Twenty years the author spent searching for the perfect refuge from winter. Twenty years in which he discovered it's not as easy as it seems. Behind the perfect facades lurked unexpected time bombs and there was no guide to help certain age people like him avoid such pitfalls on the road to winter escape perfection. So he decided to write one.

CONTENTS 1 - The Fartherland - Do you REALLY want to go there? 2 - India - Never a dull moment. Never. 3 - Sri Lanka - The teardrop island. Just so. 4 - Thailand - Eden, gardened to death 5 - Cyprus - Aphrodite has left the building (site) 6 - Kenya - Palms, qualms and Kalashnikovs 7 - Cambodia - Din din-din din... 8 - Camelot - AKA Scambodia 9 - San Serriffe - A goose, cooked

SNOW-DODGING for UMPTEENAGERS © Mark Newham 2022 CHAPTER 1 The Fartherland Do you REALLY want to go there? No. Not there. THERE. It's taken as read you want to go there. It's been your dream to follow the swallow and leave winter to others as soon as you’ve the wherewithal to do so. But now you have, you lucky pensionaire you, are you sure you're really ready to go THERE? Into the land of tripwires, mantraps and viper nests on the road to winter escape perfection? Along a trail booby-trapped with the social equivalents of improvised explosive devices that can quickly turn dreams to the stuff of nightmares? Thing is, although you might have a list of candidates that could fit the snow-dodging location bill, that's just the start of it. Narrowing the list down means having to either go and see for yourself or rely on the reports of others. Reports that can have those of a nervous disposition abandoning the whole idea altogether and deciding that gathering close to a cosy pub's blazing fireside is an infinitely preferable way of passing the winter months. After some deliberation it was the former course of action for me. I'd been around. I was no innocent abroad. There wasn't much anyone could tell a world-weary umpteenager like me about trips to faraway places that'd come as much of a surprise. Anyway, in my experience other people's travel horror stories were about as reliable as the average bus timetable and all too often designed more to terrify than to inform. So I closed my ears to such reports and went deaf. Would that I hadn't. Well, not completely anyway. Had I at least had the sense to lend half an ear to the traveller's tales of others I might have been spared a series of near-death experiences while fighting my way round the steaming Indian sub-continent, any number of dead-of-night multispecies creepy crawly invasions and bomb scares in the heart of darkest Africa, a succession of boredom-gone-bonkers days that felt like weeks on a rain-blasted Mediterranean island and becoming the victim of a chain of hair-tearing lunacy-gone-mad Chinese cheatings in the jungles of South-East Asia. Had I at least kept one ear open maybe I could have avoided all these and completed my quest in the couple of years – three at most – I thought finding my own winter sanctuary would take. Two decades and any number of revisions on how I should have approached the search later it's abundantly clear I might have over-estimated my own capacity for sensing pitfalls on the road to perfection. Like Paul Simon's boxer it's now clear I failed to resist seeing only what I wanted to see and disregarding the rest. That failing has a lot to answer for in my search for the perfect place to escape winter and is something I really should have tried to correct before setting out on the quest. But I didn't and I think I know why. It was too heavily ingrained in me, traceable as it was to a day of revelation in my early teens my shame will never let me forget.......