Eat the Wind
Travels with Dictators, Mercenaries and Queens
Malaysians have an evocative idiom for going on a trip: makan angin. It means "eating wind," a perfect way to describe what happens when you go on a journey- you eat the wind! The phrase captured me when I first heard it backpacking through Malaysia in 1986. Now, almost forty years later, it is the title for the memoir I’m writing about extraordinary adventures, often far off the grid, before the internet changed the world of travel.
Awards
A story adapted from Eat the Wind about traveling by bus through the jungles of Sumatra, called “A Night of Bahasa,” won Second Prize at the Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference 2024.
An excerpt from Eat the Wind titled “It’s Not Greek to Me” won Gold in the Nineteenth Annual Solas Awards in the Funny Travel category.
A longer story about being caught in a Basque riot in San Sebastian called “Euskadi” won Bronze in the Men’s (adventure) Travel category in the Nineteenth Annual Solas Awards.
My story set in Belgrade and titled “Cold War Camera” was Highly Commended in the Bradt Guides New Travel Writer of the Year 2025 competition.
Dan’s interview on the Carpe Diem podcast
I met Teri Murrison at the Travel Writers & Photographers Conference in San Francisco in August. She publishes a blog and a podcast on the theme of “carpe diem”, or seizing the day. My story of quitting a cushy job at a big law firm to backpack in Asia for nine months (nearly 40 years ago!) checked the boxes for Teri. Here is the interview.
