BY THE AUTHOR OF A MAVERICK NEW ZEALAND WAY, FINALIST IN TRAVEL AT THE INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARDS, 2018.
At twenty, Mary Jane left New Zealand for five years. A Maverick Traveller begins with an epic voyage on a Chinese junk named La Dame de Canton, and then goes on to describe her later adventures worldwide.
Mary Jane travels with no real plans and decides where to go and what to see next when she gets there. She likes to explore the culture and history of places that are off the beaten track as well as places that are well known, and to talk to the local people.
Whether she was eating dog unintentionally in Indonesia, meeting the rapper 50 Cent before he was famous at a back-packers, seeing Putin in Red Square, being followed around as a suspicious character by intelligence services and police in Russia, Turkey and the USA, or kicking a US nuclear submarine in New Zealand, she shares her unique stories and experiences.
By the time she sat down to write her books Mary Jane had travelled the world, from the Arctic Circle to working as a park ranger on an uninhabited island administered by New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. She spent two years (mostly naked) on La Dame de Canton; drank hallucinogenic tea in the Amazon rainforest; and got so lost she ended up at Robin Hood’s hiding-place.
A Maverick Traveller is Mary Jane’s first book, and it introduces the other books in her series.