In Search of the Blue Duck: A Novelistic Memoir of Rough Travel and Young Love in Australasia and Indonesia, 1985-6

In the summer of 1985, fresh out of an elite American college, a young man is handed a job as a suit on Wall Street to which he is totally unsuited. As soon as he has his second paycheck, he buys a round the world air ticket and walks away from the life he has been brought up to lead.
His first stop is the Fiji islands where he attempts to emulate the other backpackers and live life in the moment, but ignorant of how to go about this, he heads to New Zealand and becomes a beekeeper's apprentice. Here he takes up with a British girl from a background as limited in its way as his own who sets out to teach him the art of rough and ready travel.
There follows an intimate chronicle of the next thirteen months as the pair hike and hitch through some of the most remote areas of New Zealand and Australia, coming to know each other better than they have anyone else in their brief lives. As they wind their way through the Indonesian archipelago, however, it becomes clear that their idyll cannot last.
Alternating between narrative sections describing the couple's exotic experiences along their way and excurses into topics ranging from the origins of the cardboard box to the allure of Indonesian shadow theater, this unusual book is at once a memoir of youthful love and a chronicle of travel on the edge in the era before the internet.