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Overview
Things were going so well. A successful job in advertising. An attractive wife. Two healthy kids. A big house and plenty of cash. Then came the divorce, and with it went all the money. Four more years of hard graft generated a second fortune – enough to pay for two boarding school educations up front. £1 million worse off, and still with only a few quid to his name, the author sets up his own business and builds a third stockpile of money. This time, he is going to spend it on himself.
Convinced there is a lot more to life than simply generating money, he decides to explore the world on his own terms – all five continents and over 200,000 miles of travelling - looking for a very different type of richness: life-affirming experiences that will allow his dented human spirit to conclude that it is at last reconciled. Food to restore the soul of a life-battered man.
That means only going to places he has never been, hand-picking them for their cultural intrigue and their extraordinary landscapes. Armed with a decent budget and a highly inquisitive mind forged by an Oxford degree in geography, he scours the world for the type of mental stimulation that will restore his inner calm. He can slum it up a dirt track in Bolivia, share bread with a Waroa Indian in his wood-platform house on the banks of the Orinoco, or lord it in a Raj’s palace. His audacity and enterprise are handsomely rewarded as he discovers learning and serenity way beyond anything the developed world could ever offer.
His adventures include negotiating glaciers in Chile and Argentina, watching volcanoes erupt in Costa Rica, colluding with the locals to find tigers in the wild and swimming with elephants in India, cuddling stingrays in Belize, hiring a madman to investigate caves and moai on Easter Island, and staying sober long enough to climb Sydney Bridge. But it’s not just all-action adventure. By the end of it all he has achieved what he set out for – a mind that has absorbed the wisdom of the world, and has worked out how to apply that knowledge to the madness of modern life.
CHAPTERS
Prologue: The final straw and the Pocket Ethnologist's Meltdown Theory (London 2000)
In which the author finally cracks and decides to ditch it all. Points of self-realisation. Going to ground and formulating a plan.
Fruit Cacktail, the Law of Solitary Time and Argentinian Penis Extensions (Easter Island, Bolivia and Chile 2001)
The power of the Spanish. Power and poverty on the world’s most-ignored continent. Moonscapes in the Atacama. Staring at the Pacific. Madness at Lake Titicaca. Altitude sickness in La Paz. Andes: backbone of the world or a bigger metaphor for life?
Well Hung Down Under (Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore 2002)
Red champagne: surely not? Out of my mind in Adelaide’s Maclaren Vale. Rainforest in the desert. Random wombats. Learning to be an aboriginal artist.
It’s all the Raj (India, Andaman Islands 2003)
Rajastani forts. Stench and deprivation in Kolkata. Opulence thumbs its nose at poverty – again. Tigers, and what they can teach you about life. Andaman Islands before the tsunami hits.
Driven Caracas (Venezuela, Cuba, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico 2004)
Communism, oil and organised poverty. Exploding volcanoes. Friendly coati and the elusive jaguar. What man can learn from caves.
Deaf Leopards (South Africa, Botswana, 2005)
Up close and personal with leopards. On foot with the white rhino. Don’t confuse movement with progress. Talking to lions. Serenity and violence.
Zim, Zam, Zanzibar (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania 2006)
The rise and fall of an economy. Two sides of the Zambezi River. On the trail of Dr. Livingstone at Victoria Falls. Final meltdown for Kilimanjaro. Tracking down Freddie Mercury’s house.
Tarantulas at dinner (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, 2007)
Learning to love spiders that are bigger than your dinner plate. Elusive Harpy Eagles. Fishing for piranhas. Teasing aligators. Walking on ice. Icebergs bigger than shopping centres.
Underneath an elephant (Botswana and Namibia 2008)
Epilogue: Sod it, I’m back
A work in progress.......
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