“The King’s Postman”

Almost ninety countries, a thousand and one landscapes and the same number of personal experiences fill Jordi Llorens’s travel diary from around the world. To all this, we must add the fact of having acted as a royal postman between King Tupou IV, head of the heavenly archipelago of Tonga and the monarch Juan Carlos I.

Messages via email, technological networks and web browsing are the day-to-day work of Jordi Llorens. However, away from the work environment, he prefers face-to-face communication, maps made of paper and real journeys. So, whenever he can, this specialist from the Institut Català de la Salut (Catalan Health Institute) catches a plane, ready to discover other lands and other cultures, some of them very far away and unknown to most people, those kinds of lands that only expert travellers know how to find.

[…] He remembers particularly the mission that was entrusted to him by Tupou IV, King of Tonga, during the journey that the photographer from Granollers made to this lost paradise in the southern Pacific Ocean. He was tasked to deliver a letter from the King of Tonga to King Juan Carlos I. “It must be you who delivers my message in person, without any intermediaries,” said the elderly Tupou IV solemnly, who is eighty-two years old. Llorens promised that he would do so, and his mission has been accomplished successfully—the traveller has been received by King Juan Carlos, to whom he handed over the letter from the King of Tonga. As if he was a Royal Page […].

By Enric Alfonso