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Guardian Travel Writing competition 2013
The Guardian newspaper has just announced the winners of their Travel Writing Competition. Congratulations to Alexei Vink from Maidenhead, Berkshire, whose tale of cycling from London to Vietnam has come first in the Adventure category. Alexei wins a trip to the Everest region with Mountain Kingdoms and the story of his trek with us will be featured in The Guardian Travel section next year.
His account of how it feels to crash your bike on the soaring Pamir highway while riding from Tajikistan to Kyrgyzstan impressed the judge, travel writer and author Kari Herbert, who says: "This piece stood out clearly. His story is engaging from the start, informative and interesting, with a powerful sense of place and adventure."
Here are a few words
from his prize winning article:
"Here I lay, prone in
the road, grit in my teeth, spine
aching, skull humming. My hip torn up, my elbow shredded, the
flesh grated
right off my palm. Everything raw and bloody and tender. Here I
lay, still,
breathing the crisp air, wondering what I was doing with my
life.
For five months I had
been progressing gradually, patiently,
from London to Ho Chi Minh City by bicycle. It was to be a Great
Adventure. An
8,000-mile man-maker of the highest order, to explore the world,
to test my
limits – perhaps even to find whatever I had lost of myself in
recent years."
Read about the whole
adventure here.
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