Each week, Elisabeth Easther gets the story of people in the Kiwi tourism industry. Today she talks to the owner of I Guide U Travel.
I was born in Northern Italy and grew up speaking Italian and German. We moved to Brussels in Belgium where we had a great life. Dad had a good job there so we could afford every weekend to go somewhere, France, Holland, Luxembourg. In Brussels, I went to a European school which put me in a very multilingual environment and meant I am fluent in six languages — Italian, German, Spanish, English, French and Portuguese. As a teenager, we moved back to Italy and that was a bit of a shock. Brussels was cosmopolitan and amazing and full of things to discover and then we moved back to a small Italian town and I thought the people were a bit late on everything.
From that moment I started thinking that Italy was not my favourite place to be — however, after school I ended up joining the Italian air force, and working for 12 years as an air defence controller. The military career was not my thing at all. Back then, a friend finished his compulsory service and went to live in the Canary Islands, in Spain. He invited me over saying there were heaps of opportunities. So I took all my leave, went there and started working in a resort as a squash instructor, mountain bike and fishing guide. That was great and soon after I quit the air force to start travelling.
My first big trip was to Brazil, where later I got my first guiding job and — wow — all of a sudden, I was taking people to see monkeys and snakes. It was pretty adventurous and my life turned around.
In 2000, through my mother-in-law, I landed a job as a guide on a small volcanic island in Southern Italy called Stromboli. I was supposed to help a local guy who'd had an accident so he sent me to learn everything about the volcano. When they realised I knew so many languages, they didn't want me to quit, so I worked there and on other volcanoes in Sicily for five seasons.