I had my first overseas experience as a 5 year old when the family moved to Libya, when my dad worked in the oilfield out there. We lived in a whitewashed villa on the edge of the desert on the outskirts of Benghazi. I remember with amazing clarity many of the sights, sounds and smells of the city and the country. These are detailed in the Libya blog and whilst we were there Colonel Gaddafi had the military coup to overthrow the Arab King Idris and seize power. It was incredibly exciting as a kid with real tanks, jeeps, armoured cars and Rambo style machine guns – although my mother was terrified with two young kids and a husband away in the desert. As history dictates eventually things turned nasty and we were evacuated from the country in the middle of the night.

My dad had been in the Merchant Navy and listening to the stories of him and his old shipmates and seafaring friends spurred me on to join the Royal Navy at 16 and spend my own time travelling the world, accruing my own outlandish, but all true stories.

When on my third career much later in life, I spent many years living and working around the world as a professional expat mostly on major infrastructure projects. In that time, I lived and worked on every continent except Antarctica. Some of the places are a bit off the beaten track and not top of everyone’s holiday list, like Nigeria but it doesn’t mean I didn’t have a great time there. Mongolia might have been -40 degrees but I still had a great time there.

This is the story of my experiences in those remote and far flung places and also of the holidays – or R&R’s (rest and recuperations) that came as part of the deal. I nearly always had a camera close by so I have tried to capture some of those experiences at a glance, and the rest in print. Despite some of these countries being the coldest, or the most hostile, or the No1 for crime, or whatever, there has always been an upside, you just have to look for it. When you go on an expat assignment, whether you say “I’m going to have a great time here” or “I’m going to have a crap time here” either way – you’re going to be right! All of these events took place and all of the characters are real although some names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Now I have returned home to the beauty and serenity of tropical Brisbane, the best city in the best country in the world, and as we say here in Queensland “Beautiful one day – perfect the next