“Adventurous Tales from a Mountain Walk.”

This is my first outing as a budding writer of fact, fiction, downright lies, magic, historical and involving anything and anyone who may be considered old. Well, they do say write what you know best, and I am 63 going on 64.

All my characters and features have aged, but they still have a soul. You the reader will witness lives in a series of short stories that culminate into one finale on a mountain ridge in South America.

Features first:

• The sun and its relationship with a somewhat troublesome mountain range.
• The Old craggy trail versus the annoying new road. With its coat of shiny reflectors.

Now, the objects and animals:

• An Old people’s home, that every now and then had an excellent story to tell by one of its elderly patients.
• An abandoned Willy Jeep who was once in a theatre of war in the Philippines way back in 1945.
• A little sombrero, who befriends a strange man. Together they go to Auschwitz.
• A 100 peso coin who decides to bring luck to the same peculiar man.
• A not so impetuous old scorpion. Contented in the knowledge; he can take on the strange man’s outstretched finger.
• A lost Chilean bottle of wine bears witness to car theft.
• A kite who wishes to be a satellite.
• Gloria and Marta, two cows that decide flying is a safe option.
• The deceased cyclist. Mourned by an Olympian from the 1936 Berlin Games.
• A proud hummingbird a definite hit with the ladies.

Read & Explore the Book

MEET THE CHARACTERS

Stalin

A retired Policeman now reduced to a street man, who walks everywhere. A rock in his hand and a memory that only lasted 24 hours each time.

Rosa

A young Nun who when all her friends were snoring she was heard singing instead.

Ximena

The sexy lady with the buttocks to die for on her equally beautiful quadbike.

Ignacio

The retiring truck driver who, like his grandfather knew when to say little to gain much.

Together these four Colombians, with many more come into brief contact with a strange looking man, with white hair, blue eyes, red face and funny looking legs. The same man who speaks no Spanish and appears out having a walk.

Each character, feature, and object comes alive to the reader through the eyes of themselves. All their stories come together in the final chapters when the mountain decides one dark night to rumble and shake. Their survival will depend on each other.

Mike Bowley

When Mike reached his late 50s, he made the decision that another adventure awaited him. It turned out to be Colombia in South America.

In the past five short years, he has shared his time in both the UK and Colombia.

He married his Colombian wife Isabel Cristina Rueda Nieto in December 2013, and together they share their time between mountain life in Dapa and city life in Santiago de Cali.

In the same time, Mike has trained as a Barista, succeeded in gaining his Colombian licence after his 8-minute driving test. He quickly added to this success with passing the UK Truck diving test.

This one took longer, something like five attempts before passing. But Mike’s proudest moments were when reversing, no training required. He was a natural at reversing a truck.

Mike qualified as a Vocational English Tutor and has helped students to gain a better understanding of the English outside of their classes with his one to one approach.

Finally, 50-years after meeting Mrs Wall, Mike became an author of short stories and a Content Writer.

Mike puts his new career with writing down to an accident he experienced in 2015. Where, he did severe damage to his head, in a fall from a ladder. This nearly resulted in him tumbling down the mountain which overlooks the city of Cali.

While recuperating and recovering from his near-death experience, you would easily find Mike walking hours on end on the very mountain that nearly “Got him.”

On one such two hour walk, his imagination went wild, and the result is his first outing:

“Adventurous Tales From A Mountain Walk.”

Adventurous Tales from a Mountain Walk.