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Before author Bill Bryson ventured to Australia to research In a Sunburned Country—the successor to A Walk in the Woods, his best-selling 1998 book about the Appalachian Trail—he dropped by his local library in Hanover, New Hampshire. Bryson wanted to read
up on Oz and to look up the name of the current leader of the world's sixth largest country. "There ought to be one person outside Australia who knows," he says. "But I am forever committing the name of the Australian prime minister to memory, then forgetting it, generally instantly, and then feeling terribly guilty."
Throwing open a New York Times Index, Bryson discovered that Americans pay little attention to the country that gave us opals, the boomerang, Nicole Kidman, and Russell Crowe. In fact, Bryson's tally of one year's articles revealed that the Times had deemed that there was less news fit to print
about the nation of 19 million than there was about balloonists, ice cream or the demise of socialite Pamela Harriman.
All of this will surely change when the Olympics kick off this September in Sydney. But even then, sports fans will glimpse only a fraction of this vast continent. So to give the outback equal play, Bryson made several trips Down Under and tried, as ever, to be a good sport. He learned the unofficial Australian national anthem, "Waltzing Matilda," (the
main distinguishing feature of which, he notes, "is that it makes no sense"). He visited aptly named Broken Hill, once a mining boomtown, now a location for postapocalyptic films (The Road Warrior). He discovered that in addition to ogling its natural wonders (80 percent of all that lives in Australia is found nowhere else),
you could—"if you have sufficient gas money and nothing approaching a real life"—road-trip to see all the "big things in the shapes of other things" such as a Big Prawn, a Big Lobster, a Big Lawnmower, a Big Merino Ram. "Give them a bale of chicken wire, some fiberglass, and a couple of pots of paint," he reports, "and Australians will surely
make you an enormous something."
Our preview of his new book, "The (Seriously, Truly, Very) Fatal Shore," which begins on page 88, finds him en route to the Great Barrier Reef. As with his last romp through these pages, a delightful excerpt from A Walk in the Woods that ran
in April 1998, he's talked a chum into joining him. Poor guy.
To help create a connoisseur's lineup of the toughest of tough adventure trips ("Go on, We Dare You," page 58), we knew none better for the task than (from back to front) editorial intern Tim Neville; assistant editors Eric Hansen, Marc Peruzzi, and Chris Keyes;
and travel editor Claire Martin. They polled hundreds in the field for the most ambitious expeditions of a lifetime. Then they applied their own woolly experiences—snow blindness in Nepal, crevasse rescue in Bolivia, and lightning strikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains—to bring it all home.
"I've long been interested in the kind of life they had," says Rob Buchanan of Guy and Laura Waterman, New England's first couple of wilderness ethics and unparalleled historians of the region's mountains. "They came pretty close to being self-sustaining," Buchanan observes. Weeks after Guy Waterman left that life to climb a beloved mountain and
commit suicide, Buchanan—who visits New Hampshire's White Mountains often—tracked Waterman's final days for "A Natural Death," which begins on page 106.
Before Jack Unruh got his brush wet for the illustration that accompanies Bill Bryson's Australia travelogue, he pulled out every one of his copious fish books in an effort to find a "snottie." He wanted to depict it strutting a Cairns sidewalk. No such luck. "I
think it's one of those things that sounds better in print anyway," says the Dallas, Texas, native. Unruh's been a full-time illustrator since 1958, and contributes to National Geographic and Rolling Stone.
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"Triathletes could well lay claim to being the world's greatest athletes," says Portland, Oregonbased writer and marathoner John Brant. And he might have added world's greatest masochists, too—a perception some blame for the sport's waning popularity. And yet when Brant, a senior writer for Runner's World and contributor to the New
York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone, visited with the United States' youngest and brightest masochists on the eve of their Olympic debut ("Could This Be Love?" page 116), he found the contenders optimistic both about their own chances and the appeal of their
event. After all, Brant notes, triathlons feature "the three basic forms of human locomotion. They're universal."
"Windsurfing does strange things to you," says writer Tom Byrnes, referring to the passion that has led him from a tiny lake in the south of France 15 years ago (where he received his first lesson from some "crazed Austrians") to Malibu, to Chile, and to Punta San Carlos, Baja—all in search of the ultimate breeze. And, of course, to
Turnagain Arm, Alaska, a ferocious, narrow channel that cuts into the Chugach Mountains near Anchorage where 60-knot winds and 15-foot waves are the setting for "Ripping the Tide" (page 124). Byrnes, who now lives and windsurfs in Portland, Oregon, also writes for the
Los Angeles Times Magazine.
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