A week after breaking up with the girl next door - his girlfriend and travelling companion through Central America - Peter Moore heads off to Africa to lose himself for a while. In the grand tradition of 19th-century scoundrels, explorers and romantics, Africa strikes him as the ideal place to find solitude and anonymity in the face of a personal crisis. What follows is Peter's journey from one end of the Dark Continent to the other. Travelling the fabled Cape Town to Cairo route by any means of transport he can blag (or if he must, pay) his way onto, it's an epic trek that sees our intrepid Antipodean experience everything from the southernmost city in Africa to the Pyramids, vast game parks and thundering falls, cosmopolitan cities and tiny villages, as he journeys through the very heart of Africa. And travelling on his own, it's inevitable that Peter falls in with a motley cast of characters and has myriad misadventures: including coming face to face with a wild hyena with very bad breath, crossing the treacherous Sani Pass, the highest in Africa, narrowly escaping a riot by hiding in a coffin shop, saving oil-covered penguins in South Africa, and acting as an extra in a World War II epic, not to mention dodging 20,000 single woman trying to catch the eye of the king of Swaziland during the annual Reed Dance. Oh yes, and then there was the time when he was kicked out of Robert Mugabe's birthday bash at gunpoint.
My name is Peter Moore and I'm an Australian travel author.
Basically, my job is to go on grand journeys and write about them. I've travelled overland from London to Sydney (The Wrong Way Home), from Cape Town to Cairo (Swahili for the Broken-Hearted) and around Italy on a forty-year-old Vespa (Vroom with a View). I also travelled around Central America with a girl I'd only just met (The Full Montezuma). I'm just finishing a book about driving around Australia in an old car with a new wife (Crikey!).
I'd like to think that my books convey the stuff that I love about travelling - the people you meet and the crazy situations you find yourself in. I constantly find myself in situations that you couldn't make up. Like sheltering in a coffin shop during a riot in Addis Ababa. Or being assured by an Iranian nuclear physicist that my country would be safe in the event of a nuclear war. And I'm constantly overwhelmed by the hospitality of people in even the poorest countries
If I had to describe my books I'd say they were kind of like a cross between Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux. But whereas Bill and Paul can flash their platinum Amexes, I have to be a bit more careful with my pennies. But to be honest I've found that's the best way to meet the locals.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy my books. As Oprah would say "they'll make you laugh, they'll make you cry, they'll change your life."
Well, at least I wish she'd say that.
