Endless Horizons

By Paul Neville | PCV Tonga 2000–02, Independent, 2025

Paul Neville’s memoir of backpacking around Southeast Asia and South America more than fulfills the promise in his subtitle: A Global Backpacker’s Quest for Adventure, Connection, and Discovery. Readers will find this self-published effort a thoroughly professional product. Expect to enjoy an assiduously edited, excellently laid out, and beautifully written book. 

After two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tonga, Neville’s “festering travel bug”—a condition nearly universal among returned Volunteers—launches him into a year of vagabonding on a shoestring budget. Intermingled with vivid travelogue, he tries to explain why. 

There is novelty, of course. Bangkok, his first stop, is nothing like Tonga. Descriptions of backpacker hostel culture, big-city chaos, and dizzying tourist opportunities are crammed into an early chapter. Each new chapter is a new stopover and an opportunity to make “real connections with real people.” Looking out at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, he chats with a temple groundskeeper who is paid just three cents a day. The man insists he’s immensely happy having a job in such a beautiful setting. 

Neville’s choice of tourist stops is wonderfully eclectic. Yes, there’s lots of beach lounging and nightclubbing in this saga, but he describes his awe at places like Sumatra’s Orangutan Rehabilitation Center, admires Java’s Hindu complex of Prambanan, and marvels at Manila’s Ifugao rice terraces without ruminating on how American entrepreneurship could improve on them. 

The last third becomes more personal and reflective as he moves on to South America. Immediately on arrival in Quito, Neville settles into a homestay for immersive language and culture instruction. In Peru he does the same, and with his improving fluency he gains insight into Peruvian politics, which inspires him to join a local workers’ protest in a particularly memorable scene. 

Any reader who has ever been a backpacker on a low budget will find familiar experiences, and anyone considering such a trip can use his travel tips to their benefit. With luck, they will meet traveling companions as kind, loquacious, and endlessly curious as Paul Neville.