Meandering to Manila

Keith Dalton was a journalist with foreign correspondent dreams. He had them as a 10-year-old. They never went away.

Dalton was 25 when he crammed a typewriter in his backpack and set off from Australia to Southeast Asia, convinced he could be a self-made foreign correspondent.

Writing as he went, Dalton took buses, trucks, trains, planes, passenger ferries, cargo ships, and canoes. Along the way, he suffered malaria, dysentery, kidney stones, and gout. Four days upriver in Borneo, he was the...