Book excerpt: Backpacking Beyond Boundaries is the story of a young man who puts his career on hold in search of adventure and the discovery of his inner being. He leaves South Africa in 1990 while Nelson Mandela is still in prison and South Africa ruled by a white minority government. His travels take him through 35 countries and cultures as far afield as South East Asia where he spends one year; exotic islands of Thailand, hitchhiking through Malaysia, charming beauty of Sri Lanka, overland through India into Nepal and finally back to Thailand. He also buses through Morocco and into the Sahara Desert. In Turkey he joins a group of 11 fellow backpackers and travels across the country. Behind the Iron Curtain he visits East Germany and the Berlin Wall, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary seeing communism at work. In 1996 he returns to a free South Africa, one now with equal rights and called the Rainbow Nation, before choosing a new life in Canada. In 2003 he travels to Namibia and reconnects with his army past. And in 2005 he makes a special journey to Mozambique with two army friends to see the prison where one of them was held captive.