Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Peter Moore, Travel writer

Australian travel writer, Peter Moore, was recently written up in a student newspaper called The Daily Nouse. I loved his book 'The Wrong Way Home' described as follows in the interview: Peter’s most popular travel book so far in the UK has been 'The Wrong Way Home', in which, after a spell working in Britain, he decided he was going to use the remainder of his budget (just over £2,000) to get home to Sydney without going on a plane; “I wanted to travel home overland – without flying – as a way of blowing my mind and enriching my life.” The trail followed by Peter was originally popular with the hippies of the 1960s, who often took the journey to the Far East in droves.
On his way back to Australia, Moore decided he would use this opportunity to take a jaunt through the war-torn Balkans. “I was in Budapest during the time of the Balkan War and I thought a trip down to the former Yugoslavia was in order.” Peter ended up travelling down through Croatia, Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina. “I saw this bus with ‘Mostar’ on the front, which is a town in Bosnia, and I thought if the buses were going there then it must be ok!” This sense of adventure coupled with an apparent disregard for self-preservation sometimes has the tendency to get Moore into fairly harrowing situations, as he found out when he eventually arrived in Mostar. “The bus arrived and I saw it was still a war zone. I decided I would just sit on the bus and wait for it to turn back, but it turned out that it was stopping for the night. Understandably, the town was pretty much deserted and anything resembling a place to stay was shut long ago. I was even considering heading down to the police station and asking them to put me in a cell for the night! As it happened, I bumped into a couple of guys who offered me a place to stay at their uncle’s flat. I later found out that when the war started their uncle had taken the family to safety over in America and left the keys to his flat with his nephews.”

1 comment:

Jay said...

Yikes. That's scary,and yet, I like life's adventures.