My name is Hans Joachim Wirtz. I am 76 years old and a retired judge.

After having visited other countries, I traveled to Bolivia in 1976 and came back every two years during my annual vacation. Since 1982, I have been traveling more and more in the northern part of Bolivia, which still has a largely intact river and jungle landscape.

On my trips – approximately from 1985, 1990 onwards – I only took travellunch meals with me. Per jungle trip I had about 25-30 daily rations in my backpack. For me, it was ideal: You sit in the canoe or on the jungle floor, put the bag – the bottom spread – on the ground, tear the bag open lengthwise at the top, pour boiling water into it, stir, close the bag at the top, wait a few minutes and then you have a delicious dish in front of you!

I still have fond memories of a Christmas in the 90s at some jungle river in the Pando region of Bolivia with “chicken in curry cream” or “pasta carbonara” later in the 2000s!

At the same time, I realized that due to my advanced age, I could not continue this kind of strenuous travel forever, and that I should actually write to the travellunch team sometime that I have remained faithful to their trekking food all my “travel life”!!!

The idea of decades of loyalty to a good product is really something. The question is how you can prove such a claim, especially since during all these decades I never dreamed of photographing the travellunch bag at 6 o’clock in the morning in the dark of the jungle while preparing the meal. Or in exhaustion in the evening or during several days of non-stop rain to make such photos. I then looked through my entire photographic archive for each trip to see if there were any photos that by chance showed travellunch! Thank God I found some.

In conclusion, the jungle and river trips in Bolivia during those decades were a wonderful experience. This experience was made possible to a significant extent by travellunch! You just can’t live on palm hearts, monkeys or turtles or the occasional fish during weeks of trekking through the jungle; you need food twice a day to cover all your physical needs! And this is made possible by the travellunch meals!

This summer, my brother and I will be doing one last big hike through a jungle area, much of which is uninhabited. We have already shipped our travellunch provisions to Bolivia. This time, I will make sure to photograph the dishes during preparation!