Australian author, motorcycle adventurer and motivational speaker Heather Ellis will be at Smithfield Library tomorrow (Wednesday 2 October) for an author talk and book signing.
A former James Cook University Cairns journalism graduate, Heather will talk about her two travel memoirs: Ubuntu: One Woman’s Motorcycle Odyssey Across Africa and Timeless On The Silk Road: An Odyssey From London to Hanoi.
Ubuntu details Heather’s solo 42,000-kilometre motorcycle journey from south to north Africa from 1993 to 1994.
After her motorcycle trek across Africa, Heather was diagnosed with HIV in London at the age of 30 and was given just five years to live.
Timeless On The Silk Road is the story of what happens next.
Unwilling to relinquish her travel plans, she rode from London to Vietnam along the fabled Silk Roads of antiquity.
The journey took her to Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Union, through the vastness of Siberia’s Altai Mountains and into in China.
A year later after, completing the ride, she arrived in Cairns, near death with AIDS, but was saved by a new generation of medications. Three months later Heather enrolled in a Bachelor of Journalism.
Heather is the chair of Positive Women Victoria, Australia’s only fully funded community organisation for women living with HIV.
She lives in the Yarra Valley in Victoria with her three children and is working on her next book, a novel.
Heather Ellis is at Smithfield Library, Cheviot St, 10.30am-noon October 2.
