Asia -Me & My Girl

About the Book

After living apart for over 18 years, Shaun Donovan and his teenage daughter, Hayley, decide to make-up for lost time, by embarking on a 60,000km voyage of discovery: a journey that would inevitably take them half-way around the world. ‘Asia –Me & My Girl’ tells the amazing true story of the first half of their incredible adventure, as they travel 20,000km overland from their hometown of Cardiff, in South Wales, to the Far Eastern shores of Singapore. Read all about their unforgettable six-day crossing of Siberia, before traversing the infamous Gobi Desert in Mongolia –and how they are kidnapped and virtually held to ransom by a bogus taxi-driver and his compatriots in Beijing, China. Shaun also tells the unbelievable stories of how he and his daughter had a magnificent day in Xi’an, visiting the Terracotta Warriors -before meeting the farmer who had actually discovered them –and how the pair of them had their photo taken with the one and only living survivor of the notorious ‘S21’ Prison Camp from the ‘Killing Fields’ of Cambodia. In Thailand all hell breaks loose as our intrepid explorers spend their days bottle-feeding leopard cubs, walking with tigers –and swimming with elephants, before climbing the 7-tiers of the Erawan Waterfall, crossing the Bridge over the River Kwai, riding the Thailand to Burma ‘Death Railway’ -and walking the length of ‘Hellfire Pass’. To round-off their ten-week ‘Voyage of Discovery’ our dynamic duo pay a visit to the phenomenal PETRONAS Towers in Malaysia -and in Singapore they come face-to-face with the ‘Lords of the Jungle’, as they embark on their first ever ‘night-time safari’.

About the Author

Shaun Donovan was born in Cardiff, South Wales, on 9th August 1959. The son of a carpenter, he joined his father in the building trade after leaving school at the age of 15, but was soon disillusioned and so he changed careers, working first as an office clerk, before moving into the lucrative world of sales and marketing. Being a keen motor-cyclist and also a travel enthusiast, Shaun spent numerous holidays riding his bike around Europe and North Africa, spanning a distance of 10,000 miles, and visiting 13 countries and several islands between 1981 and 1983. In 1984, he married and became the father of three children, but after being made redundant in 1991 due to the recession, and with little hope of re-employment in the near future his marriage collapsed the following year.    Whilst on the dole, Shaun read the best-selling paperback ‘Jupiter’s Travels’ by Ted Simon, and he decided to transpose the book into a movie called ‘Freedom Run’. Shaun spent a week with Ted at his various homes in California, where after lengthy discussions, they decided on promoting the idea to film and television companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Because of the cost involved the BBC suggested a six-part documentary series for television instead, entitled “Steps of Jupiter – 20 years on” in which Shaun would re-create the journey himself and Ted would meet him at strategic points along the way, but unfortunately sponsorship was not forthcoming and so inevitably the project was shelved.

In 1998 Shaun moved to Tenerife and in 2000 he took his three children, Liam, Carl, and Hayley, around the whole of America, and across into Canada on a Greyhound Bus. Apart from giving them the holiday of a lifetime, he also kept the promise he had made to them two years earlier.