Round the World in the Wrong Season

A colorful coming-of-age story about a recent college graduate who is forced to assume life-changing responsibility during a six-month baptism of fire, played out in the lovely tableau of South American and Polynesian Islands, ending some 8,000 miles later in New Zealand. But the narrator¿s true-life adventures don¿t stop there. Torn between wanderlust and the burning desire to set his adventures to paper, he puts off a much-anticipated reunion with his college girlfriend in Thailan...
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A colorful coming-of-age story about a recent college graduate who is forced to assume life-changing responsibility during a six-month baptism of fire, played out in the lovely tableau of South American and Polynesian Islands, ending some 8,000 miles later in New Zealand. But the narrator¿s true-life adventures don¿t stop there. Torn between wanderlust and the burning desire to set his adventures to paper, he puts off a much-anticipated reunion with his college girlfriend in Thailan for another five months, in order to `find himself¿ and begin the fourteen-year process of completing this book. As a result, their subsequent reunion doesn¿t quite go as planned. Includes the fascinating story of how teak trees in Burma became a yacht in Scotland which sailed to New Zealand.In this pre-modern round-the world travel-log, you were expected to spend twelve months in dozens of countries with no credit card, no cell phone, no internet, no car, no plane tickets, no laundry for months, sometimes no motor to propel your sailboat from one island to another, 700 miles away. The yacht voyages involved forcibly removing a captain with a gun, a crew threatening to use his sword, drunk naval personnel peering at the boat¿s chef in the shower, a captain who wanted to have the boat towed to South America, and a shark attack. Characters included Israeli backpackers, a female French home-steader, a widow hotelier, prep school escapee, army deserters, and French Foreign Legionnaires in Papeete, a Kon Tiki survivor, and a young man determined to bring ecstasy to Tahiti. The rest of the narrative involves travelling through New Zealand with a snowboard salesman, hiding beneath surfboards on the ferry to South Island to avoid paying the fare, watching Japanese snowboarders compete in August, holing up on an island with a population of about 300 for three months, learning how to distill spirits, watching a friend¿s ponytail being set afire in a pub, and getting beaten up in one of the He finally made it back to family in Sweden, followed by the UK and Bahamas.