Rory MacLean

After the death of his father, Beagan Gillean finds himself stranded on a wild Scottish island, alone except for a trunk full of three generations of family history. Immersing himself in the lives and dreams of his forefathers, Gillean decides to retrace the journey his great-grandfather made two-hundred years before to the promised land of Canada. A wave-rocked, wind-tossed travel adventure unfolds, carrying him into his family's past and across the world's second-largest country. In his wake trail three ghosts: his great-grandfather, his grandfather and his father. Together they navigate the rivers, lakes and waterways that ribbon through Canada and as they travel Gillean discovers that his ancestors' struggles, achievements and failings mirror Canada's own. A haunting tale of loss and discovery, "The Oatmeal Ark" is the story of one remarkable family and a candid, beautifully rendered portrait of the country that defined it.

"In the sixties and seventies hundreds of thousands of young Westerners took off for India, blazing the 'hippie trail' from Istanbul to Kathmandu. These intrepid pioneers left behind their parents' world of postponed pleasure, the guilt of Empire and the spectre of war. Aboard the weirdest procession of unroadworthy vehicles ever to rattle across the face of the earth, they reached for a new kind of life, and became the first movement of people who travelled to be colonized rather than to colonize." "On foot and by bus, Rory MacLean retraces their wide-eyed adventures along the route reopened for the first time in a generation and travels across a region that has experienced extraordinary and turbulent changes since that Summer of Love. In Istanbul he meets the original Flower Child. In Tehran, capital of revolution, he encounters two Iranian boys whose dream of wealth in the West ends in tragedy. At Bagram airbase he sings 'Age of Aquarius' with US Special Forces commandos in Paisley shirts and granny glasses. In Kabul he picks through the smashed statues that are now Afghanistan's history. Along the way he reveals how profoundly the trail transformed travellers' lives and the countries they traversed, unleashing forces that changed for ever the way we travel the world."--BOOK JACKET

"For ten years the memory of a chance visit to Burma had haunted Rory MacLean. Ten years ago its people rose up against their military government. The unarmed demonstrators were cut down, leaving more than five thousand people dead." "In Under the Dragon, MacLean returns to the betrayed land, travelling from a decaying Rangoon to the heart of the golden triangle, meeting the victims and perpetrators of the uprising. He rides with a hill tribe warlord, shares tea with a government censor and is trapped into a karaoke evening with a group of singing Chinese businessmen. He learns about the economics of the heroin trade and the tragedy of child prostitution. He meets the most courageous and principled woman of our age, Aung San Suu Kyi, imprisoned leader of the democratic opposition party. And on his journey, he unravels a paradox of selfless generosity and sinister greed in a country stitched together by love and fear."--Jacket.

191 pages : 20 cm

viii, 255 pages ; 19 cm