Back Stories - Personal tales from a lifetime of travel

Back Stories is a collection of more than thirty, highly personal traveller-s tales, embracing adventure, comedy, disaster, romance, stupidity and a miscellany of mishaps, spanning more than five decades on the road.

They range from being in Boston during 9/11, weathering a storm while sailing in Croatia, travelling the backroads of Kerry in a horse-drawn Romany caravan, being thrown in jail in Ecuador, experiencing a scary scuba dive in the Caribbean and finding work as a film extra in Athens. The longest story covers a year spent in a remote farmhouse in Calabria, living with a family who subsisted on produce they grew on a series of terraces. It portrays a way of life that is fast disappearing on the Mediterranean.

From low budget journeys as a student, to longer intervals living in Italy, Switzerland, Vermont and New York, David Wickers has spent much of his life travelling. In his mid-thirties he discovered that, as a professional travel writer, he could be