Travels with my Rant

by Martin Edge

Overview

“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’.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940044367708
Publisher:	Martin Edge
Publication date:	03/07/2013
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

"Travels with my Rant"

Most of my writing is about my travels. Mostly very slow travels. For some years now I've been plodding round the seas of northern Europe aboard a small sailing boat. To date I've published three accounts of these trips.

For years I poked around in some of the more obscure parts of some developing countries, hitch-hiking and travelling by boat, train and bus. Some of the buses were slower than my boat. The record was 12 hours to go 11 miles in the Shan State in northern Burma. I'll soon be publishing two volumes entitled "Travels with my Rant" and "The Front of Beyond". These will include tales about hopping across dodgy borders in places like East Timor and Nicaragua.

Whilst travel may broaden some minds and narrow others, travelling slowly and alone changes your perspective on the world around you. I like to think it hones the senses and heightens the critical faculties. Others have agreed that yes, it does make me rant on and on about everything.

My travel writings are not gripping tales of derring-do and one man's survival in a savage wilderness against all the odds. I am, in fact, something of a wimp. Neither do they consciously seek to maintain the mythology and exoticism of travel to far flung parts.

The fact is that more or less everywhere on earth people wear jeans and ride scooters. The documentary makers must have a hell of a job editing the world so that it's full of tribal head-dresses and loin cloths. Culture shock isn't all it's cracked up to be and nowhere on the planet is as alien as it appears to be from a distance. Except Manchester of course.

I've tried to give a flavour of the places I've visited and to discuss those aspects of their landscape, environment, people, culture, economy and politics which make them interesting.

In 2014 I published a sort of pilot book entitled "105 Rocks and Other Stuff to Tie your Boat to in Eastern Sweden and Finland". It's full of photos, maps, descriptions and waypoints for, as the name suggests, 105 Scandinavian rocks and other harbours. It's available FREE of charge at my website (www.edge.me.uk) as a web file and as a pdf.

There's yet more stuff on my web page at http://www.edge.me.uk/index.htm. This includes a pile of more academic papers written while I was Head of Research of the Architecture School in Aberdeen.