
Trekking 4,000km along the Australian coast -- on a skateboard
CNN
If you've been out driving on the eastern coast of Australia in the last few months, you might have seen Tom Drury. He would have been hard to miss, a 28-year-old with a droopy moustache and a backpack, cruising along by the side of the Bruce Highway. Cruising, on a skateboard.
What you probably wouldn't have known was that he was a long way from home, skating alone on an epic voyage of discovery that led him from Melbourne all the way north to Cairns, a 4,000-kilometer route on just four little wheels. When he set off at the end of October, Drury had no idea what would be possible. When asked on his 'Gordy Aboard' Instagram page where he was heading, he responded simply, "As far up as possible!"
More than two decades ago, on January 24, 2004, I landed in Baghdad as a legal adviser, assigned an office in what was then known as the Green Zone. It was raining and cold, and my duffle bag was thrown into a puddle off the C-130 aircraft that had just done a corkscrew dive to reach the runway without risk of ground fire. Young American soldiers greeted me as we piled into a vehicle, sped out of the airport complex and then along a road called the “Highway of Death” due to car bombs and snipers.












