This is the story of the first leg of my ambitious round-the-world journey. I leave England in January 1963, having just celebrated my twenty-third birthday. I had a passport, £250 of hard-earned money, and my over-loaded rucksack. I arrived in Australia, very short of cash but having travelled through seventeen countries, exactly one year later, in January 1964.
This was to be a shoe-string journey with a simple travel plan. I would hitch-hike, use cheap accommodation and eat sparingly.
For the first four days every thing went well – good lifts, interesting people, but none of them were English-speakers, so I had to resurrect my limited schoolgirl French. I was starting to make the assumption that hitch-hiking alone in France would be as safe as it had been in England during my hard-up student days.

But on the fifth day I was proved wrong. A previously friendly truck-driver turned rogue as dusk was falling. I should have stopped hitch-hiking while it was still daylight but this road by-passed all towns and villages. I miraculously escaped from hands tightening around my throat but was left with just the clothes I stood in, and my passport and money which had been stowed in an inside pocket of my duffle-coat.
It takes a while to regain sufficient confidence to continue my interrupted journey. This time there will be an unbreakable rule of no hitch-hiking alone. As long as I stay within my budget I can choose to occasionally use local buses or trains. If the distance between hostels is reasonable I can walk from one to another. Or maybe I can hitch-hike with other back-packers that I might meet along the way. And so I set off again but this time into an unknowable future.