Showing results by narrator "R. A. Dalkey" in All Categories

When R.A. Dalkey travels cheap, he thinks bigger than hostel dorms, overnight trains and pasta with tomato sauce for every meal. He’ll roll out his sleeping bag in Madrid’s red light district, nap on the streets of Monaco and furtively string up his hammock on Swiss farms. He’ll spontaneously teach English in Laos in exchange for rice. He’ll thumb rides anywhere from Timor to the Orange Free State. He’ll try smiling a lot, and see where it takes him. Most of the time it's somewhere good. As this collection of stories will reveal, it doesn’t always go smoothly.

When a nine-year-old R.A. Dalkey decided he was going to become an Outback truck driver, the poor Australia-besotted boy had no idea what he was getting into. He’d been born on the wrong continent, for a start. And even if he could make it out of Africa one day, where was an Australian work visa to come from? A sensible adult would have filed that dream away as a juvenile fantasy and gotten on with life. Especially after taking five attempts to get the most basic of car licenses. But R.A. Dalkey never claimed to be a sensible adult, did he?