The adventures of a young nomad, Anna Heijker

A story about the things that can happen to you when you go into the world without fear. The dreadful bushfires of 1967 destroyed all the excursion huts which were built over the lower slopes of the Mount Wellington, a popular day-resort for the residents of Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, in Australia. A few modern huts were built afterwards and are open to the public at The Springs, The Pinnacle and The Chalet. After an hour and a half of walking, Anna Heijker reached "The Springs", where it started to rain. She was a bit worried because she knew the weather could change quickly on Mount Wellington and the tracks would become slippery. It was 2011 and Anna, a 1.59 m tall, 24-year old Dutch girl was in her first year on the 7.6 million square kilometer continent and on her second day in Hobart. Once it became clear that the rain wasn't going to cease, Anna decided to walk back, but just then she met a 72-year-old Australian lady, Marian, who invited her to the campervan to join her and her husband, Bob, as they drove to the top of the mountain. Marian and Bob were so-called "grey nomads", old people traveling in campervans around the country after they retire. They offered her coffee and cookies and helped her find a lift back. With the help of Marian, she met another grey nomad couple, Ron (78) and Von (73), who offered her a sandwich and a fruit pie and took her to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hobart, where Ron bought her an ice-cream. She called these two couples her new grandparents. "The most striking thing was all four people I met were in their second marriages, and I could see they were so unbelievably happy with their current partners," wrote Anna in a story called "The Grey Outdoors", one month after her trip. "Bob stroked Marian's cheek and she was still smiling at him like it was their second date. Von and Ron aren't married, but have been together for 20 years and are still having fun." As she is telling me about her Australian experience, Anna, now 26, is 13,000 km away from Australia and about 1,500 km away from her home in the Netherlands. She is now an entrepreneur in Bucharest. Even if it seems a long way from hitch hiking in one part of the world to being a communication specialist and having your own business in a different corner of the planet, it becomes somehow logical once you get to talk to Anna. A few months after she had moved to Bucharest to volunteer for a local NGO in 2012, Anna met a Dutch guy who talked to her about his business idea. What should have been an informal business presentation, was actually a thick word-jungle, full of predators such as jargon and technical details, where one could easily get lost and not understand a word at the end. This became Anna's first client she helped to develop a pitch to an investor. She helped him to sort his ideas and convey them in a much simpler form. When I ask her why are people so scared of speaking in public, she says: “They are afraid of being judged by others and most of the time they don't have clarity on the structure, clarity about the message. That's what I work with my clients on. They need to have a clear message and a clear structure.” Anna built her own business in only a few months, with the same fearless determination she resorted to when she was 19 and went to Thailand to teach English, even though she had never been on a plane before. “Business was completely new to me. I had to learn a lot of things; how to deal with contracts and negotiations, all the stuff you need to learn when you start a business. After a few months I learned all the basics and I could start working on a strategy.” This pure determination has always been associated with being overly self-confident, but what seems really striking about Anna is her modesty. She's not fake, she's not displaying this "I-am-being-interviewed friendliness", she's genuinely warm and curious about people. This is probably the reason why stories stick to her. "It was my first day in Bucharest,” Anna recalls. “I took the bus from Drumul Taberei, where my home was, to the center of the city. And there were these guys who asked me for my ticket. They didn't have any uniforms, so I didn't believe they were actual officers. But then this girl sitting next to me explained me that they were indeed fare collectors. We start talking about stuff and the same evening I went with her to see a play at the National Theatre." Once Anna went to Cismigiu to run. It was about 6.30 in the morning and there was this gym equipment in the park where she met two ladies. One was Russian, Ludmila and the other one was Romanian, Nicole. They started chatting. The ladies asked her a lot about The Netherlands and Anna practiced a bit her Romanian. “Then Ludmila said: I will teach you one thing and it will make you much happier,” Anna recollects. “You need to do it one time a day, but three times it's better and if you really want to be happy you need to do it twelve times a day. I was curious what is this going to be. And she said: You need to hug. And this lady was really big, she really squeezed me. Then I ran home and I really felt happy.”