Adventure & Travel in Southeast Asia

WOOFENDEN PUBLI8SHERS

www.wolfendenpublishing.com

It seems these days one needs a “niche” before they can succeed in any field. Publishing is the same. Publishers have to concentrate on niches: children’s books, mysteries, supernatural, histories, biographies, self-help books, health books and the likes. At Wolfenden, with an office in Bangkok, we tend to slant towards books about the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, but we do not limit ourselves to these areas alone. The writing, regardless of the locale, is the important thing.

The world is changing drastically, and so is the publishing business with it. Only but a few of the big publishing houses of the past remain. It’s not only the publishers but it’s the publishing giant personalities as well, names like Maxwell Perkins and Bennett Serf, literary leaders in the field who had nurtured writers and stood behind them and their works. William Maxwell Perkins was the famous editor of novelists F.…

www.haroldstephens.net

www,wolfendenpublishing.com

Biographies, short stories, travel and adventure books set in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific by writer extraordinaire, Harold Stephens, who has explored the South Pacific and Southeast Asia for forty years, writing 24 books about his exciting experiences and about those of others he has met.

Left. Stephens with his jeep in Washington, D.C.

The South Pacific and Southeast Asia travel and adventure is brought to you by Harold Stephens who has searched for Lost Cities of Southeast Asia, hunted for sunken treasures in Southeast Asia waters including locating Battleship HMS Repulse, fought Pirates of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, tracked Southeast Asian Big Foot, explored forgotten Caves of Southeast Asia, drove Around the World in a Jeep, bought Yachting to Southeast Asia aboard Schooner Third Sea that he sailed in the search for World War II Wrecks.

Right, Fishing wild rivers of the Malay jungle

Harold Stephens brings us his accounts…

What are the charges against IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn?

Attempted rape, sex abuse, a criminal sex act, unlawful imprisonment and forcible touching, what ever that means.

Left, Dominique Strauss-Kahn in his better days.

In May 2011, Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York City and charged with the sexual assault of a maid who entered his Sofitel $3,000 a day hotel suite. He has denied all charges. A judge later approved his release on $1 million bail and US$5 million insurance bond.

If found guilty, he could be punished by five to 25 years in prison.

A noted French economist, lawyer, and politician, and a member of the French Socialist Party, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was, until he was arrested, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a position he has held since 28 September 2007. There’s more. He was a professor of economics at the Paris Institute for Political Studies, and Minister of Economy…

Ed Boden was a yachtsman who sailed single-handed around the world in a 25-foot yacht. He wrote extensively about his voyage, not in one tome but in many magazine and newspaper articles and letters to friends. I found a piece he wrote on Quinn’s Tahitian Hut, or simply Quinn’s Bar. I feel rather flattered for when he began his story he quoted the opening paragraph that I wrote for Argosy magazine many years ago. So here is Ed’s story, as he wrote it. I dug into my files and found these photos I took. They have not be printed before. —HS “Imagine an Old West saloon, a Dixieland cabaret in New Orleans, an Oriental taxi dance hall, a German beer garden and a Pigalle bistro in Paris.  Combine them under one roof on a tropical island paradise in the South Seas.  Take away the liquor-control board, the fire marshal, the building…

By Paul Stephens

Life with my dad, Harold Stephens, meant always being on the road. We had a great big colonial house in Singapore—my dad, my mom and my two brothers and me. We kids loved the house, for it was right in the middle of the jungles and all night long you could hear strange sounds of animals outside our windows. The gardener had killed six cobras the month before we moved in, and a man walking in the woods got stung by killer bees and died. The road to our house was about half a mile long and no taxi driver would take us home after dark. We had to walk and it was frightening. I remember one lizard was so big—dad called him a Komodo dragon—that when he crossed the road his body would take the whole width of the road. Chinese workers had caught a python ten…

My friend of many years, Ed Boden, recalls my appearance on the Tonight Show wiih Johnny Carson. Here it is in his own words

NOT EASY

Left, Read about the record breaking motor trip around the world in Who Needs a Road

A good friend of mine, Harold “Steve” Stephens, has had some of the most interesting and truly outstanding adventures that I’ve encountered anywhere and has written several books and many articles about them. One adventure, in 1965, involved a motorcar trip around the world with a Toyota Land Cruiser. Wherever there was a road heading in an easterly direction, he and his companions took it. A number of times there was no road at all but they headed easterly anyway which led to the title of a subsequent book, “Who Needs a Road.” Interestingly, it was the last successful trip that encircled the world by motorcar because political conditions have precluded…

My sister-in-law, Sara, can boast of having Einstein’s’ brain sitting on her bookshelf in her front living room. It’s the truth. I wouldn’t have believed it until I went to visit her in San Jose, California. She not only told me about it but she had the proof. Here’s her story.

The book, Driving Mr. Albert, tells the story

All I wanted to do was to help  Dr. Tom Harvey find a safe place for Einstein’s brain. In an interview in the Wall Street Journal (which I was reading during my coffee break), he had expressed his deep concerns and fears about his getting on in age (early  80’s)  and he did not know who or where to leave  Einstein’s brain  for safekeeping when he passed on.  Dr. Harvey was one of only two surgeons authorized to remove Dr. Einstein’s brain upon his death. The other doctor passed away soon after. Dr.…

There is no question, tourism is big business. I can give a few examples. When I first took up writing for the Bangkok Post in Thailand in 1966 there were a little more than a hundred thousand visitors to the Kingdom a year. The Tourism Authority of Thailand went into full swing. And last year it neared eleven visitors, bringing their foreign currency earnings to number one place. Even the state of California was boom with twenty million visitors arriving from Asia alone. What a grand way to boost the economy.

All that has changed due to US visa requirement. For a Thai who wants to visit America, the visa fee is $130.  For a family of four wanting to visit Disneyland it can be a hefty price. If an applicant makes an error in the form he or she can reapply, but the fee will not be waved.  They must pay…

They said we were hauling coal from northern China to feed the starting economy in Shanghai. One of the duties of the US Marines, other than repatriating the Japanese forces back to Japan, was to guard the coal trains leaving Peking, or what is Beijing today. The trains would pass through the Hattaman Gate at the southern wall and once through the wall US Marine guards took over and delivered the precious coal to Shangri. The boxcars were sealed shut, under lock and key, and Marines guarding the cargo had to sit on top the cars in the blistering cold winter winds. It wasn’t pleasant duty. I wrote about this duty in my book Take China, The Last of the China Marines.

Left: Train guard in China

But why all the security for a pile of coal?

As young Maines in China, right after the war and until the Communists take over in…

I planned to visit New York and there were a few people I wanted to look up. One person was Milt Machlin, former editor of Argosy magazine. Milt, as an editor and more than anyone else in the world, taught me how to write. In my latest book, The Education of a Travel writer, I devoted much of the text to him, giving readers his tips and philosophy, and when I arrived in New York I was hoping to give him an autographed copy of my book. And now I had learned he had died. It was sad for me to hear the news.

Right, An early Argosy, dated 1931

Milt was no slough; he was a bear of a man with a walrus mustache who growled at you when you stepped into his office. That’s the way I felt when I met him the first time.

Milt was true to his colors. He…