The Last Bus to Lamu

Sometimes you have to get lost to find yourself.After a brutal breakup, John Ahern bumps into mate Timmy Adams in a local pub. Having quit his job that very day, Tim tells John of his half-baked mission to cross Africa. 'I'm going to Lamu, ' Tim says. 'Wherever that is.'John soon follows Tim's lead and throws in his job, sells his car and sub-lets his share room, reasoning that he might as well go too, for he has nothing to lose.He is wrong.With a vague plan to 'wing it', the pair land in Johannesburg in 1995. What follows is a hilarious, confronting and high-risk journey through the wilds of Africa. Hitching rides on buses, bakkies and freight trains, the two hopelessly naïve overlanders lurch from one life-threatening situation to the next. They cross Namibia's great dunes and deserts, sleep in caves in Zimbabwe's Chimanimani mountains, safari Etosha Game resreve and the Serengeti, survive a train derailment, backpack through war-torn Mozambique, and transit Tanzania on the rooftop of a bus. Along the way, they are confronted with armed militia, child soldiers, angry herds of Kalahari elephants, sufferers of leprosy, landmine victims, and moral and ethical dilemmas so extreme, John begins to question his own humanity.But when a rookie traveller's mistake turns catastrophic, the adventure takes a darker turn. Drugged, hospitalised, and locked in a Kenyan jail, John attempts to escape by throwing himself out of a moving truck. He tries to kill a police officer with his own hands. And he soon becomes embroiled in a capital punishment trial where his testimony will be a death sentence for his assailant. Forced to make an impossible choice, John must decide what he truly wants from life.Part travel tale, part moral reckoning, part love story, The Last Bus to Lamu is a timeless heartfelt odyssey, a reminder that the journeys we don't plan are the ones that transform us most.