Travel Diaries

In order to secure his first passport, the author was flown from what was then a British colony to New York in 1970. He returned to the Bahamas weeks later. Raised in a footloose family, were road and rail trips in the US and EU and voyages to lesser visited islands via mailboat. At age 13 Eric spent a summer packing grocery bags in Nassau for tips to earn the airfare to join a friend in rural Ireland, then flew alone to Sweden. There, on distant rail platforms, distant relatives and family friends met and hosted him. Eric intended to walk or cycle around the planet, but quickly learned that there is too much blue. His four trips round the planet have taken him to six continents and 75 countries, as often as possibly by surface. Travel is the balance between time and money, and most of his adventures were on a budget. After boarding school ended in 1989 he, Eric raced a boat to Bermuda, sailed back, drove across the US in just 54 hours to Los Angeles, he then rode a bus ride to San Francisco, he took a flight home to Nassau. Then he embarked for Cairns Australia and a family drive to Alice Springs near Ayers Rock. From Perth the gang crossed southern Australia to Sydney before flying back to Nassau then Boston. When his studies were over, he spent a year traveling round the world, halfway in command of a dying man’s yacht. Then Asia and Europe, followed by a return to Singapore for three years. This included voyages on tankers, a trip to Borneo, Vietnam, others to Indonesia and Malaysia and India. Calculating he could hitchhike through East Africa for less money than it would cost to stay at Oxford, he achieved three weeks of mostly solo travel in search of an elusive ferry in Mpulungu, often getting lost but receiving no help from Peace Corps. In Tonga he’s met neighbors who ate the dog next door, encountered a one-legged fighter-pilot in New Zealand, seen Bob Marley, sailed with another man who saw the sunrise with Jaques Brel, and was given a ride in Nova Scotia by a man who heard Churchill speak in parliament. He’s spoken and met with German and Allied survivors of the U-boat campaigns. Their neighbor in Bahamas would show boys his war wounds if they would wash his car. At age ten he found a bullet-ridden skull in the pond behind their house. Eric took a few chunks out of the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1991 and was in a train hit by a truck in Kosovo weeks before the lid blew off the Balkans.   3