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Hookers and hawkers.
Mosques and mosquitos.
Paul has had enough of Southeast Asia.
He's only here ‘cos it's cheap.
He's on the run from police after leaving Australia.
No, that place wasn't much better either.
Well, it was when he was young.
When his life was full of promise. An up-and-coming boxer. And he had friends. And fun.
Then a bit of bad luck later and he found himself on the run in outback Australia. Paranoid. Hiding from shadows. The heat. The dust. The sweat.
Next stop, Southeast Asia.
Read an Excerpt
Cigarette in mouth, Paul stood on the hotel balcony and stared nervously out into the hot Cambodian night. He hated Asia. He didn’t know why so many loved it. Of course deep down he knew - cheap holidays. But to Paul, Asia was hell - hot, dangerous and always just a bit of bad luck away from some sort of disaster.
Not much could be seen from his balcony. His hotel was down a small street off the main road that led to the tourist centre of Siem Riep. He could see people drifting down the main road, mostly tourists clutching dollar beers. Directly across from him was the construction site of a new hotel.
Paul took another drag from his cigarette, grabbed his beer off the balcony railing and walked back into the hotel room. He looked at his boots next to his duffel bag. He was sick of those stinky boots. He looked at the grime on the duffel bag. That grime was from India. Indian grime was unique. Black. Oily. Nowhere else that he had been in Asia left that kind of grime. It came mostly off the train floors. As he stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray, he remembered what his feet looked like in thongs at the end of those long train trips - black.
About the Author: Gregory Pakis is an Australian author, film-maker, actor and wacky vlogger. He has written the short story, The Lonely Australian of the Asian Night; the soon to be released horror-suspense novellas, The Regressor and He., and Memoir of a Suburban Hoe-Bo, which is partly an account of when he lived out of a van for ten years in Melbourne.
Gregory Pakis is also the writer / director of the feature films, The Garth Method (2005) and The Joe Manifesto (2013), which have won national and international awards and been distributed through Accent Entertainment, Label, Vanguard Cinema.
Gregory's more informal video projects are the feature documentaries, Garth Goes Hitch-Hiking (2007) and Garth Lives in a Van (2011) which have screened at film festivals in Australia.
More recently, he has created the comedy series, suBURPieS and his Wacky Vlog which can found on his socials.
Gregory has been featured in articles in newspapers, The Age, The Herald Sun, Beat Magazine, Inpress, FILMINK, and the Neos Kosmos. He has been interviewed on radio by the ABC, 3RRR, SYN FM, 3CR.
THE LONELY AUSTRALIAN OF THE ASIAN NIGHT - LINKS
AMAZON SALES LINK: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01N36UWYK
BOOK TRAILER: https://youtu.be/ZE0JH1EdGfc?si=-zroVl6rV8Sd3OyH
AUTHOR CHAT TO CAMERA VIDEO: https://youtu.be/uTd0-Y_FT7Y?si=dz0NzUnpoYUYoNmw
WEB PAGE (WITH MEDIA KIT): https://www.gpak.org/books/thelonelyaustralianoftheasiannight
WEBSITES
BOOKS https://www.gpak.org/
FILMS https://guerillafilmnite.com/
SOCIALS Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gregorypakis/
Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gregorypakis
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gpakis
Twitter: https://x.com/GPakis
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Thankyou for the post. The reason I wrote this story is that I enjoy writing and reading stories about individuals on the edge of their luck or alienated in their environment, and one of the best ways to test that is overseas travel with little or no money. Australia and Asia thought being geographically close are culturally so far apart. Hopefully makes for a good story.
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