GENNIFRE HARTMAN

Question: Do you have a passport?

 

Yes. The glue that holds extra passport pages used to be sticky enough to gum the blank pages together, frustrating every fatigued border guard from Latin America to Eastern Europe. The first time I received new pages, I waited for hours in a tired embassy office, counting peeling ceiling tiles to entertain myself until the consulate returned from a long lunch in La Paz, Bolivia. I’ve traveled to 54 countries as a guide, teacher, writer, and now – as a single mother.

 

I heard a reporter say the other day that journalists should have a soul. As a life-long freelance journalist and writer, that resonated with me. Gone are the days when a journalist was merely words on a page, absent of a persona beyond a byline. Instead, the digital age has allowed travel journalism to evolve into sagas and images and parables from ordinary people who travel to extraordinary places.

 

I have two sons, ages 11 and 14. The first time they got their passports, they were so small that they couldn’t hold up their heads independently. The kindly teenager at Kinko’s spread a sheaf of paper in a grid-like pattern over the floor as a make-shift back-drop, and I splayed my son on his back while the teenager hovered from above to take the picture. He looks like a freakishly upright infant in his first passport photo.

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Question: What’s the most interesting place you’ve been and why? 

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I found myself on the fringes of the Amazon rainforest with a huge backpack stuffed to the brim with money.  My nylon backpack bulged with bricks of sucres, stuffed hastily inside as the Ecuadorian banks collapsed with the new millennium. The sucre lost 87% of its foreign exchange value in a volatile downward slide, and I was stuck with 25,000 for every dollar. My only task was to pay for three months of food and lodging for a group of 35 teenagers and teachers still in the jungle. To pay our bill, I transported 125 million sucres of paper through three busses and two pick-up trucks, and I only fell asleep twice.

 

My impromptu money-laundering launched me into a career of travel. I’ve started and run two international high schools where I dragged American students for semester-long adventures around the world, from a Maori marae to a makoro canoe in the Okavango Delta. I collected 5 languages, and I spent 16 years clogging my passport with stamps, helping homesick teenage girls fall asleep in the jungle night, and figuring out how to plug anything in without blowing up a truck battery.

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And then, I had kids. And the whole game changed. Which is why my answer to the “most interesting place” has a Part 2.

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Using my expertise as a teacher and an international guide, I took my sons for almost two months in Thailand when they were in kindergarten and 3rd grade. They've additionally traveled to Nicaragua, South Africa, Germany, Mexico, Iceland, and the Netherlands. 

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 “This will slow you down,” my friends said. It did. It has. And, it didn’t and it hasn’t. I’m rediscovering the world with my two blonde sidekicks and a whole new chapter on how to travel. Because, the road less traveled should be additionally traveled by vagabond families and adventuresome children.

 

Question: How is writing a part of your life?

 

When I was younger, I wrote long emails sharing my adventures with friends back home. They were filled with misspellings generated from sticky keyboards in Internet cafes. “I'm sitting in a funky little Internet cafe in Amsterdam, listening to euro-techno-trash music and drinking an ice-cold Heineken. I miss Nepal!!” And, “The big question...where am I?? Don't feel offended if you don't know...I don't even know most of the time.  My Mom told me that my Grandma Pat was embarrassed because she could never tell people where I am.” My friend recently told me that my emails used to make her want to sell her belongings and travel.

 

My next decade of sharing travel stories was a tapestry of blogs, presentations, letters, and articles. I traveled overseas for nine months a year, living in tents and sleeping in busses as I ran two international traveling schools and rambled from one adventure to the next.  I taught Travel Journalism and was quoted for a National Geographic book called, “100 Places That Can Change Your Child's Life: From Your Backyard to the Ends of the Earth.” I wrote blogs, letting anxious parents know their teenagers would be, “Clicking in Zulu and climbing red African cliffs before you know it.”

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Now, I work with multiple organizations that I support with my primary passions: experiential education; international travel, and authentic learning opportunities. During my 20-year career, I’ve been an international guide, a leader, a published writer, an entrepreneur, a Founder, an Executive Director, a fundraiser, a wilderness guide, a novelist, a college professor, a teacher, a peace advocate, a philanthropist, an editor, and more. A unique career path driven by my innovative spirit, my diverse background, and my creative opportunities. 

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