Hi, I'm Roland

Even with my parents. As a railwayman, my father enjoyed free travel on the entire Swiss railroad network. Apart from two weeks in Kernten (Austria), we always spent our vacations somewhere in Switzerland.

It wasn't until later, when I was training to become a train dispatcher with the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), that I regularly traveled through Europe. I had always been interested in traveling off the beaten track.

Like when I took the train from Switzerland up to Sweden in the middle of December, I think it was in 1985. My deep winter journey took me from Stockholm via Sundsvall, Östersund, Arvidjaur, Gällivare and Lulea back to Stockholm. I had the impression that I was the only tourist north of Uppsala!

Or my first trip to France in my own car. I actually wanted to go to the Mediterranean coast. But simply driving down the Rohne Valley on the autoroute like everyone else was too stupid for me. So I took the roads as close as possible to the eastern border of France as far as Nice. However, the hustle and bustle on the Mediterranean was too much for me, so I spontaneously drove across the southwest to the Atlantic coast.

My first big trip outside Europe took me from India to Australia in 1988, traveling by land and sea through Southeast Asia. After just under a year, I ran out of money. I financed my return journey by washing dishes in a hospital in Sydney.

Since then, I have traveled to Indonesia and New Zealand several times, where I met Ester from Indonesia during a language study trip to Auckland. She was also a language student. We lived with the same host family. I liked her straight away. So much so that I visited her in Jakarta two years later. We traveled on to Bali together, where we spent unforgettable weeks and fell in love. We decided to get married and settle down in Bali.

It didn't happen that quickly, because I had to go back to Switzerland. It wasn't until October 1996 that I emigrated to Indonesia, where we got married on December 27, 1996 in Pontianak on Borneo. We lived in Bali from 1996 to 2006. Since then we have been in Switzerland. More precisely in Zweisimmen.

I speak fluent Indonesian, English and German.