Meandering to Manila

Keith Dalton was a journalist with foreign correspondent dreams. He had them as a 10-year-old. They never went away.

Dalton was 25 when he crammed a typewriter in his backpack and set off from Australia to Southeast Asia, convinced he could be a self-made foreign correspondent.

Writing as he went, Dalton took buses, trucks, trains, planes, passenger ferries, cargo ships, and canoes. Along the way, he suffered malaria, dysentery, kidney stones, and gout. Four days upriver in Borneo, he was the first white man ever seen by the children of ex-headhunters. For more than a month he saw no other foreigner.

It took Dalton 18 months to travel through Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, and Borneo before he reached the Philippines, stayed 10 years, and became the foreign correspondent he had always wanted to be.

Meandering to Manila is about the places, people, and events that he encountered along the way. It's a fascinating story about a compelling journey.