Exploring the unknown is a personal account of a South African's backpacking journey of self-discovery and adventure off the beaten trail. In 1990, leaving behind a life of white privilege and a career, the author travelled to 35 countries in five years on a shoestring budget as the apartheid regime collapsed with uncertainty. A time of carefree travel, inbred survival instinct and always proudly South African he became set on seeing and experiencing as many cultures and places using maps, travel books and various modes of transport. An exciting and funny account with history and politics enmeshed throughout the story, spanning three continents the author using temporary bases in and around London to springboard his travels-United Kingdom, Ireland and Europe- East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Morocco and South East Asia-Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Hong Kong and Cuba. In 1996, he returned home before choosing a new life in Canada. In 2003, he travelled to Namibia and in 2005 embarked on a special trip to Mozambique.

Border-Line Insanity offers the reader an insight into the life of a conscripted soldier in the South African army during the dark days of apartheid.
In 1984 I was thrust into a scary world of strict order and discipline as a teenage school graduate, experiencing subtle brain washing as I became moulded into a white soldier for the mandatory two-year term.
The reader is taken through the training, character building and bonds of camaraderie, before being dispatched into a bush life ripe with fear on the border line of South-West Africa/Namibia and Angola. From one patrol to the next we experienced the insanities that came with the hardship as we survived with an iron will under intense heat and heavy rainfall upon a land we scorned. Having seen and smelled innocent death on one border, only to have three troops from my section captured on another, and held prisoner under deplorable conditions in Mozambique. Experiencing real life fears in 1988, as we massed up in a mechanized armoured brigade as Citizen Force soldiers on the South-West African/Angolan border, in wait for an attack against Cuban and Angolan forces, with our fate a living hell in itself.
With the army still breathing deeply in me, I left South Africa (after having served two and a half years) for a solo backpacking adventure across exotic parts of the world and behind the iron curtain, which lasted five years. In 2003 I returned to an independent Namibia to bury some tension, anxiety and hatred for a people, a land and a life where much of my ill feeling had been born only to fester silently for many years ahead. In so doing I had come full circle to closing a chapter never to be lived again and onecertainly never to be forgotten.

In 1984, as an eighteen-year-old school leaver, the author was conscripted into a chaotic world of strict order, intense discipline and subtle brain washing, moulding him into a proud well trained 1SAI Ratel soldier. On the SWA/Namibian/Angolan border patrolling through the bush under heavy rainfall and extreme heat, the platoon formed unbreakable bonds of camaraderie. The sheer fear of lying in nightly ambush positions and burying massacred dead in Angola, added to the insanities of the border war. While stemming the flow of refugees from war torn Mozambique, three soldiers from Platoon 3 were captured and held as POW’s in Maputo in the notorious former Portuguese prison, Machava. Called up as a Citizen Force mechanised soldier in 1988, the author along with some of Platoon 3 joined an armoured battle group hurriedly formed to repel two Cuban armoured brigades threatening to invade SWA/Namibia east of Ruacana.

Backpacking Beyond Boundaries is the story of a young man who puts his career on hold in search of adventure and the discovery of his inner being. He leaves South Africa in 1990 while Nelson Mandela is still in prison and South Africa ruled by a white minority government. His travels take him through 35 countries and cultures as far afield as South East Asia where he spends one year; exotic islands of Thailand, hitchhiking through Malaysia, charming beauty of Sri Lanka, overland through India into Nepal and finally back to Thailand. He also buses through Morocco and into the Sahara Desert. In Turkey he joins a group of 11 fellow backpackers and travels across the country. Behind the Iron Curtain he visits East Germany and the Berlin Wall, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary seeing communism at work. In 1996 he returns to a free South Africa, one now with equal rights and called the Rainbow Nation, before choosing a new life in Canada. In 2003 he travels to Namibia and reconnects with his army past. And in 2005 he makes a special journey to Mozambique with two army friends to see the prison where one of them was held captive.