I’m a retired corporate citizen and haphazard blogger. Travel has always played an important role in my life, either doing it, reading about or writing about it.
My latest book, Quicker Than Walking: More Fun in Thailand, China and Hong Kong, is now available. As with the previous Go Away: Travels With, and Without, my Wife and Mostly Fun: Soft Nut Bike Tours of Laos and Thailand this is another one for fans of the truth-telling style of travel writers such as Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson. It highlights, once again, that travel is not always about glamour and goggle-eyed wonder.
My previous two books, described the pleasures and pitfalls of travelling solo, travel with a partner, and group travel. In my latest effort Quicker Than Walking: More Fun in Thailand, China and Hong Kong, I’ve added a fourth option – travels with imaginary friends. But these aren’t just any old invented souls, dragged from the dark recesses of my mind. I was accompanied, in my head, by some of the greats of literature.
I checked in for my flight to Bangkok with non-other than Henry Miller for a travelling companion. I took early morning walks, one I’d found the beach, in Hua Hin with Franz Kafka. And I had a massage with D.H. Lawrence himself.
Soon though, my heroes left me to my own reality. In Bangkok I was happy enough in my own company. Then on to Hong Kong and mainland China where my nephew took on the role of translator and tour guide. Eventually I was back in the saddle exploring the delights of hilly Northern Thailand – an e-bike helped me here. Sweating the lowlands of the south – beer my only solace.
I was as Groucho Marx said, born at an early age, in London (England). My parents moved to the Kent coast when I was seven. I caught up with them a year or so later.
I now live in Brisbane, Australia. I still occasionally try to stay fit riding my e-bike on the hilly terrain surrounding the city.
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