Unlonely Planet

Billy Curry

Twenty-eight-year-old Billy Curry has had enough of the Melbourne rat race. Aproaching the critical stages of his professional career, his inner curiosity of travel begins to take over. He has not seen much of the world and decides to change his four-week annual leave holiday to an around-the-world adventure. He starts with kayaking and trekking through the Himalayas then later gains a unexpected role in a Bollywood film in Bombay.

The much-anticipated European summer finally arrives and Billy is a guest on a royal prince's super yacht, runs with the bulls in Spain, and narrowly escapes the Mob in Italy. Next stop to Sweden to experience the beauty of Scandinavia, the States to sample the fraternity lifestyle, and somehow gets stabbed with a pizza cutter wielded by a Brazilian prostitute in Rio. The nine-month experience is filled with many mishaps, adventures, tragedies, romances and fun-filled episodes.
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Maverick in Madagascar

Mark Eveleigh

Intrigued by tales of the Vazimba people – a mysterious tribe of white pygmies according to some accounts; an invisible telepathic people according to others – Mark Eveleigh travels to the ancient ‘Isle of the Moon”. He treks along Madagascar’s north-west coast, accompanied first by his pack bull Jobi and then by an intrepid Malagasy guide, Eloi, who prudently dons a bullet-prooof vest for the trip. Before he comes to the end of his quest, and hears the story of the last of the Vazimba at the feet of an old village headman, he explores the difference between myth and reality in a land that has spawned sacred crocodiles, schizophrenic tyrant queens, blood-guzzling spirit animals and people-eating plants. Mark Eveligh exuberantly captures the spirit of Madagascar in this modern-day adventure. - book cover
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Larkin about Ireland

John Larkin

John Larkin travels to Ireland in search of his spiritual home, the one his father had left behind in the fifties. Instead he finds a nation undergoing tremendous change: from poor to rich, religious to secular, leprechauns to boy bands. Ireland is on the move, cutting deals, talking bollocks on mobile phones.

It's a hilarious and often poignant journey up Croagh Patrick, the holiest of holy mountains, around The Ring of Kerry, to Knock, home to the tackiest sourvenir shops in the world (and an apparition of The Blessed Virgin), and into pubs where the locals still end their days in a lively fall off a bar stool. -- book cover.

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Snakecharmers in Texas

Clive James

“This collection of essays brings the celebrated Jamesian wit to bear on a dazzingly diverse assembly of personalities, places and burning issues of the eighties. He tells of such wonders of the world as the Statue of Liberty and the Sydney Opera House, and visits the Nuremburg stadium littered with crushed Fanta can where the master race once assembled shoulder to brown-shirted shoulder. He reports on the Royal progress through the Californian heartland of Ron and Nancy’s USA and the invasion of Normandy by an ageing army of D-Day veterans out on an anniversary spree. He profiles Barry Manilow in “a detergent-blue suit with diamante trim” and Philip Larkin “wearing his Library Association tie” alongside the seductive Diana Cooper and the searing Bob Geldorf and in company with the frost-borne footwork of Torvill and Dean.” – book cover
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