Description
Author: Peter Piney, Hardbound, 312 Pages, ISBN: B000KP4SDK, 1957 Reprint of 1952 Original - Second-Hand book in perfect unread condition **
A new Marco Polo emerges as one reads the vivid pages of Dust on My Shoes. He is Peter Pinncy, adventurer and wanderer extraordinary, whose flair for finding the dramatic, dangerous and unusual in experiences and people makes the record of his travels a spirited chronicle, robust, lively, exciting. .
Setting out from Greece, Pinney travelled through the countries of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, over the snow-covered mountains of Afghanistan, across the plains of India to the steaming jungles of Assam and Burma. In between times, when he was not actually on the move, he took part briefly in the Greek civil war, worked as a rouscabout in a baked-bean bar on the waterfront at Beirut, coloured photographs for a photographer in Teheran, and peddled orchids in Delhi. He travelled sometimes alone, sometimes with a Dutchman named Marchand, a "peerless companion" whose instinct for wandering was as strong as his own.
Nearly always penniless, they scrounged lifts by every available means of transport; and when there was no transport they walked. They were often in trouble with the authorities, especially in those countries for which they had no proper visas; and they were often in pursuit of, or pursued by, girls whose charms were as various as their nationalities. In an endless succession of adventures and misadventures they were saved by their quick-wittedness and ingenuity. Once, in Burma, they fell in with a tribe of head-hunters. How they escaped from that predicament is only one of the many exciting episodes that make up this book.
Peter Pinney is an engaging writer with a keen eye for detail in what he describes and a gift of summarizing character vividly. Though he has no ((message", the reader of Dust on My Shoes will get not only an impression of the countries separately described, but a total impression of the Middle Eastern and Far Eastern scene of the present day, torn as it is by poverty, suspicion and uncertainty.
Illustrated with line-drawings and many of the author's own photograhs
