All the Right Places

"I am in exactly the right place, thinking, doing and feeling exactly the right things." This was the affirmation that Brad Newsham repeated daily as he cycled alone across the Japanese Alps to Mount Fuji in 1984, free to wander wherever he chose. But back home in San Francisco, life hadn't been so rosy: his wife of ten years had met someone else and wanted a divorce. He tried everything to change her mind, eventually leaving his job and buying a one-way ticket to Asia in the hope that she would miss him. It worked - and then he met someone else on a bus in Hong Kong. One of the first wave of Western backpackers to blaze a trail through China and Russia, Brad Newsham travelled from the neon-lit streets of Tokyo to the epic prairies of Mongolia in a journey that took him across Asia by bicycle, boat, bus and the Trans-Siberian railway.