Read Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means for Free Online

the back of the plane, cramped and sweating, an old-style helmet on my head and the fuselage almost like a cage around me. I only realised just how small it was when Rick got in too, and I was hunched behind him with my elbows at my sides and my hands between my knees.
    It was fantastic, though. This was a replica of the most historic fighter in British aviation history and I was about to fly up the coast. When my dad was making Hope and Glory , I remember reading about the Battle of Britain pilots, how they had been quite happy to get on with the job once they were in the planes; it was the waiting around for the call to scramble that set their nerves jangling.
    Finally we were up and away, with Claudio filming from the open door of the chase plane. Rick was super-cool, so confident and very experienced. He told me that it was usually after about twenty minutes that people started to feel sick. He was not wrong. Even so, I don’t think he expected me to fail quite so spectacularly. There was another forty minutes to go and there I was with a hand to my mouth and my face beginning to resemble the emerald forests below. I didn’t actually puke, but cold sweat was dripping from the ends of my hair onto the nape of my clammy neck.
    The chase plane flew in a straight line while we climbed and dived, with the odd barrel roll and one almighty loop-the-loop thrown in for good measure. We were flying over towns and farms, rivers and forests, and at one point we banked steeply across the side of a mountain before scything around it, like taking a corner on a motorbike with your knee down, only much, much faster.
    I was feeling really crook now, and to be honest it was hard to appreciate just how lucky I was, and how fabulous the world looked from a fighter aircraft. I had to take my helmet off because it felt like it was pressing my skull into my brain. I realised that the last time I’d felt this ill was when I went to a funfair as a kid and ate mountains of candy floss before being whirled around on a waltzer. When the thing finally stopped, I stumbled off and threw up everywhere.
    But that was a waltzer and this was a plane and I couldn’t just get off. We flew over Rainbow Beach with the waves breaking in white rollers only five hundred feet below. An hour or so in the air and I have to admit that, much as I loved it, I was not sorry to see the airstrip at Maryborough.
    The TV must have broadcast where we were because when we taxied to a halt and I climbed out, there was quite a crowd to meet us. I signed a few autographs, still feeling pretty green, and then thanked Rick before jumping into a replica of a 1952 MG-TD driven by a wonderful old guy called Ron Stephenson. He was wearing a straw cowboy hat and handed me a black one, and like a couple of old desperadoes we drove four or five kilometres to the Maryborough Museum where John Meyers had an armoured car waiting.
    Yep, an armoured car. It was a Ferret Scout and the steering was sort of up and under with the wheel horizontal to your knees rather than perpendicular. It came complete with machine guns and what they called a pre-select gearbox where you chose the gear you wanted then stamped on the clutch and it clicked in. The car was fifty years old, green and camouflaged, and was driven by a guy called Graeme Knoll. He actually had to drive it out of the museum and from there it was fifteen minutes to the station and the Tilt Train. I have to say I was looking forward to a bit of trainage. After being up in the plane for five hundred kilometres with my stomach in my mouth, I would be more than happy to sit for a few hours and let it settle.
    I played machine-gunner as we drove up Maryborough High Street, then Graeme let me drive for part of the way. Of course I stalled the thing before we got going, but then it’s not every day you drive an armoured car. Anyway, I eventually got the hang of it and we made it to the railway station with six minutes to spare.
     
     
    The