‘So Dirk, are you going on holiday again?’ His fellow teachers liked to tease Dirk van der Wal. They also knew that he was not a tourist, but a traveler. And what kind. The geography and history teacher visited all countries in the world.
When people found out that he had such a wanderlust life, he was always asked three questions. Why are you doing this? What has been your most spectacular destination? And what are you paying for it all?
“Then I in turn ask where they buy that BMW or that house,” he said in 1995 Fidelity† He cared nothing for material things, the furniture in his apartment in Vlaardingen remained the same for years. Moreover, he had no family to support. ‘A family life was difficult to combine with his traveling life,’ says his sister Joke.
Van der Wal grew up in The Hague, in a family with two sisters. At the age of 14 he made his first big bike ride through the Netherlands. ‘And of course he went to the Drielandenpunt’, says his sister. ‘Just across the border. That’s how it all started.’
Van der Wal soon expanded his cycling tours to Switzerland, Austria and Scandinavia. After the bicycle came the moped, with which he drove to Libya, among other places. In 1973 he booked a ticket to Vietnam to see what war does to a country. It was typical of his curiosity, says Joke. ‘He wanted to see everything with his own eyes, draw his own conclusions. That was what drove him.’
After completing the training college, he became a teacher, a profession that suited his love for travel very well. Sometimes he came back late from a trip because he had missed a connection or was in hospital with malaria. But the school management never blamed him for that, says Adrie de Raaf, his colleague for thirty years at the Marnix Mavo in Maassluis, later the Lentiz Revius Lyceum. ‘Dirk understood his trade. He was an inspired teacher.’
And yes, sometimes students took advantage of that. De Raaf: ‘If they didn’t feel like the lesson, they simply called a country. Then Dirk naturally started talking about it enthusiastically. Before they knew it, the bell rang again.’
Knocked overboard from a dinghy in the Caribbean, face to face with a polar bear in the North Pole, who had ripped open his tent; Van der Wal experienced exciting adventures. But he was just as sweet in Chad to see if it was really as boring there as they say. He wasn’t doing the adrenaline rush.
Nor was it a goal in itself for him to visit all – almost 200 – countries in the world, although he became more and more enthusiastic when the end goal came into view. With a visit to Tokelau, a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, his collection of visited countries was complete in 2011.
In 1994, thanks to his students, he received a mention in the Guinness Book of Records† “A special person came over from abroad to check that he really had a stamp of all those countries that he said he had visited,” his sister says. Then he got a certificate.
For the last two years he suffered from Lewy body dementia, which affected not only his brain, but also his body. He ended up in a wheelchair and had to go to a nursing home. Dirk van der Wal died on April 2, aged 75. The charter of the Guinness Book of Records remained in his room in the nursing home until his death.