Cobra in the Bath ─ Adventures in Less Travelled Lands

Miles Morland is an adventurer. He was born in India to a naval father and a mother once described as the "most dangerous woman in India." His parents divorced and Miles followed his mother to Tehran, which they had to leave in a hurry after the Shah was first expelled, and on to Iraq, which they had to leave in a hurry after a revolution. Having survived boarding school in England, Morland rowed in an Oxford crew that broke the boat race record and left Oxford to become a beach bum in Greece. Years followed "shouting down a phone" on Wall Street and London but it got better when Miles left his job, bought a giant motorbike, and set off to discover Africa in 1990. He is credited with reinventing investing in Africa; he soon found himself the biggest foreign investor in most African markets.

Africa was interspersed with increasingly foolish solo motorbike trips, over the Andes in the tire-treads of Che Guevara, 'round South India, through southern Japan in a typhoon, and dodging 'roos in the Australian outback. At other times he was deported at gunpoint from Ceausescu's Romania while the Berlin Wall was coming down and avoided, thanks to a lucky plane crash, being murdered in Ethiopia by the Ogaden Libration Front.

Epic in scope, keenly observed, and told with razor sharp wit, Cobra in the Bath is a hilarious and riveting account of a life lived to the fullest by a man in possession of an unassailable enthusiasm for life.