Point of departure - Pamela Hardy

At an age when my mother was wearing sensible frocks and having an afternoon nap, I set off on foot to explore Vancouver in T-shirt, shorts and a floppy sunhat, my wrinkles hidden behind dark glasses, clutching a map that flapped in the breeze like a sail. When she was fifty-one years old, Pamela Hardy left her divorce, her rusted-out car and her low-paying job to hit the road with little more than a backpack and a thin wallet. For twelve months she traversed the globe - by rickety train through India, by snowmobile across the Arctic Circle, by elephant into the Nepalese jungle. What she discovered was not only the adventure she craved, but a new awareness of herself, her own unexpected strength, and a host of bizarre yet - mostly - lovable characters. In Under an Exotic Sun, Pamela takes you on a whirlwind tour through her year of travels and travails, via an American cowboy proposal, the Norwegian Vikings, a brush with Bollywood and the magic of the African plains. I realised I had spent all my life within boundaries, brainwashed by society and totally compliant. I had never had the initiative to walk on the wild side and think for myself.;Now in my fifties I was at last finding out what the world was all about, and I was loving it.