Tamar Valkenier

THE FULL-TIME ADVENTURER - A WOMAN TRAVELS THE WORLD
LIVE REPORTAGE BY AND WITH TAMAR VALKENIER

At the age of 28, Dutch-born Tamar swapped her promising career for a life on the streets - on a bicycle she built from second-hand materials. Homeless and unemployed, she embarked on a journey that would last about a year, but is still going ten years later. Despite living well below the poverty line, she has never felt so rich.

After two years on a bicycle, she also travels many kilometers on skates, on camels, with a pulka and skis, with a donkey, and of course on foot to the remotest corners of our planet. She talks about her three-month crossing of the New Zealand Alps, carrying only a rifle and a fishing rod to feed herself.

However, it was her first journey into the heart of the Altai Mountains that touched her the most. Far beyond the last town, telephone reception and flushing toilets, she travels to the eagle hunters of Mongolia. She has to learn how to ride a horse, how to pack a camel and how to stay out of trouble in the remote wilderness of these rugged mountains. With her own horse, camel and dog, she sets off on an epic four-month journey.

She crosses wild rivers, the Death Pass and faces snow as early as August. She learns about the hardships of a nomad and earns the respect of a culture that is more hospitable, forgiving and playful than any other she has ever encountered. While she loses her animals in a storm, her horse gets injured and her dog once kills a sheep, she learns the value of animal companions and tells how her camel saves her life.

Tamar regularly returns to the Altai Mountains and has befriended a family of eagle hunters. After years of training, she finally caught her first fox with an eagle and won first prize at a local eagle festival in August 2022. She founds a non-governmental organization (NGO) to support nomads in need and writes a book called "The Full-Time Adventurer". As icing on the cake, the local nomads organize a lavish Kazakh wedding for her and her husband...

Born in the Netherlands, Tamar Valkenier (1986) retired at the age of 28. In 2015, she gave up her promising career as a criminal psychologist with the Dutch National Police. Although it was her dream job, she felt an overwhelming urge to take time to see what else life had to offer. Once she started, she went from one adventure to the next. Fascinated by traditional ways of life, she visited the reindeer herders in the Siberian taiga, the Maasai in Kenya and practiced survival techniques with the indigenous people in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. She spent winter seasons ski touring and skating in Swedish Lapland, crossed Iceland on foot, lived off the land in New Zealand and regularly returns to the eagle hunters in Mongolia. Tamar is a city girl gone wild. As tenacious and capable as she may be, she's still a "daddy's girl," and as rugged as the adventures may be, she'll always stop to smell a wildflower.