: About Me

I left home when I was seven years old. I reckoned it was time to hit the road. So I packed a bag and plonked myself beside the Great Western Highway and waited for adventure to come and meet me.The grown-ups had a different idea.“Hit the road!” Roared my father, “I’ll show you hit the bloody road!”I blamed the books. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn did it, the Famous Five hardly saw a grown up from dawn to mystery laden dusk. Kids did adventure, at least in every book that I had read. And if it was in a book then it must be true. I wished I had thought to put a book down my trousers.I couldn’t sit down for a week.

I put those plans on hold for thirty years and tried it their way with varying degrees of success but there were always The Books.  They whispered to me of far off places and foreign faces, fuelling my curiosity, feeding this poets soul. And The Road. No matter where you are in life there is always a road nearby, curling seductively around a distant bend. Who knows where it will end and who you will meet along the way?

Eventually the correct planetary alignments came together with more earthbound circumstances and I was off like a robbers dog! Thirty years after my first failed attempt, I went to India via Kathmandu like any self-respecting Sixties styled Dharma Bum. I may have been years too late for that trip but in timeless India I found that I was right on time! It was love at first sight; India has been my muse and my never-ending story for 15 years.

The years and experiences and adventures have been kind to me, I have extracted the lessons, saved my life a few times, squeezed each drop of poetry out of every moment and followed stories down alleyways, across mountain tops to their proper home.It’s one of those lives you read about on the back of a book when the publishers try to make it look like the author has gained a lot of life experience.Which is good because now that I have gotten waitressing and road working and bar tending out of the way I can concentrate on writing the next in the great chain of Booker Prize winners set against the backdrop of Mother India.

Travel > Australia & South Pacific Travel Diaries Travel experiences: Hitchhiking in New Zealand

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The first time I ever did it was when I was an impossible fourteen years old, and the last time I did it, I was in my late forties. As I got out of my daughters car by the roadside and prepared myself to flag down a car with nothing more than a winning smile and a thumb outstretched, my daughter complained. “For God’s sakes mum! You are getting too old for this!” She may have been right, when you are young and fresh with sunshine on your hair and the wind against your back hitch hiking is a delicious adventure on the joys of The Road.But as you age you are supposed to bec...

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