My name is Erik Adler and this is my stroy....

When I was a little kid I would often peer into the horizon as we drove along the Pacific Coast Highway wondering what adventures awaited where sky met sea. I would intensely scan the Big Blue for the telltale signs of migrating wheals as I fantasized that I was a swashbuckling pirate sailing the seven seas with Jacques Cousteau aboard the Calypso. Little did I know back then that one day I would set off to travel the world for five solid years.

When I was about nine years old we moved to Beverly Hills where I attended Beverly Vista Elementary school until I graduated the eighth grade. Being dyslexic was a complicated matter growing up. Due to my dyslectic idiom I was placed in the “retardo” class for many years. Ironically I was on the school chess team and a member of MENSA . Later I attended Beverly Hills High School but I cannot say that I was particularly impressed with the superficial ambience there. What I liked the most about Beverly Hills was that most my friends had swimming pools that we could skate in.

Growing up I had a lust for life. When I was about fifteen years old I was a wild kid who broke a lot of bones doing crazy stuff. Science and particularly electronics became a lifestyle. My bedroom became a laboratory where I made surveillance gear, stun guns, tesla coils, lasers and just about every other illegal high voltage thing you could imagine. I did eventually become a radio pirate when I built 300 Watt FM stereo transmitter. The thing was rock steady using a dual phase lock loop (PLL) design. My best friend and I spawned a clandestine pirate station. We played alternative music and basically just had a great time not getting caught by the FCC.

When I was not skating or surfing you could often find me digging in the soft dirt next to the fence at the La Brea Tar Pits . My friends and I used to collect prehistoric bones. I’m still a huge fan of natural history museums. Basically anything that went boom, zap, crash or could fly I was interested in. Model rockets, telescopes, D&D stuff, computers, and R/C airplanes and the occasional Tijuana M-80 firecrackers were littered all over my room. Music was a huge part of my life. I listened to everything from the Rage against the machine to the Sex Pistols.

When I was about seventeen I knew that something had to happen. There had to be something more to life then Beverly Hills. I felt that there was so much to see and so much to do and that life is just ticking away. I figured that the worst that could happen was going to happen anyway when I got old and that there was no point fearing it. I never could comprehend people who found personal (or cared about) security in collective solidarity. Nor could I understand individuals that needed to conform to every environment and veiw around them. In my world there are no absolutes.

I told my mom that I was going to Sweden to live with my uncle Lars for a year. My uncle Lars was a professor in neurologi and was the greatest guy on earth in my eyes. Sadly he is deceased now. I quickly melted in with the local punk scene in Göteborg. Since this was an experimental time of my life I moved in with about 20 people in an occupied house just for the hell of it. We had tons of fun going down to Denmark to see concerts and just..well have fun. I had enough common sense to realize it was time to move on after a while. Now that I had learned to speak Swedish I wanted to get to know my grandparents better. They invited me to move in with them in Linköping. I did the normal run of the mill things there. Got a job at Ericsson working on ECCM (Electronic Counter Counter Measures) in military radio commutations. The Ericsson job was basically designing novel spread spectrum schemes so commutations could not be jammed or eavesdropped. Had a few serious but boring relationships. I was too young for a corporate life...I wanted more.

One night when I was getting on a bus in Linköping I started talking to the bus driver. Turned out that he was starting up a radio program that was in English and he wanted to know what I knew about radio. I told him about my days as a pirate and before I know it we had a program with me as his DJ. The radio studio we used was from a church busting out on 95.5 MHz. It did not take long before we were shut down from their studio because they did not like stuff like...Sound Garden, Prodigy, Alice in Chains, Space Hog, Chemical brothers, Babylon Zoo and so forth.

My mother who is Swedish moved back to Sweden at about this time. She had always wanted to live in the epitome of Swedish culture . She got a job in Tällberg Dalarna working at a hotel called Siljansgården. I moved up to Tällberg and lived in a cottage that was over 700 years old for about six months.

It was about this time that I took off to work in Israel on a Kibbutz in the Negev desert. I had no idea that I was going to be travelling for the next five years.

During that five years I ended up in an Egyptian jail for two days for climbing the Cheops pyramid (video), did my military service in the Israeli paratroopers, become a competitive surfer in Hawaii with kick as freinds, have a skydiving accent, got my ass kicked and robbed by a gang of monkeys in Rajasthan India, ended up in middle of a tribal warfare as the Dayak tribe went head hunting for Madurese people with spears, swords and poison arrows on Kalimantan Borneo, got lost in the countryside of China for a week, got malaria in Laos, a Komodo dragon chased me up a tree on Komodo, went to school in the old city of Jerusalem, almost executed by Muslim fundamentalists in Poso Indonesia. These are just a few of the things that I can remember off the top of my head. Once you leave home "you" dont really come back.

My traveling came to an end when my father needed me in LA because he was dieing of Leukemia. When he did die I went back to Sweden to be with my mother and sister.

When I moved back to Sweden I decided I needed a Masters degree in something. The problem was that I did not even graduate from high school, the grades that I had were terrible and I was dyslectic. Details had never stopped me before. I went to adult school and took the courses I needed to even apply to University. I took a test similar to the SAT called the Högskoleprovet and scored in the top 1%. There was not a program or university I could not get into after that.

Since 1999 I have traveled all over the world for three or more months of the year. After a skydiving accident (not half as cool as it sounds...I fell out of a tree). SCUBA diving became my new lifestyle. I am a Dive Master #477433 with all sorts of specialties in deep diving, mixed gas etc. I become fanatical critter buffs with hundreds of hours underwater spending over 200-300 hours in the waters around Borneo, Lembeh, Bunaken, Sipadan and just about every were else in South East Asia.

If all goes as planned I will be graduating with a master degree in medical biology in 2006

I have not updated the site since 2005. So much has happened the last 2 years. Eva is now history. Got a new girlfriend (Linda). Just became a MSDT SCUBA Instructor. I have tons and tons of new adventue from 2005-2007 to write about and a zillion new UW photos to put up when I got some time.

Please sign my guestbook. I would love to hear from you.

All the best Erik Adler