If, as we await the pandemic’s end, you are making plans for a trip to the exotic lands of Asia, you will welcome the timely arrival in bookstores of Under the Bright Sky (Caitlin Press) by award-winning Sunshine Coast author, journalist and editor Andrew Scott. It’s the story of his 10 trips to Asian countries – from South Korea to Indonesia to China, India and Turkey – the first in 1987 and the most recent in 2011.
Scott’s appetite for travel was first whetted when, as the editor of the magazine Western Living, he was invited by Cathay Pacific to fly first class to Hong Kong, and thereafter, though he never flew in such luxury again, he accepted every new opportunity to visit Asia.
In Laos he travelled in a plane where on take-off, “alarming clouds of smoke began to seep into the cabin,” though none of the other passengers took any notice! On India’s Malabar Coast it was canal boats, modern hydrofoils in South Korea, and bicycles when nothing else was available. He visited an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka, where the “large, leathery residents filled us with unexpected joy,” thousand-year-old archeological sites in Vietnam, the tourist beaches of Goa, temples in Bali and the jade Buddhas of Thailand.
But Scott’s journeys were never mere sight-seeing trips. For this writer with his immense curiosity, each was an investigative expedition, “accepting the unfamiliar and paying attention to the differences and similarities” around him. As he writes in his epilogue, he was trying “not to approach travel as a checklist of destinations to be ticked off and then forgotten.” And this approach has made this elegant collection of travel stories taken from his journals not easily forgotten either.
