A Backpacker's Journey
A Reporter’s Walk on the Wild Side of Life
by Tom Barrett

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Whether you are a true adventurer yourself, or someone who enjoys reading about and vicariously enjoying adventures from the safety of an armchair, A Backpacker’s Journey is the book you never knew you needed to read. Filled with true, exciting, quirky, nostalgic, and often extraordinary stories, this book is a reminder to us all from author Tom Barrett that “we should not sleepwalk through life.” Originally written for a blog, this collection follows the author’s experiences as he hitchhiked across North America in the 1970s, covered national and international stories as a reporter for the Edmonton Journal, and trekked across dozens of countries, including Uganda, Bhutan, India, Peru, Malawi, Italy, and Nepal. Told with humour and humility, Barrett shares stories about meeting stoned fellow hippies and Deadheads, Hell’s Angels, gay female strippers, a horny truck driver, and even Muammar Ghaddafi. A mix of intriguing glimpses of other cultures and locales, some 1970s and 1980s nostalgia, interesting behind-the-story insights from a well-travelled news reporter, and some personal escapades, A Backpacker’s Journey celebrates the uniqueness of the many people, places, and circumstances that weave together our own personal stories.

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Tom Barrett was born and raised in West Orange, New Jersey and first introduced as a young boy to the wider world through National Geographic magazines left by a Norwegian boarder. Vowing to someday go to the places he saw on his globe and in the pages of magazines, he started by emigrating to Canada in the 1960s and hitchhiking across North America. Ultimately, Barrett would travel and trek in dozens of countries around the world, and even bring his three children backpacking in East and Central Africa and later in Nepal and Thailand. Along the way, Barrett completed a BA in political philosophy from the University of Alberta and found a way to make a career out of telling stories, when he became a reporter for the Edmonton Journal. During his 29-year career with the paper, Barrett broke many national and international stories and won the Michener Award for Public Service in Journalism for a series of articles on the use and abuse of psychiatry in the criminal justice system.

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Contributors

Author

Tom Barrett

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