Latest News: May 2012
Posted by Tom | Filed under Travel, News
Tearing up the Silk Road, my first full length travel book, will be published by Garnet in August 2012.
The book has now been typeset and indexed and is ready for printing.
Click here to view the final cover design and back cover blurb.
I am currently working on my second book Voodoo, Slaves and White Man's Graves: Wanders in West Africa. This travelogue details an overland journey through Benin, Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali.
Another project that I am looking into is publishing an anthology of alternative and anti-travel writing. If this is something that you might be interested in, then I can be contacted through tom@tomcoote.net.
Photography: Ethiopia
Posted by Tom | Filed under Travel, Photography
I have recently returned from visiting Sudan and Ethiopia for the first time.
I flew into Khartoum and then travelled to Gedaref, Gonder, Bahir Dar, Lalibela, Axum, Tigrai, Harar and Addis Ababa.
There is also a new Sudan Photo Gallery for my photos from Begrawiya and Khartoum. I stayed at the International YHA in Khartoum - as their only guest - and then used public transport to visit the Meroe Pyramids before hitching back through the Nubian Desert.
Travelogue: Libya
Posted by Tom | Filed under Travel, Writing
A Short Break in Libya details a short trip to Tripoli and Leptis Magna during the first days of the Arab Spring.
Libya appeared to be making its first tentative steps towards opening up to mass tourism but then everything changed.
If you would prefer to read it as as an eBook (for Sony Touch, Nook or Kindle) then you can download it for free - along with To Camels from Cows: Algeria Overland and Turkmenbashi's Land of Fairy Tales - at Smashwords.
Desert Search
As we clattered through the Kyzylkum desert in the battered shared taxi, the driver reached across and offered me some pills. When I asked him what they were, he shrugged. Sometimes the drivers would take nicotine pills rather than smoking, but chewing tobacco had already been passed around. When it was time to spit out the dregs, they would push open their doors and gob out huge streams of brown spittle into the passing desert. If the timing were wrong and the wind in the wrong direction, then the back seat passengers would be splattered with the chewed out remains. I was wary of accepting an unknown quantity of...
Last Chance
The two young Aussie guys in their bright white shirts couldn't hide their disappointment. As the various day trippers had trudged back on to the Fraser Explorer four wheel drive bus, several had looked over to them quizzically. They looked a bit too smart to be on our bus. "We're custom officials" they said, cheerfully. They weren't really. They were trying to flog fifteen minute flights over Fraser Island for seventy five Australian dollars a head. Apparently this was great value, we'd see all the highlights from a bird's eye view - maybe even some dolphins and sting rays - and we wouldn't miss any of the...
A 100,000 word travelogue about a journey from China to Istanbul, through Central Asia, Iran and the Caucasus.
