Travellers' Checks23,000km kayak trip retraces epic 1930s journey to Australia

Specks in the ocean Australian adventurer Sandy Robson finished an impressive 23,000km kayak journey this month. Travelled in five stages over 5½ years, her epic trip began in Germany and took her through the Mediterranean, then around India and Sri Lanka, along the coastlines of Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, much of Indonesia and around Papua New Guinea. Her final stop was the Australian island of Saibai, in the Torres Strait.

She was greeted by her father and Australian Border Force personnel, who gave her a warmer welcome than was received by the man whose journey her trip retraced, Oskar Speck. Having set off down the Danube, in his native Germany, in search of work in 1932, Speck eventually arrived on Saibai in 1939, soon after the outbreak of the second world war, and was interned as an enemy alien.

Another solo sea traveller of note was Donald Crowhurst, whose unusual life and death – a novice sailor, his empty boat was found adrift in the Atlantic Ocean near the end of a round-the-world race he had been leading – are brilliantly examined in The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, written in 1970 by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall.

Described by a Washington Post reviewer as “one of the most moving and disturbing books I have ever read”, it will be republished next month to tie in with a new film. Directed by James Marsh (The Theory of Everything) and starring Colin Firth as Crowhurst, The Mercy should be in cinemas sometime next year, according to the Hollywood Reporter.