The Travel Addict's Puzzle Published

The big day has arrived

The Travel Addicts Puzzle, subtitled Around (most of) Half the World in Forty Days, is now available from Amazon as an e-book for the ridiculously low price of $3.49 or equivalent.

The book relates the adventures I had while travelling alone from Eastern China to Bulgaria on public transport. My present tense progress is broken up with the story of how my wife and I managed to reach China overland through South East Asia, despite having totally different expectations of the journey.  Subsequent travels through China are largely of me chasing Liz around the country on crowded hard-sleeper trains, while she travelled in style on planes and bullet trains for her work.

I embarked upon a quest to find the rural heart of China, which was challenging as what appeared to be a village on a map often turned out to be a city of half a million people, but towards the end of the book I do manage find what I have been searching for. I have not been afraid to express my own views and opinions in trying to make sense of the different cultural experiences that I encountered through my travels and at one point concede that my wife would call me a grumpy old man.

From China I cross the vast deserted steppe of Kazakhstan along the old Silk Road, through Kalmykia, the only Buddhist republic in Europe and where the capital city has been inspired by a work of fiction. I skirt around troubled Chechnya and attend a vodka fuelled wedding proposal in North Ossetia, cross the Caucasus Mountains to enter beautiful Georgia through the back door and finally span the breadth of Turkey to Bulgaria and the European Union.

As a self-confessed travel addict I also use the journey, and references to past travels, in an attempt to discover the driving forces behind the urge to travel. The answer develops as being far more complex and detailed than would first have been thought with notions such as searching for an imagined Arcadia from childhood, collecting images that become the building blocks of an individual’s identity and creating a kaleidoscope of movement in an effort to resist change, as just some of the conclusions that are drawn from reflecting upon the experience of travelling.

The book is an honest account of a man who is no longer young (I’m currently in Sydney on my way back to Malaysia having signed on for my old age pension in New Zealand) but still possesses a drive to explore the world and the people in it. The real puzzle, which is enormously satisfying, is that the more that is understood the deeper the mysteries become. Humour, much of it self-deprecating, is used throughout the book which is essentially meant as light reading and designed to entertain.

Click here to see the book live on the kindle site