Anna von Boetticher talks about how to get the most out of travelling
Anna von Boetticher has just returned from the cold depths of the Baltic Sea. The 53-year-old German freediving champion is filming the latest season of Waterwoman, a four-part documentary for German television broadcaster NDR, and is travelling to dive sites around the country. Filming for the first season took her freediving among blue sharks in the Azores, through the cenotes in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and into Iceland’s Silfra fissure – but season two starts off a little closer to home.
Germany isn’t an obvious diving destination, but it’s been an important trip for von Boetticher and her team. She earned her first scuba diving qualification here at the age of 17, in the deep waters of Lake Constance, and has spent the last few weeks exploring a flooded quarry and the Rhine River. ‘It’s crucial to understand that if you have the will to be fascinated by the world around you, you will see amazing things wherever you are,’ she says. ‘You do not need to travel to faraway places for that at all.’ So far, the trip has far exceeded her expectations. ‘I can’t wait for people back home to see this.’
Von Boetticher had been scuba diving for years before trying a freediving workshop in 2007. She turned out to be a natural. Less than a year later, she broke the German freediving depth record and took home the bronze medal at the AIDA freediving world championships in Sharm El Sheikh. Despite her smaller-than-average lung capacity, she can hold her breath for six minutes and 12 seconds, a skill that has helped her to explore dark and potentially dangerous corners of the ocean.
Anna’s travel insights
• Be fascinated by the world around you; you will see amazing things
• You don’t need to travel to faraway places
• Go against the flow; look for beauty in unexpected places
During a trip to Greenland in 2019, she completed what she thinks may have been the most difficult dive of her life. ‘It’s a toss-up between diving beneath the frozen surface of a fjord in Greenland and sinking 12 metres down a narrow water-filled crevasse in the French Alps. Both locations were very physically demanding, with extreme cold and a fair amount of risk management involved.’
Von Boetticher can often be found in places that, at first, appear uninviting. Many of her dives are in less-popular cold-water locations, where she is ‘constantly freezing’, and when she travels, it’s often to areas that others have overlooked. ‘I think what counts when travelling is that you are willing to look and to see things,’ she says. ‘If you don’t have a sense of wonder about your surroundings at home, then I don’t think you will truly find it in far-flung places either.’
Her advice for other travellers looking for beauty in unexpected places is to go against the flow, to climb the famous mountain’s smaller neighbour. ‘That, to me, seems like more of an adventure,’ she says. ‘And if it’s wild and rough or miserable, be prepared to get wet.’ Never one to shy away from the rain, von Boetticher recalls a damp and dreary walk through a Norwegian valley where, suddenly, the clouds parted to reveal the blazing lights of the aurora borealis. ‘I had never seen the northern lights before and we had gone looking for them several times on that trip with no luck – except at that moment, on a wet walk to nowhere in the darkness of the polar night.’
Filming for the second season of Waterwoman will take von Boetticher back to the mountains around Chamonix. ‘When I tell people where we will be filming, high up on a glacier at 3,200 metres, they look baffled.’ But diving, and especially freediving, is about so much more than marine life and reaching great depths, she says. ‘Glacier water is a unique and mesmerising environment – but the crevasses are also going to be a challenge to explore. Let’s just say I learned to ice climb a few years ago because I wanted to be able to get in and out!’
