One for the Road: An Outback Adventure

By Tony Horwitz

"A high-spirited, comic ramble into the savage Outback populated by irreverent, beer-guzzling frontiersmen." --Chicago Tribune

Swept off to live in Sydney by his Australian bride, American writer Tony Horwitz longs to explore the exotic reaches of his adopted land. So one day, armed only with a backpack and fantasies of the open road, he hitchhikes off into the awesome emptiness of Australia's outback.

What follows is a hilarious, hair-raising ride into the hot red center of a continent so desolate that civilization dwindles to a gas pump and a pub. While the outback's terrain is inhospitable, its scattered inhabitants are anything but. Horwitz entrusts himself to Aborigines, opal diggers, jackeroos, card sharks, and sunstruck wanderers who measure distance in the number of beers consumed en route. Along the way, Horwitz discovers that the outback is as treacherous as it is colorful. Bug-bitten, sunblasted, dust-choked, and bloodied by a near-fatal accident, Horwitz endures seven thousand miles of the world's most forbidding real estate, and some very bizarre personal encounters, as he winds his way to Queensland, Alice Springs, Perth, Darwin--and a hundred bush pubs in between.

Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of two national bestsellers, Confederates in the Attic and Baghdad Without a Map, is the ideal tour guide for anyone who has ever dreamed of a genuine Australian adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307763020

Tony Horwitz

Tony Horwitz is a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He worked for many years as a reporter, first in Indiana and then during a decade overseas in Australia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, mostly covering wars and conflicts as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. After returning to the States, he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author. His books include Midnight Rising, A Voyage Long and Strange, Blue Latitudes, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook, Baghdad Without a Map, a national bestseller about the Middle East, and Confederates in the Attic, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Civil War. Horwitz has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He lives with his wife, Geraldine Brooks, and their son, Nathaniel, on the island of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.

Reviews for One for the Road

[craso_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tony Horwitz was working at a newspaper is Australia when he developed a wander lust. He decided to hitchhike across the Australian Outback. He accepts rides from chockies (farmers), Aborigines, tourists, families, sheep ranchers, opal miners, and truckies. Horwitz sleeps in ditches, campsites, and rundown hotels. At times his journey seems like one long pub crawl. He observes many different aspects of Australian Outback society such as; Aboriginal ceremonies, pub patron etiquette, and lobster fishing. I almost stopped reading this book after the first few chapters. All the chockies picking up Horwitz were drunks traveling from pub to pub. They all swilled beer from coolers in their cars as they weaved from one side of the road to the other. The narrative started to become interesting after the author visited Ayres Rock, now known as Uluru. He began meeting a more diverse and interesting group of people especially the Aborigines.This is as much an ode to the romance of hitchhiking as it is a travel log. The book was written in 1986 when hitchhiking was still possible. You rarely see hitchhikers in America today. I don’t know if people will still pick up hikers in Australia. I think they still might in the Outback. It is such a sunbaked desolate land full of desperate people just trying to make a life for themselves that they can feel for the poor lonely tramp trying to travel a few more kilometers down the road.

[themythicalcodfish · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Again with steadily working my way through the collected works of this author; it's interesting to read what is obviously his first book, and remark at the differences in his writing style as he goes along. While I would personally recommend Bryson's "In A Sunburned Country" as an Australian travelog, this book provides a different layer of insight not merely for Terra Australis, but for a now-vanished part of first-world culture: hitchhiking as entertainment and legitimate travel.

[co_coyote · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm still reading travel books. (I've got to get this out of my system soon. Maybe I should go on another long trip!) This book is about hitchhiking around Australia. Probably not something I am going to be doing anytime soon, although I do have another trip to Australia planned for next month. Still, Horwitz is a fairly entertaining guy, and it's fun to read of his adventures with the usual suspects you run into when you are traveling.

[skinglist · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dreamed of, or been through one. While I think he's nuts to hitchhike, this is a great story of both an Australia that most people don't see and an Australia of the 80s that is only partially still there.Haven't finished yet but some of the best bits:I like how he mixed Aboriginal aspects in with the rest. He integrated the two rather than just treat them as something apart. I also think he did this while still acknowleding the feeling of uncertainty that can be present. I still remember my initial uncertainty and trying to understand that, as much as I tried to understand anything else about Australia."...that was one of the things I liked so much about hitching: getting a personalized tour of the continent with people I'd otherwise never meet." I can say the same thing about backpacking, Greyhounding and BookCrossing. I met so many wonderful people in my travels and learnt so much that I wouldn't have otherwise . Kinda sad the upcoming trip will be plane only due to a lack of time :(More to come when I've finished the book, but I'm definitely loving it. So much so that I don't want to go to sleep even though I have the chance after being up at 5 AM.I thought this was going to be my ring in 07 book, but I finished it a couple of hours before the ball dropped. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It was great to see his perceptions of places I'd seen, and to hear about places I hadn't seen.Love that he stayed at some of the same places, such as Radeka's in Coober Pedy. And his trip up the coast of WA made me really nostalgic for my own trip.

[jennyo_587543 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love Tony Horwitz's books. They're funny and full of information. In this one, Horwitz hitchhikes across most of Australia. Along the way, he sees a few of the sights and drinks pots and pots of beer. While I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as Confederates in the Attic or Blue Latitudes, it was a fun read and one I'd recommend to fans of Horwitz's or of Bill Bryson's travel writing.My favorite quote from the book was: A middle-aged woman smiles at me from behind a pile of filing cards. Apparently, it's acceptable behavior in Broome to collapse in a sweaty heap at the first public building you come to. Smiling back at her, it occurs to me that I've never met a mean librarian.