Holg's Life So Far

Here's a map of the 75 countries I have been to so far:

Born 18 June 1960 in Osnabrück, Germany. Six years later we moved to Flensburg, (85,547 inhabitants, 54.47°N, 9.26°E) right next to the Danish border, where I grew up. (More precisely in Frörup, which is now part of Oeversee, about 11 km south of Flensburg; a village of 1978 people.) Landkarte Schleswig-Flensburg

Following the advice of my elementary school teachers in Oeversee, I went to high school, Goethe Schule Flensburg where I graduated in 1980. It was one of the most miserable times of my life. I did enjoy my double major in biology and chemistry, as well as three years in philosophy, though.

While still at high school, I hitchhiked all over Europe.

1977 to Austria, Italy and Yugoslavia with a friend.

1978 to France and Norway, alone. I had the equivalent of 20 Euros in my pocket for each trip. The same summer I worked on a dig of the Archäologische Landesmuseum Schloss Gottorf in Schleswig, which was my first exposure to real work. Although it was plenty interesting, it was way too much like physical labour for me.

1979 I worked on a cargo ship which went to Leningrad, USSR. Later I hitchhiked to Norway again with Dörte Jürgensen. Again on 20 Euros.

1980 I went to Morocco - the first time outside of Europe and in a truly alien and amazing world. I felt rich with 53,68 Euros in my wallet. I began to realize that this kind of travelling was what I really enjoyed and that there would be more trips in the future. Two days after my graduation, I hitchhiked south. To Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran (got arrested by the Revolutionary Guards of the late Ayatollah Khomeini), Afghanistan (civil war raged, the Russians had invaded just six months earlier), Pakistan and, finally, India. I had budgeted 113 Euros to reach New Delhi and I made it. I decided to study oriental languages and enrolled at the Ostasiatisches Seminar at the Freie Universitaet Berlin for Sinology/China Studies.

1981 I studied for five weeks at Fudan University Shanghai.

1982 I came to Taiwan to study Mandarin at the National Taiwan Normal University. Fell in love with Taiwan right away and felt miserable that I would have to go back to finish my degree. So......

1983 I flew back to Germany, finished my exam and came straight back to Taiwan, where I continued to study Chinese, but at the same time I enrolled in the MBA program of National Taiwan University. Those days the program was still housed in the old pre-war Japanese buildings on XuZhou Road.

1984 I worked for Tatung Company in the Overseas Operations Division. Marketing.

1985 I opened Mr. H.P Jacobsen's Language Classes (江浩哲語文) and subsequently married my first wife, Ruan Wenzhi.

1986 saw a short trip to Sri Lanka (civil war)

1987 we went to the Kingdom of Tonga, where we "chartered" different boats from various yachties, who were all in serious need of money. An almost universal state for yachties, as I have since discovered. After three months we went back to Taiwan.

1988 I bought my first sailing boat, a Prout Snowgoose 35 catamaran and named it DHARMA BUM (after the book The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac). Then we sailed from Plymouth, UK, to A Coruña and on to Tenerife on the Canary Islands. Unfortunately my first wife hated sailing and the boat, so ...

1989 we got divorced and I sailed on with my brother, Birger Jacobsen, to Belem do Para in Brazil and to Kourou in French Guyana, where I stayed for quite a while. My boat was in bad shape, and so was I. The divorce proved much more painful than I had thought and nearly did me in. I found a job at the Hotel des Roches - the very best hotel in the country. I got published in Multihulls Magazine (U.S.A.), Multihulls International (U.K.) and Backskiste (Germany).

1990 I made a short trip to Taiwan, but came back to Kourou after a little while.

1991 I sold DHARMA BUM and went back to Taipei once more. I taught at the Language Training and Testing Center of National Taiwan University, where I met Yeh Liping (葉麗萍 or Gloria, also known as 葉倩儀 or Moira), my best - and most beautiful - student. Gloria and I moved to New Garden City, a place in the mountains between Hsin-tien and Kuei-shan on this map.

1992 we got married. The best thing that ever happened to me. :-))) Honeymoon hasn't stopped yet and it has been more than 30 years. The same year I took a course in TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) which was jointly organized by the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES) and the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). A most excellent program!

1994 Gloria and I flew to San Diego, USA, and bought another boat, this time a Horstman 38 Tristar Trimaran. We sailed DHARMA BUM II to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, then on to French Polynesia and finally, the Kingdom of Tonga. We had planned to sail all the way back to Taiwan and the idea was to do it slowly in two years. DHARMA BUM II got hit by lightning between Tahiti and Tonga and sustained extensive damage. We had to fly back to Taiwan in 1995 - only ten months into the trip. 1995 and 1996 I worked for an ISP, because I was interested in UNIX and got published in Eurotrade Magazine

1997 I started writing my first novel Double Trouble at Sea.

1998 and 1999 I went to the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Brilliant! Gloria got featured in various magazines and TV stations all over the island. I started to get interested in investments , the stock market and trading. Just at the right time, as it turned out.....

2000 I finished my first novel, Double Trouble at Sea. We drove all over Europe in a VW micro bus - Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium. Also, Gloria and I managed to lose enormous sums of money on the Taiwan, German, and US-stockmarkets. Later I shifted from investing to trading, from stocks to options to index & currency futures.

2001 my wife and I started collaborating on a Mandarin Chinese non-fiction book about our sailing trip through the South Pacific. We traveled all over Vietnam on the Sinh Cafe Trail.
2002 Destination Paradise (勇闖南太平洋) got published. We took a short trip to Nha Trang, and a somewhat longer one to visit my parents in Germany.
2003 we went to Koh Samui in Thailand and later to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Sukhothai in Thailand, as well as Pattaya and Phuket for a look-see. My futures trading got a bit more successful, so that the trading account equity peeked above $200k for the first time. Also, I seriously cut down on the beer to get rid of the belly & protect my liver. In fact, I went completely dry for 101 days. And finally, our daughter Aurora Ulani Jacobsen got born on 12/30/2003. :-)
2004 we spent 3 1/2 weeks with my parents in the very north of Germany. Running a school and taking care of a baby 24/7 at the same time was a bit heavier than we had anticipated. I'd much prefer one at a time.
2005. On Valentines Day our daughter got sick and was subsequently diagnosed with Kawasaki Disease. And on June 27th, I bought DHARMA BUM III, a Privilege 39 catamaran in Tortola, British Virgin Islands and subsequently sailed it to Trinidad.

2006 we sailed in Trinidad, Bequia (very nice place with excellent holding-ground, wind for the wind-generator and lobsters right under the boat) and right into the worst storm of our career. About 150 nm offshore from Catagena, Colombia we saw three days never under 50 knots and a sustained windspeed of 60 knots. The waves were up to the second pair of spreaders and we were often surfing with more than 15 knots. Unbelievable! Next came Panama. The same weather had thrown three cargo ships on the beach.

2007 we had to hand-steer from Panama to Galapagos and visited old friends in the Marquesas, the Tuamotus and Tahiti. A definite highlight. After Fiji, we decided to get off the beaten track and went up to Kiribati and the Marshall Islands. We liked it so much in Micronesia, that we went back and forth between those countries for almost a whole year.

2008 we headed down to Vanuatu and New Zealand, as the boat really needed some major repairs. We left DHARMA BUM III in Whangarei, to be able to attend my parents' 50-year-wedding-anniversary, visit family and friends and give Aurora Ulani a chance to hear that German isn't only a crazy secret language spoken by her father. New Zealand has since joined the short list of countries where we could imagine settling down.

2009 we worked on the boat in New Zealand and sailed non-stop in 38 days from Whangarei to Darwin (40°C) and the unforgettable Ashmore Reef. Uninhabited island, nature reserve, turtles, sharks, many different species of birds and all that other stuff that circumnavigators dream about. On we went to Bali, right through Indonesia, which is an experience of a different kind. Hundreds of fishing boats of all sizes, light-fishers, abandoned rafts, freighters and cargo-ships of every description, ferries, cruise-ships &&& - some of them with no lights. On top of that there are "Sumatras", ferocious squalls that usually hit when you already have numerous other problems. VERY strenuous sailing. Between the squalls there is no wind, but still we refused to use the engine. Thus it took us 31 days from Bali to Batam (opposite Singapore).

2010 we spent a wonderful time in Singapore moored at the Changi Sailing Club and subsequently went up the Malacca Straits to Langkawi, where we stayed for three months before going up to Phuket, where we had DHARMA BUM III hauled out and stayed on the hard for five months. The rest of the year we spent again in Langkawi with our numerous friends.

2011 was one of the highlights. On 8 March we set sail for Chagos. We had plenty of diesel on board for fear of mutiny after drifting for 31 days from Bali to Batam in 2009. Still, it took just as long, as there was no wind. :-) Just like the atolls in Micronesia, Chagos is dream-country. After one month we were tired of eating fish three times a day and set off for Mauritius. This time, the wind was perfect and we only spent 11 days at sea. Madagascar was astonishing – and sometimes shocking. The most interesting place of this voyage.