Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road (ePub)

Travels with My Hat is the story of how an Australian nurse switched careers to become an award-winning international travel writer and photographer. It is a colourful record of her experiences defined by travel and frequently against all odds. "We don't know who you are," she was told on arrival in London in 1974. "To get a name here, you need to write a book," which is precisely what she did, choosing as subject, the developing Arab oil states of the western Gulf. Publication of The Gulf States & Oman in 1977 brought commissions on the Middle East. Books followed on Jordan and Pakistan. In 1979 she was accredited to the Buckingham Palace press corps to cover Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's historic tour of Arabia. The title refers to a famous piece of millinery which was on the road for decade. Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth II, disoriented in the great souq in Nizwa in the Sultanate of Oman, said: "I was looking everywhere for your blue hat."

Christine Osborne has visited 35 different Muslim countries, usually treated with great respect and kindness. But of her experiences in the secretive mountain republic of Yemen near the Red Sea she says, "I've occasionally wished I were a boy. Not for the penis per se but for the freedom it allows a man." In 1981 Christine Osborne travelled to Iraq, invited to Baghdad by the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein. Christine's adventures in Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco and other exotic places, are rounded off with letters to her mother, who never left Australia.