‘The Front of Beyond’ is a collection of travellers’ tales from East Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It is available for all species of e-reader via the links below

In the late 1980s and the 1990s I was working as a lecturer. The only perk of this eighty hour a week job was ten weeks holiday a year. So two or three times a year I would leave the office and take a bus to the airport. Usually travelling with hand luggage only I would hop on a plane to somewhere interesting, cheap and a long, long way from the nearest student of quantity surveying.

I wandered around China, trying to nip across international borders in militarised zones. I stuck my nose into parts of rural Burma where the authorities didn’t really want foreigners to go. I delved into parts of Kurdistan. I had a look at parts of the Sahara, apparently being chased by the army. I hitched and bussed across borders in East Africa.

I would sit on a painfully slow, rickety bus in the baking tropical sun for weeks at a time. I spent the time sweating profusely, wondering where I would sleep that night and not thinking at all about lectures, paperwork and meetings. Oh, the interminable bloody meetings.

In the middle of the decade I upped sticks and buggered off, without pay, to sit on a slow bus for a year. But for most of the nineties, I spent a month at a time, hitch-hiking to the front of beyond. I always aspired to get to the back of beyond, of course. But there’s only so much you can do in a month. I really didn’t have the constitution for facing down hitherto undiscovered tribes of angry Amazonians, wielding blowpipes.

You can find ‘The Front of Beyond’ at http://www.amazon.com/author/edge, at the UK and other European Amazon websites, Kobo, on ‘I Tunes’ (Search for ‘Martin Edge’), for all formats (including pdf) at the ridiculously named ‘Smashwords’ and elsewhere.

All the colour photos from ‘The Front of Beyond’ are available via the clickable photo below