I suppose if someone asked me to choose the best decade of my life, I would probably select that time from the mid-70s to the mid-80s. Apart from a moment when I briefly and unsuccessfully dipped my toes into the sea of matrimony, it was a good life. I was unencumbered by career, emotional commitment or geography. It was a time when I gave my heart freely and frequently. I had almost finished my university degree, which I had begun after a few years wandering through my own wilderness and had taken every second year off to see the world. This decade, for me, was my belle époque. Whilst in Sydney I became an ambulance officer, drove taxis, worked as a trolley boy in a major hospital, and various other jobs in order to earn the wherewithal to continue my travels. It was a time of adventure, of romance, of exploration of my inner workings, many of which were reflective and quite painful, and a time of observing and understanding relationships.
While most people leave school and set their course on a career, I took almost twenty years to find my calling. Meanwhile, life called me and I was there to answer that call.
So, this book covers many facets of that decade, written often in a humorous vein considering some of the predicaments in which I found myself and often with a good dose of introspection and an exploration of relationships between people and between people and existence. Even though the chapters, each one very different, are set against the backdrop of exotic destinations in the Third World, one would not necessarily glean a traveler’s insight into these places. One would simply be taken along with the reminiscences of a life well-lived. It's, in part, through optimizing circumstances, a chronicle of a life that very few people get to experience.
