my best turns in life and on travels were unplanned side trips that eventually developed into something more important. But it all started with that one-way ticket to Morocco at the spur of the moment. It was an adventure impulse that I've never regretted!
What God taught me in adventure travel
What did I learn on that first trip to North Africa? I explored Sahara and three countries, yes. But most of all I explored myself. I learned that I was indeed able to travel into the unknown on my own and deal with any unexpected problems on the way. I learned that it's more important to know where you're going than where you're coming from. More importantly, I learned that sometimes the best trips in life and travel are not those on roads less traveled, but those without visible roads at all.
Traveler, there are no roads.
Roads are made by walking.
(Spanish proverb)
Later in life, after I became a Christian, I started to rely on God's guidance alone and became an explorer of God's invisible patterns of reality. As a Christian, I know now that I am also an adventure traveler in Christian faith. I try to live on the leading edge of my faith. I see now a deeper purpose in that first trip to North Africa. Although I was not a Christian at that time, I realize now that God was teaching me how to walk not by sight but by faith. In the beginning, while I was still a nonbeliever, I walked by faith in myself, but after I became a Christian I've been walking by faith in Christ. I am an explorer in faith, I'm an explorer by faith in Christ.
As a rookie reporter from Baghdad
When I came home from North Africa, I published my Moroccan adventures in a weekly newspaper. They were a success. A national daily, for which I had been writing for two years as a freelance, sent me as a their correspondent to Lebanon and Iraq the next summer. So there I was in scorching heat in Baghdad, 19 years old and with eyes wide open, and one morning I see tanks rolling on the streets. Wow, a coup was happening before my eyes! (That was before Saddam). I wrote my first report as a foreign correspondent, took pictures, and it got published as a scoop. It was a serious start on my path of becoming a professional journalist, which I was for over fourteen years. But that's another story...
Copyright (c) 2007-2008 by Eric Magnusson