Photo above: Glen in the Amazon river, near Leticia, Colombia, in January 2003.
Glen David Short was born in Australia in 1962. His father was a bank teller, his mother a Dutch migrant. Glen's childhood was spent in Australian towns as varied as Gundagai, Leeton, Bowral and Wollongong. He finished high school at Katoomba. As an adult he has lived in Leura, Mudgee, Sydney, London and Dover. His first career was as an underground electrician in a coal mine.
In 1987 he won a newspaper essay-writing competition; the prize was a three month voyage on an old sailing ship, the Anna Kristina, to paticipate in Australia's Bicentennial First Fleet Re-enactment Voyage. He was working at Ulan Colliery in 1988 in a crew that broke the world record for coal extraction. Later he travelled to England where he gained employment working on the English Channel Tunnel and Canary Wharf projects. He has also worked at Sydney's Royal Easter Show as a professional spruiker and Sydney's Garden Island Dockyard as a supervisor.
Glen made his first overseas trip in 1981. In the intervening years, he has travelled to Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. He developed an interest in Latin America after visiting Mexico in 1984. He decided, after working six years without a break in the early nineties, to travel again to Latin America. This was to be perhaps the most challenging trip in his life; in addition to being robbed twice, succumbing to a fever and almost suffocating atop an active volcano, he was in Antigua Guatemala when Hurricane Mitch - the deadliest hurricane to hit the region in modern times - left him stranded. He kept a diary which became the basis for his book An Odd Odyssey California to Colombia by bus and boat, through Mexico and Central America.
From January 1999 to July 2002 Glen lived in Cartagena, Colombia, teaching English at Colegio Británico. He lived in the 400 year-old Torre del Reloj apartment building in the famous Plaza de Coches (the same building that is featured on the front cover of the Lonely Planet Guide to Colombia).
In August 2002 he commenced a new journey, endeavouring to be the first person to traverse South America from West to East, from its western promontory at Punta Parinas in Peru to the easternmonst tip at Ponta do Seixas in Brazil, and return via tha Amazon River.
Text and Photos Copyright 2005 Glen David Short