TRAVEL: Are we there yet?
Considering I hadn’t set foot on an aeroplane before I was 30, it’s remarkable that in the intervening decades I have begun to enjoy travel for its own sake.
My partner Sue is even more of a travel addict so we tend to clock up the air miles whenever we can. Our philosophies, however, take us in different directions. When we have been somewhere we like, I want to go back, she wants to find somewhere new.
Being writers, of course, we write about these places and have been published in the travel pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald, the Australian Financial Review, the Australian and too many magazines to mention.
For the past few years I have been a guest lecturer in travel writing at Boston University’s Sydney campus, introducing young American students to the joys of writing about something you love … and, if you’re lucky, getting paid for it.
Meanwhile, I have become a bit of a Vietnam addict and have even started leading tours there. All of which has led to the creation of my website www.mildrover.com where you can find stories and pictures from some of the places I have been. There are also details of my next tour of Vietnam, for readers and writers, in October 2016.
I understand you have written a few screenplays and was wondering why there hasn’t been a film made about the Sappers in Vietnam.
I reckon it would make a fantastic film.
Did you ever write a draft?
Or has anyone approached you for the rights?
Somewhere in the darkest recesses of my hard drive, I have a “treatment” for a Tunnel Rats TV series … by the time the producers were interested, the TV networks were obsessed World War I stories (many of the anniversaries coincide) which they proceeded to mostly balls up. But the story remains, if anyone is interested.