5 Cents to Spare

This book is about my fathers 10 month around the world travel adventure in 1936. He visited some 20 countries, traveling by bicycle loaded with camping gear, second and third class train, bus, ship, motor lorry, riverboat, and hiking. His greatest adventure was a 500 mile hike along the Burma Trail from Burma through China to Hanoi.

Wherever my father went he aroused the curiosity of the local people and the suspicions of the authorities. He recorded pre WW-II viewpoints of the towns' people and fellow travelers on social, political, educational, and economic matters. He bedded down in guesthouses, youth hostels, YMCAs, or camped out. He recorded some of his story with over 1,000 photographs.

Over a 15 year period, I transcribed my fathers handwritten diaries. There were many duplicated entries because much of his diaries consisted of letters home to family and friends. Most of these letters contained accounts about the same thing, but each either had a different twist or some new activity altogether. My biggest job was to eliminate all the duplication, fit together the different twists, and to put it all together into a logical timeline.

In my first effort to transcribe I used a manual typewriter, before the personal computer was available. About the time I finished, I bought my first PC, an IBM XT. I re-entered all my typewritten pages into the computer. As the years went on I got better and better computers, copying my fathers adventure into each, making more changes along the way. Eventually I put together a 31 chapter book with 166 photographs.

My father (and my mother) passed away in 1994. It had always been his wish to find a way to publish his travels so that others may see the world as he saw it.

Larry S. Kramm

Antioch, California

July 1999