No Return Ticket

A memoir of a two-year round the world travel adventure and the joys and sorrows on long term life on the road.

This is a boys firsthand account of the Second World War siege of Budapest and the trials of its aftermath, transitioning to an English private school and tough days in London on the way to medical school. Emerging as a urological surgeon, the journey continues to far-flung places, always keeping the human focus. A life lived to the full, it finds the author taking up flying at age fifty-six, something to rekindle the flying daydreams of the armchair pilot.

Readers around the world were enthralled by the first voyage of Skip Rowland and his yacht 'Endymion'. In this second leg of No Return Ticket, Skip tells of his further adventures battling storms, a flooded river, a host of maritime dangers and narrowly avoiding capture by pirates.This is a story of real-life adventure at sea, told by a master story teller.

It's 1972. When hot-headed, impetuous Jack Muir gets off the ship in Durban, he fails to get back on. Instead, he sails into misadventure, fleeing the stifling town of Genoralup to try to lose himself in South Africa at the height of apartheid. But the past has a way of catching up with you, and soon Jack is running again, this time to a kibbutz in Israel. In the course of a lifetime, Jack will travel far, always caught between fleeing from and seeking those things he needs: a mother's precious gift, a lover in a time of war, the loss of a child, a kind and steady woman. And, across time and across continents, old Jack Muir will remember those who helped him become a decent man, a better father and a friend.

Mark Freeman, a recently retired teacher, returns on holiday to Igana, a West African country where he once taught. But much has changed and the elected government has given way to a military regime. The holiday is not what Mark expected and his journey takes him across the country with a companion he had not anticipated and on an adventure he would never forget.