A Scot Goes South - A Journey from Mexico to Ayers Rock (Roughing It Round the World, #2)

'Like its predecessor, the book is notable for its dash and enthusiasm, coupled with the photographer's instinct for the exotic and eccentric.' Sunday Times
'...another compelling bit of reading.' The Oxford Times
Here is the sequel to Alastair Scott's highly acclaimed Scot Free, which left readers on the threshold of Central America impatient for more. A Scot Goes South describes the next two years of the author's five-year odyssey, spent in Central and Southern America, Australia and New Zealand.
Alastair Scott writes with the same infectious brio as in his first book, a photographer's eye enriching the writer's, seizing with delight upon the egregious and eccentric, the larger-than-life that turns out to be life. On the vertiginous Andean Riobamba-Guayaquil line, he pockets his first-class ticket and climbs onto the carriage roof with the other passengers. He spends a night in a Peruvian witchdoctor's hut, takes English four o'clock tea on an estancia in the heart of the Argentine pampas. Letting defences drop in order to be receptive to a new culture he pays the price, stoned by hostile villagers, mugged in Rio, incarcerated as a suspect Tupamaro guerilla in Uruguay. He continues through New Zealand and Australia with the same eye for detail and ear for anecdote, finally arriving at Ayers Rock.

Alastair Scott is a writer, photographer, broadcaster and Yachtmaster Ocean sailing skipper. His work has been published in The NY Times Book Review, Time-Life, Readers Digest, Sunday Telegraph, The guardian, The Herald and The Scotsman, among others. He is the author of ten books.
'After leaving school and doing two useless degrees (German & Economics) I worked in a photographic studio in Edinburgh for eighteen months to learn the trade. Soon sickened of doing passport photos, weddings and portraits of children who delighted in throwing tantrums in revenge attacks on their parents and so set off to make my name as a travel photographer. Worked my way round the world on a five-year journey, mostly wearing a kilt (but abandoned it where it attracted hostile respones). On my return I set up my own photographic library, which I still run. Wrote a trilogy of books about my journey and this set up a lifestyle of travelling somewhere adventurous and writing a book about it. I got a dogteam and sled together and 'mushed' across Alaska, Tracks Across Alaska; cycled 5000 miles behind the Iron Curtain shortly before it fell (no book as yet!); learnt to sail and made a solo voyage round Ireland, Salt and Emerald; cycled round my homeland with a foreigner's eyes, Native Stranger...I also wrote a guidebook to Scotland and two novels. Am currently working on a children's novel.'