A fascinating mix of adventure travel, ancient history, 21st century geopolitics and people. Veteran journalists Iain Finlay and Trish Clark set out to travel 21,000 kilometers from Singapore to Venice, hopping on and off trains up through South East Asia, across China and the sprawling steppes and deserts of Central Asia to the Caucasus, Turkey and the Balkans. Their route covers territory along which ancient Silk Road trails have wound their way over the past two thousand years. The rail lines they follow form part of an embryonic, UN-backed Trans-Asian Rail Network, that will eventually...

When Iain Finlay and Trish Clark arrive in Hanoi on a one-year work assignment for the English language service of the communist government-run radio network, they can hardly foresee the intense and exceptional experiences that await them. Coming to Vietnam for an Australian aid agency, their intended role is to coach and instruct, or at least to share their knowledge, with a small group of young reporters. But they find that they learn more than they teach. As friendships with their colleagues grow, Iain and Trish are involved in developing and presenting a daily radio program - the first...

This is the incredible story of how one man, left to die in the jungles of Malaya during World War II, after his battalion had been decimated during the Japanese drive to take Singapore, survives, living on the run in unbelievably hostile circumstances, without ever being captured. In January 1942 British, Australian and Indian forces clashed for the first time with a Japanese army of close to 10,000 that was charging southward down the Malayan Peninsula in a seemingly unstoppable march on Singapore. Arthur Shephard, a corporal in the Australian 2/29th Battalion, took part in the only...

Travel Adventure in Colonial Africa An inspiring true story Author, veteran foreign correspondent and television journalist, Iain Finlay, now in his eighties, recalls two remarkable overland treks through Africa in the 1950s. Viewed now in the light of more than sixty years of historical change in that continent, they have become, in effect, mini time-capsules...journeys in time... Travelling through a pivotal moment in Africa's history. he sees an Africa that has long since disappeared - an Africa in which every one of sixteen countries traversed is under colonial rule or some form of...