Travels in a Dervish Cloak

Isambard Wilkinson was born in 1971. As a young boy in Ireland, he listened to family stories of adventurous botanists and artists, sailors and soldiers who travelled through China and Africa, India and Albania. It fired an urge to roam. Expelled from school at 15, after university he was refused entry into the Royal Marines and instead worked for Country Life magazine before leaving to travel throughout Pakistan, an ambition curtailed by kidney failure. After a stretch on dialysis and his first kidney transplant, he became a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in Spain, and then in Pakistan, where he completed his travels, the subject of this book. Following a second transplant, he now works for AFP in Hong Kong.