Travels Without a Donkey

 
By RICHARD DONALD

At the end of 2011 Wellington publisher Steele Roberts released Travels without a Donkey: sketches from here and there by Richard Donald. With references to RL Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, (1879), the author Richard Donald tells light-heartedly of his travel experiences in Europe, India and other far-flung parts of the globe. Accompanying him was, not Stevenson’s unfortunate donkey Modestine, but his “honest friend’, his wife, ceramicist Gennie de Lange, whose delightful sketches enhance the book throughout.

Donald and his wife, who appears in the book as Annie, are not your average cruise ship or guided tour junkies. They prefer independent travel with all its unpredictability and frequent lack of comfort, believing that this can often yield surprises and delights beyond those dreamed of.

In Travels Without a Donkey we follow Richard and Annie on their adventures round the world – narrowly escaping brigands in Mexico, coping with a pregnant donkey in Greece, and learning of an unreported murder in the Czech Republic.

In a former life Donald was a medical professor. Donald attributes his transformation from medical professor to travel writer to his interest in people. He writes books about travel because of the people he encounters as much as the places he visits. Having spent his teaching years telling his medical students not to write a novel he now finds himself trying to resuscitate a dormant imagination. Drafted by his parents into the sciences Donald studied medicine and had a distinguished career as an endocrinologist, with a special interest in stress hormones. Now with two previous books to his credit, the release of Travels Without a Donkey and an impending leap into writing crime fiction his metamorphosis is proceeding rapidly

He and his wife own a small 300 year old apartment in France and have recently moved reluctantly from their home in Christchurch. Donald is the author of three books: French Leave, Shoal Bay (2002) and Painting out the Past: The Life and Art of Patricia France, Longacre (2009).

With its short chapters, delightful illustrations, and accompanied by Donald’s wry unassuming comments, and sometimes the more tart of the faithful Annie, Travels without a Donkey is the perfect travel companion for the plane, train or armchair and comes highly recommended.