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| Keep Australia On Your Left: A True Story of an Attempt to Circumnavigate Australia by Kayak | 
 enlarge | Author: Eric Stiller
Publisher: Forge
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $0.95
You Save: $25.00 (96%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (27 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1125709
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.4
ISBN: 0312874588
Dewey Decimal Number: 919.40466092
EAN: 9780312874582
ASIN: 0312874588
Publication Date: July 16, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
"You mad bastards. You mad bloody bastards." The challenge? Paddle a kayak around Australia. As Eric Stiller and Tony Brown would discover, the attempt would be a fascinating, frustrating, maddening, and at times hilarious crawl around what many consider the most beautiful but treacherous coastline in the world. Swamped by high waves and rain, hampered by faulty technology, blown off course, baked by a broiling sun or chilled by sub-zero temperatures, battling loneliness and exhaustion--and sometimes each other--it would be the most demanding emotional and physical challenge either had ever attempted. In short, it was the adventure of a lifetime! Keep Australia on Your Left is a story of friendship forged--and sustained--under demanding circumstances. It is also the personal portrait of Eric Stiller's journey around a continent...and into himself..
Amazon.com Review
It sounds like a pilot for a new Fox network live broadcast: a self-searching Manhattan kayak salesman teams up with a rowdy Australian male model to circumnavigate Australia by kayak. Thankfully, though, chest beating and contrived conflict are absent in Eric Stiller's true account of his attempt to kayak the 10,000 miles around Australia with Aussie Tony Brown. What we get instead is a look at the tedium, death-defying stamina, and hilarious blunderings of two men with little experience to prepare them for their chosen expedition. "The Australian coastline is a nightmare of tightly coiled inlets and rocky coves and sheer rock cliff faces and bays as huge and forbidding as Saharan deserts," Stiller muses while he kicks off his training with Brown by paddling around Manhattan. Raised in a family that sells Klepper kayaks, the German-made folding expedition kayaks known for their resilience in violent conditions, Stiller is an expert on the technical details of the equipment. He is not, he admits, accustomed to spending more than three months in a 17-foot-long kayak with anyone, much less Brown, a natural athlete filled with joie de vivre whose navigational strategy is simply, "Just keep Australia on your left, mate." The curious pair encounters an impressive variety of harrowing sea conditions. The first month is a daily battle against capsizing during beach landings amid Australia's legendary skyscraper-high waves. Marathon paddling sessions through maddening back-eddies rip open their hands and scrape their torsos. The inhospitable Tasman Sea is rife with deadly creatures, including crocodiles, sharks, and sea wasps, a toxic jellyfish with tentacles several meters long. At one point the two must cross the Gulf of Carpenteria, the most arduous leg of the trip, requiring seven days on the water with no land in sight. For all their travails, however, there is relief in the form of friendly hosts (nearly everyone they meet is happy to have a smelly kayak team at the dinner table), striking scenery, wild nights in isolated cities, and the personal reckoning that comes with an effort of this magnitude. --Lolly Merrell
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 Kayak adventures... December 29, 2007
I picked up this book as my husband is Australian and we both kayak. I can't imagine trying to accomplish this feat, and I found the tale pretty accurate of a long kayaking trip.
 Too bad. June 15, 2007
I wished they could have finished the trip, but it kind of seemed like they wanted it for the wrong reasons. Don't get me wrong they accomplished quite a feat and I"m not trying to take away from that. It's just that Eric and Tony seemed to grow up rich and be given all the oppurtunites in life, so when presented with severe obstacles they had a hard time dealing with them. It seemed more like an extended vacation rather then an expedition. Maybe, I"m just a little biased after reading Paddle to the Amazon and discovering all they went through. Still, this book isn't as bad as some say, it's good read, and you get a good sense of thier journey, it just could have been better.
 Yawn... pass on this one November 17, 2006
I struggled through 106 pages before I gave up on it altogether. The book held every potential of a great adventure but sorely lacked in its characters - the whining and vain Stiller coupled with a boorish Tony made for a literary flop. Their trip was doomed from the beginning, the two seemed to be in a state of constant bickering - where was the camaderie? The whole thing begged for credibility and substance. Sorry - just couldn't take it. Save your money and buy Chris Duff's 'Southern Exposure'.
Pales against Paul Caffyn's Book January 28, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Caffyn's "Dreamtime Voyage" is the best on kayaking around Australia. It is more of a 5 star book. And his NZ book "Obscured by Waves" is back in print!
 a depressing account of a great achievement April 19, 2005
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
I got this one for my birthday and started reading it with great enthusiasm. Few people have attempted to circumnavigate Australia in a kayak and except of Paul Caffyn no one succeeded so far. Therefore, Eric Stiller (the author) and Tony Brown (his paddle partner) are in good company with their failed attempt to complete the circumnavigation. This book is Eric's account of five months of paddling over 3500 miles from Sydney along Oz's east and north coasts to Darwin.
Paddling almost half the way around Australia in a Klepper foldable boat in five months is a great adventure. It must have been quite an amazing journey along one of the worlds most beatiful shorelines. However, there is hardly any of this aspect in the book. Instead you'll get bored of Eric's dwelling in endless complaints about his sore butt, the always higher-than-expected swell, and his ever ongoing struggles with Tony. The only thing more disappointing than Eric's whining about all the evil surrounding him is the stretch of lousy b/w pictures (on all of which the water is as flat as a mirror, so there must have been a couple of good days at least).
The title refers to Tony's rejection of Eric's request to buy charts for the trip. Instead, he recommends, to simply "keep Oz on the left". I would not want to go on a week-long trip with a guy as naive as that. Tony's naive attitude and Erics subordination to Tony's moods borders on stupidity more often than not. Day after day the two get up too late to make their distance in daylight, they have to make a dangerous landing at some beach they can hardly see in the dark, they find some food and exhaustedly fall asleep, which makes them get up too late the next morning and so on. They once take off in a storm out of a "cabin-fever" mood and almost die that day, triggering a coast guard search. A long list of misjudgements and rants of self-pity later, the duo almost get themselves killed in the gulf of carpentaria and, to the big relief of the reader, give up their journey shortly thereafter.
Eric does not seem to really enjoy any of this whole trip - everything always seems to be worse than expected. He doesn't seem to live the journey, he seems to long for it to end before it even started. The book reads as if all this was pushed onto him, and this way it ends up to be a depressing account of quite a tremendous achievement. Unfortunately, Eric does not seem to understand anything of what has happened. Instead of writing a pity-party of a book like this, he should fall down on his knees and thank his god for the fact, that he pulled his sorry butt out of this alive.
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