Published: March 07, 2013
Words: 52,213 (approximate)
Language: English
ISBN: 9781301941568

Short description

“Travels with my Rant” describes my wanderings around some of the more obscure bits of East Timor, the Indonesian islands of Nusa Tenggara, Sulawesi and Borneo, Central America and parts of India. It is a series of travellers tales about uncomfortable and sometimes slightly worrying journeys, sometimes in places which few other western touros reach.

Extended description

“Travels with my Rant” describes my wanderings around some of the more obscure bits of East Timor, the Indonesian islands of Nusa Tenggara, Sulawesi and Borneo, Central America and parts of India. It is a series of travellers tales about uncomfortable and sometimes slightly worrying journeys, sometimes in places which few other western touros reach.

In the 1990s, whilst working as an academic, I took full advantage of every minute of the only perk of the job – ten weeks holiday a year – to explore some of the areas of the world less frequented by Europeans. Driven to near insanity by the demands of the lecturing profession, I threw in the towel in 1995 and took a travelling ‘Gap Year’, like a superannuated middle-aged posh kid.

Life is, of course, always annoying and as ever I found travel an effective emetic for the brain. So I stored up a lot of rants about many of the places I visited and have regurgitated them onto these pages.

I had a look at East Timor, while t.. (Read more) “Travels with my Rant” describes my wanderings around some of the more obscure bits of East Timor, the Indonesian islands of Nusa Tenggara, Sulawesi and Borneo, Central America and parts of India. It is a series of travellers tales about uncomfortable and sometimes slightly worrying journeys, sometimes in places which few other western touros reach.

In the 1990s, whilst working as an academic, I took full advantage of every minute of the only perk of the job – ten weeks holiday a year – to explore some of the areas of the world less frequented by Europeans. Driven to near insanity by the demands of the lecturing profession, I threw in the towel in 1995 and took a travelling ‘Gap Year’, like a superannuated middle-aged posh kid.

Life is, of course, always annoying and as ever I found travel an effective emetic for the brain. So I stored up a lot of rants about many of the places I visited and have regurgitated them onto these pages.

I had a look at East Timor, while the folk there were still fighting for their independence from Indonesia. They were also wondering if kidnapping me would further their cause at all. I wandered around the Spice Islands and up rivers into the heart of Borneo. I meandered around the countries of Central America, getting mugged and running borders, accidentally.

‘Travels with my Rant’ is the first of two volumes of rants, published for all e-readers, about some of these travels. The other volume is called ‘The Front of Beyond’.
(Less)

Tags

travel, mexico, borneo, guatemala, el salvador, nicaragua, costa rica, belize, indonesia, panama, sulawesi, honduras, flores, spice islands, komodo, east timor, ambon, auroville, nusa tenggara, utila

Available ebook reading formats

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LRF (Use only for older model Sony Readers that don't support .epub)	Buy	Download sample
Palm Doc (PDB) (for Palm reading devices)	Buy	Download sample
Plain Text (download) (flexible, but lacks much formatting)	Buy	No sample available
Plain Text (view) (viewable as web page)	Buy	No sample available

Reviews

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Review by: trailmaintainer on May 09, 2013 :
Hi Martin - It's me again, the only person who will give you a review, and an American at that! I'm glad to see that you gave up on your hopeless campaign to avoid our taxes by giving your books away free, and have come around to our way of seeing things and are charging for them now. To an American like me, the cost is a mere pittance, though it probably precludes many of your impoverished fellow countrymen from reading your works. Which is truly a shame, because the Angry Scot has come through yet again with another fine work of wit and irony.

This work, from Martin's pre-sailing days, describes his travels among some of the remotest and poorest third-world outposts remaining. While Somerset Maugham visited many of the same places a hundred years ago, the transportation standards have seen a shocking decline in the interval. The descriptions of the Timorese buses and Bornean barges evoked the utmost squalor, though the people were noticeably kinder and more civil than the Panamanian basketballers who cruelly beat Martin at a later stage of his trip. All in all, I can understand why Martin has given up on land travel and now can sail away from the drunken Norwegians, automatonic Swedes and murderous Irish who he visits in this new millenium.

This book, along with its companion, "The Front of Beyond", is worth every cent of the price, no matter how much tax Martin has to pay.
(reviewed within a month of purchase)

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