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EXCESS BAGGAGE
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24听March听2007
1955 ROYAL CHALLENGE -
In 1955 the Duke of Edinburgh issued a challenge to students to see if they could travel round the world, starting off with only five pounds in their pocket.听 Alistair Boyd took up the challenge and spent 14 months on the journey which involved working his passage on freighters, hitchhiking on remote mountain roads, cadging free rides in aeroplanes and piloting a smugglers鈥 boat up the Amazon.
Sandi Toksvig hears the travel tales and Amazonian experiences of Alistair and is joined by Daniel Mason and Patrick Symmes, two North American writers who have travelled extensively in South America.听 They explain the dangers of protecting the mahogany forests and swimming in the river and of meeting with tribes so remote they have never heard of the sea.
Presented by Sandi Toksvig
Photo: Amazon
This week's guests:听
graduated in 1955.听 At that time he was told that the Duke of Edinburgh had said to a group of students in Cardiff 鈥What I should like every university student or graduate to be able to do is first of all to work his way around the world on five pounds鈥. 听Alistair had long harboured two ambitions, to travel up the Amazon and down the Congo.听 He saw this as the ideal opportunity to achieve these aims.听
En route, Alastair made his way to the lost city of the Incas, Machu Picchu - virtually unvisited at the time, met Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in Darjeeling, went to Hollywood to appear on America鈥檚 biggest chat show and saw leather back turtles laying their eggs on a Malayan beach. His adventures are recounted in:
Royal Challenge Accepted 鈥 Around the world on five pounds
Publisher: Ocean Media
ISBN-10: 095542450X
ISBN-13: 978-0955424502
received his bachelor's degree in biology from Harvard in 1998 and spent a year studying malaria on the Thai-Myanmar border.听 He graduated as a medical student in 2004. Much of his first book The Piano Tuner was written in and is set in the Shan states of Thailand/Burma.听 His latest novel A Far Country is located in an unnamed South American country.
Daniel鈥檚 interest in the Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral took him on a research trip to the coast of South America.听 While in Brazil, he was struck by the country鈥檚 recent history of internal migration, of people who had fled the droughts and land struggles of the arid northeast to move to the cities.听 Daniel returned on several occasions to Brazil where he made a few trips up the Amazon.听 He went along the Rio Negro, a tributary, which is almost as big and flows from the north near Colombia and joins the Amazon at the town of Manaus some 900 miles from the sea.
A Far Country
Publisher: Picador
ISBN-10: 033049273X
ISBN-13: 978-0330492737
The Piano Tuner
Publisher: Picador
ISBN-10: 0330492691
ISBN-13: 978-0330492690
is a Contributing Editor at Harper's and Outside magazines.听 As a foreign correspondent, Patrick has travelled with Maoist insurgents in Nepal, visited both main guerrilla groups in Colombia, and profiled drug gangs in Brazil.
He is the author of Chasing Che, an account of a 12,000-mile ride across South America, retracing the journeys and guerrilla campaigns of Che Guevara - later made into a film called The Motorcycle Diaries鈥.听 His latest book The Boys from Dolores is his account of the childhood and youth of Fidel Castro, his brother Raul and their school chums in Santiago de Cuba.
The Boys from Dolores: Fidel Castro and his Generation 鈥 from Revolution to Exile
Publisher: Constable and Robinson
ISBN-10: 1845290003
ISBN-13: 978-1845290009
Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend
Publisher: Constable and Robinson
ISBN-10: 1841192910
ISBN-13: 978-1841192918
's (FCO)
Travel Advice Notices aim to ensure that British travellers are well prepared before departureThe 大象传媒 cannot be held responsible for
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 Sandi Toksvig:
The daughter of a foreign correspondent, Sandi has been travelling all her life more info |
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