Cold Beer and Crocodiles: A Bicycle Journey into Australia
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.13 (623 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0792279522 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 284 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-11-02 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
An excellent cycle tour read, and a worthy companion to "Miles From Nowhere" Amazon Customer I really enjoyed this book, and congratulate the author on writing an extremely entertaining account of his journey and his personal interactions and observations with Australia and its culture. I particularly enjoyed his often wry sense of humour (something I really appreciate!) and the charactershe painted to life with his wor. True to the cycle touring experience Jason Signalness Having finished only half the book, I'm amazed at the experiences he has. I'm at a loss to understand just how he went about getting into the situations he did. And yet, being a cycle-tourist myself, I can understand.Let me explain a bit. While Smith was riding inland, in central Queensland, he decided he wanted to visit a sheep. Michael Murphy said Duel in the Sun.. Cold Beer and Crocodiles (crocodiles barely feature at all!) is an excellent travel adventure which will appeal to anyone who cosily enjoys the vicarious experience of someone else battling to survive in an extreme landscape: in this case, the Australian Outback. Having lived in Australia for 15 years without developing any emot
When he happens to be a keen observer and a vivid writer as well, the result is a classic travel book. It's a tale worthy of the bold explorers who lived -- and sometimes died -- to open up this vast, isolated, beautiful world, from chilly Tasmania to the arid, blistering outback, where temperatures soar to 140 degrees in the midday sun. He's a free spirit, following the road map of his own adventurous imagination. We meet rancher Rob Macintosh and his family, who offer Smith a warm welcome and a job on a working sheep station, and a quartet of matey diggers who whisk him off to a lush canyon oasis hiddenbetween the folds of an apocalyptic landscape. By the time he coasted b
In 1996, that's just what American-born Time magazine correspondent Roff Martin Smith did, though; as he explains, he'd been living in Australia for 14 years but didn't really know the country, and he "felt no emotional bond to it." About to turn 38, a few pounds over his ideal weight, and untested as a distance bicyclist, Smith faced up to considerable odds, but he survived to tell the tale. And a rollicking tale it is, as Smith meets with an odd assortment of humans and critters along his sometimes torturous path. Difficult though the journey is, Smith keeps up his good cheer throughout these lively pages, and, if he's not quite unflappable, he's certainly a sympathetic narrator. (One all-too-long stretch of road, for instance, he calls "the most dangerous and frightening I've ever had the misfortune to ride: a suicide run of hammering trucks, heavy const