Alex Tannen (a pseudonym) is in his 40s and is a native Berliner. Since his student days (Political Sciences and MBA), he has travelled extensively, often alone and mostly in Arab and African countries. His trips have taken him from the Gaza Strip, via Libya and Timbuktu, to Germany's lake-district Mecklenburg, where he realised as he paddled in the idyll that he could do without a passport. He has published four travel books in German. 'Victoria Bitter - Stories from an Australian Winter', about an internship in an Australian construction company in 2003, is his first book translated into Eng...