Tony Halik - Polish traveller, journalist and explorer (89th anniversary of the birth)

One of the greatest Polish travellers and journalists; a Second World War veteran; an explorer and sailor dreaming of becoming the first journalist in the space; a man with vivid imagination and great charisma confirmed by his spectacular achievements - Tony Halik.

98 years ago, on January 24, 1921, in Polish city of Toruń, Tony Halik was born; a Polish traveller, journalist, writer, explorer and Second World War veteran; travelled across all the continents, in the most extreme conditions; an explorer of the Amazonian tribes and author of many books, hundreds of TV documentaries, radio auditions and countless photographs.

Born as Mieczysław Sędzimir Halik; as a teenager he run away of his home in Płock city of Poland and travelled by a raft all the way to the Free City of Danzig where he was caught by border guards and brought back to the home; during the World War II he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht which he escaped in 1944 and joined the French resistance movement, and then the 4th Infantry Division of the Polish Armed Forces in the West.

After the war, he married Pierrette Courtin, a French woman, who he set off with for a five-year-long car journey through the South America, making over 180,000 kilometres and visiting 21 countries; he settled in Argentina where he took citizenship of this country that allowed him to move freely around the world; a sailor who often travelled the South American rivers, for instance the Parana River (Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina) in 1955 or other Amazonian rivers; he discovered a system of tunnels and caves in the Brazilian mountain range of Serra to Roncador located in the state of Mato Grosso; he was a foreign correspondent working for the American NBC television and journalist of the Life, Time and Life and Sport Magazine; a friend and advocate of the Indians who gave him a name the White Indian.

In 1975, after meeting in Mexico a Polish female journalist and traveller, Elżbieta Dzikowska, he moved to Warsaw where they started life as a couple sharing a passion of the travelling journalism; in 1976, together with a Peruvian professor Edmundo Guillén, they reached the legendary and lost capital of the Incas - Vilcabamba; he was an author of a dozen or so travelling books among them 180,000 km of Adventure, With a Camera and a Shotgun Through Mato Grosso, My Great Adventure; he co-created around 300 documentary films, including popular Pieprz i Wanilia series; between 1987 and 1988, on the Dar Młodzieży ship he circumnavigated the world; he wrote many articles for number of Polish and foreign magazines; he was fluent in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and German as well as several languages of the South American Indians; he died on May 28, 1998.

@casphotography aka @cezarys