London Ambulance Service
Maureen and I have recently acquired a house in London which we’re using as a base for the European side (as opposed to the Australian side) of the world.
Maureen farewells my London ambulance
On Saturday afternoon I managed to trip over a chair, fall full length across the room, crash my head against the corner of the wall and arrive on the floor bleeding profusely. Maureen did the British thing, called 999 and asked for an ambulance. Ten minutes later medical assistance arrived. On a bicycle.
It makes perfectly good sense, I wasn’t about to die, I could find my own way to a hospital to get stitched up and he probably arrived faster than a real ambulance would have found its way through Saturday afternoon London traffic.
We leave for Venice tomorrow on the Orient Express.
Subtitled ‘Travels in the Deep Tropics,’ Frater wanders from his New Hebrides birthplace (today it’s Vanuatu) north to the Tropic of Cancer and south to the Tropic of Capricorn, ie his peregrinations are entirely within the tropics. Although there are excursions all over the place – the Pacific, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, the Middle East, South and South-East Asia - it’s Vanuatu he always returns to. Sometimes the excursions are mere diversions, distracted during a Vanuatu church service we’re suddenly heading down the Irrawaddy River in Burma. 
When Tony and Maureen Wheeler arrived in Sydney the day after Christmas 1972 after a six month Asia overland trip from Europe they had 27 cents ...
Once while Travelling: The Lonely Planet Story
