"Two Up" By Scooter to Australia (Cover)

(inside cover)

Michael Marriott and his wife once crossed the Sahara in a twenty-year-old London taxi, and recounted their adventures in a book called Desert Taxi. Three years later the same urge for bizarre and cheap travel led them to set out together bound overland for Australia riding 'two-up' on a motor scooter.

Yugoslavia. Bulgaria. Turkey and Persia have roads, but in Afghanistan the road was usually nothing more than a humped and gullied track across a grim, almost deserted land of mountain ranges, sandstone ridges and bare, scorched villages. Every mile of travel in this country is a hazard, and with nothing but a scooter every hazard might have had serious results. Yet, after some unpleasant set-backs, the Marriotts emerged from Afghanistan and made their way through Pakistan and India, to Ceylon. Steamer took them to Adelaide, but the faithful scooter carried them round the eastern half of Australia and across to Melville Island, reserved for aborigines whom they had come to observe. This is a travel story of unusual character, told with humour and great vivacity.