A young man searches for meaning while traveling the world – in this compelling narrative full of fantastic characters and exotic landscapes, Robert DeMayo combines the real-life travel journals of his younger years into a colorful coming-of-age story. 

SEDONA, Ariz. – The Wayward Traveler follows the adventures of Louis, a young American who, in 1985, is determined to travel the world. The story takes place in forty countries and spans ten years: from the deck of a felucca on the Nile to the scorched dunes of India’s Thar Desert to the powerful Beni River in the Amazon Basin.

 Louis feels disenchantment with his former life, and a yearning to understand the foreign lands he encounters on his travels. He’s broke most of the time and spends considerable effort trying to get by. Along the way he meets other travelers. He learns about love and compassion, and hate. He befriends a Thai monk and Hindu Sadhu Babas and learns about other ways of thought, and enlightenment. Along the way Louis develops a list of Rules to help him get by, and yet, there´s a restlessness to his travels. He continues to wander into new countries, and through it all his Rules save him. On a frozen ridge in the Atlas Mountains he comes up with his first rule, Embrace the Unknown, to combat the fear that had been building in him. In Israel he decides If You Can’t Get Out of Something, Get Into It when his survival depends on pushing his body beyond its limits. And when he’s under the spell of a mad salesman with three personalities he realizes how important it is to Choose Your Battles.

 Author Robert Louis DeMayo spent ten years traveling as much as he could, living a peripatetic life in nearly one hundred countries. These travels took place during the late eighties and early nineties, before the internet and cell phones shrank the world to pocket format. Guide books were still non-existent for many of the places he visited, and there were still a few dark spots left on the world´s maps.

 He completed ten six-month-long trips and noted his thoughts and experiences in altogether thirty journals; they became the blueprint for this book. He also developed a list of Rules for Survival on the road, which became the backbone of his novel, “The Wayward Traveler” (ISBN 9780983345398).

 “For ten years I wrote travel features about these places I visited,” DeMayo says, “but I never told the full story. I call it a story because however closely the narrative may fit my recollections—or the words of my journals—the fictional process has been at work.”

 “The Wayward Traveler” is available for purchase online at Amazon.com and through other retailers.