Justin Venable (New Zealand)
I met Henri is 2005 in Uganda… We had mutual respect, shared common goals and ideologies, felt a similar passion for living life to its wildest, craziest, most challenging and most beautiful elements..… So Hendri was quite an inspirational force for me, by being such a legend he gave others the confidence to achieve their abilities – and for that he became a superhero! …. He managed to fire up some of the greatest adventures and athletes on the planet with his strong and silent brand of leadership and encouragement. Hendri was such a powerfully magnetic and quietly humble force, he attracted other legendary men and women to him like moths to a flame. His energy was infectious and quite often intimidating…a bit like a semi-dormant volcano, you always knew that beneath that unflappable and charming exterior, he was a bubbling caldera of scheming seismic activity. He was conflicted and yet sought answers, fighting his demons in search of inner peace. It was always GO around Hendri, his itching to unleash his next outrageous mission when the proper celestial alignment and similarly motivated team mates had arrived from far corners of the globe. And invariably, the mission would both shock those who first heard the stories, fill us all full of incredulous wonder at his super hero antics yet again and profound sense of SEEKING to find that which eluded him always. I feel lucky to have shared some 0f the very best days of our lives together…
I may have mentioned I planted a fruit orchard on my land in New Zealand in his honour. Hendri’s Orchard is full of apple trees, pear trees, feijoas, plums, peaches, with new trees going in all the time…