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The Well at the World's End
When A.J. Mackinnon quits his job in Australia, he knows only that he longs to travel to the Well at the World’s End, a mysterious pool on a remote Scottish island whose waters, legend has it, hold the secret to eternal youth.
Determined not to fly (‘It would feel like cheating’), he sets out with a rucksack, some fireworks and a map of the world and trusts chance to take care of the rest. By land and by sea, by train, truck, horse and yacht, he makes his way across the globe – and through a series of hilarious adventures. He survives a bus crash in Australia, marries a princess in Laos, is attacked by Komodo dragons and does time in a Chinese jail. The next lift – or the next near-miss – is always just a happy accident away.
This is the astonishing true story of a remarkable voyage, an old-fashioned quest by a modern-day adventurer.
Determined not to fly (‘It would feel like cheating’), he sets out with a rucksack, some fireworks and a map of the world and trusts chance to take care of the rest. By land and by sea, by train, truck, horse and yacht, he makes his way across the globe – and through a series of hilarious adventures. He survives a bus crash in Australia, marries a princess in Laos, is attacked by Komodo dragons and does time in a Chinese jail. The next lift – or the next near-miss – is always just a happy accident away.
This is the astonishing true story of a remarkable voyage, an old-fashioned quest by a modern-day adventurer.
298 pages, Paperback
First published July 28, 2010
About the author
A.J. Mackinnon
4 books44 followersA.J. Mackinnon is the author of The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow and The Well at the World's End. He was born in Australia in 1963 and he spent his childhood between England and Australia, traveling as a small boy with his family on the last P&O liners to sail between the two countries.
His interests include painting, philosophy, writing, conjuring and home-made fireworks. He is currently a teacher at the Timbertop campus of Geelong Grammar.
His interests include painting, philosophy, writing, conjuring and home-made fireworks. He is currently a teacher at the Timbertop campus of Geelong Grammar.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
January 19, 2016
The Well at the World’s End is a fabulous book! Mackinnon is a romantic, a travel tragic and a superb raconteur all rolled into one, and I’d love to have him as a guest at my next dinner-party…
Back in the 1980s, Mackinnon set off from Australia on the obligatory see-the-world trip that most young Australians do. His ambition in Scotland was to find the mythic ’well at the world’s end’ and this book begins with his adventures in getting there as a penniless – guileless – young man. On the way he met up with a truly ghastly female called Pixie who relieved him of much of his money but he pressed on regardless to fulfil his dream of bathing in the pool which confers eternal youth. Alas, it turned out he should have drunk it, not swum in it, and he got a beastly cold for his trouble. Undeterred by this, he has been bitten by the travel adventure bug!
To see the rest of this review please visit
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...
Back in the 1980s, Mackinnon set off from Australia on the obligatory see-the-world trip that most young Australians do. His ambition in Scotland was to find the mythic ’well at the world’s end’ and this book begins with his adventures in getting there as a penniless – guileless – young man. On the way he met up with a truly ghastly female called Pixie who relieved him of much of his money but he pressed on regardless to fulfil his dream of bathing in the pool which confers eternal youth. Alas, it turned out he should have drunk it, not swum in it, and he got a beastly cold for his trouble. Undeterred by this, he has been bitten by the travel adventure bug!
To see the rest of this review please visit
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...
October 10, 2018
the well at the world’s end takes you on an exciting journey through many different countries. each one travelled to without planes. it’s an exciting book with many unexpected turns and non-planned travelling. it’s extremely descriptive and makes you want to read on and on.I rate this fabulous book 10/10
December 26, 2013
Having previously enjoyed The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow I was not sure that Mackinnon could better it, but he certainly has. In his second book, incidentally set earlier than Jack de Crow, Mackinnon sets off on a pilgrimage to Iona, where he had previously bathed in, not drunk, the waters from the Well of Eternal Youth. Attempting to rectify this error, he departs from New Zealand in a journey that does not involve the impersonal comfort and speed of flying, but instead is a series of ship, yacht, train and truck rides. With the resilience of the young and good-at-heart he gets himself in and out of trouble the whole way. Torn between wanting to be part of such a trip, and secure in the knowledge that I would not have the guts, I have loved every minute.
Mackinnon, an English teacher and writer, displays a love and knowledge of literature that leaves me in awe. As an English teacher myself, I can only wish that I could draw upon my reading with such ease. The sprinkling of literary references, poetry and Mary Stewart take what is otherwise a travel journal, albeit an entertaining journal, to the level of great literature.
Mackinnon, an English teacher and writer, displays a love and knowledge of literature that leaves me in awe. As an English teacher myself, I can only wish that I could draw upon my reading with such ease. The sprinkling of literary references, poetry and Mary Stewart take what is otherwise a travel journal, albeit an entertaining journal, to the level of great literature.
April 28, 2012
Thoroughly enjoyable! I am still left wondering why he had to START his trip from New Zealand instead of Australia, (and wondering why the editors never picked up that minor detail either). Also slightly annoyed with the ending of the trip. But glad it's not your usual travel book that everyone seems to write these days where they fall in love with somebody, or some type of food, or foreign religion that gives them a new (and obvious) revalation to their life. This book was filled with PURE adventure and I cannot think of one person I wouldn't recommend this book to. It's too much fun that you don't want to put it down and will make you think about Komodo Dragons or Jails in China. I hope more people get to read this book as I would love for it to become a best seller. An intelligent, yet relaxing read!
February 7, 2017
Interesting
The tale of his travels is certainly lively, much of it a bit hard to swallow, but there is a frantic feel to it that makes it something of a disjointed read.
The tale of his travels is certainly lively, much of it a bit hard to swallow, but there is a frantic feel to it that makes it something of a disjointed read.
April 3, 2015
At the age of 27, A. J. ‘Sandy’ Mackinnon throws in his respectable job as a schoolteacher and sets off on a pilgrimage to drink from the Well of Eternal Youth. In compliance with ancient legend, he must travel only by land or sea. Given that he is beginning in New Zealand and his goal is a remote Scottish island, this is no easy task. The Well at the World’s End is the story of Mackinnon’s miraculous journey across twelve time zones – the miracle being that he lived to tell the tale at all.
Now in his 40s, the author is looking back at events that occurred in 1990. He heads into dangerous seas aboard yachts skippered by suspicious characters. He enters unfriendly countries without a visa, more than once. He persistently fails to carry drinking water or food. He starts freezing winter journeys at 5pm. He urges reluctant yachties to leave him behind on a remote beach, assuring them that his friends are not far away… and as a result is forced to spend the night standing neck-deep in the ocean while ravenous komodo dragons patrol the shoreline.
On various occasions, Mackinnon is interrogated, threatened and imprisoned. He comes within a whisker of being drowned, eaten, shot – or even accidentally married. But don’t pick up this book expecting to read the reckless adventures of a youthful boofhead. This author is a gentle and spiritual soul, who gets himself into scrapes out of not bravado but innocence. He meanders through life with the dreamy impracticality of the poet. He sticks his hand into the jaws of reality expecting a kiss, but gets bitten again and again.
One of the strengths of the book is Mackinnon’s courage in revealing his own foolishness. Occasionally it gets annoying just how constantly he fails to learn, but it is mostly endearing. He also plays it up, knowing that his reader can see what’s coming even though his youthful self did not. At times The Well at the World’s End is the literary equivalent of watching a B grade horror movie and wanting to shout, ‘Don’t open that door!’
While hitchhiking in New Zealand, Mackinnon prattles on about how awful the tourist traps of Rotorua are, only to find that his driver owns a souvenir shop, in Rotorua. His lift ends abruptly at the foot of a volcano in the middle of nowhere. After hours of climbing without water, he sees lakes in the distance.
The day was blindingly hot and I was parched, so I turned that way with considerable eagerness. My route took me across a lunar landscape of bare twisted rock and finally to the tarns, which a sign declared were the Emerald Lakes. Any thoughts of a cooling dip or even a drink faded instantly. They were green in colour: a shiny, serpentine green, the sort of colour you associate with Listerine, or the stuff they spray people down with after nuclear accidents. (29)
Later, after a blundering journey through forbidden and dangerous territories of Laos, he ends up imprisoned in the back blocks of China. Thankfully, his guards speak English, but their often comical incompetence reminds him of Laurel and Hardy.
After a night in the cell, my two policemen came to fetch me off to headquarters and spent the next three days interrogating me. This didn’t exactly involve being beaten with bamboo rods but at times it was frightening, more because of their unpredictability and strange hopelessness than anything else. I spent much of the time wondering if I had wandered into a surreal sketch penned as a co-operative effort by Kafka and the man who wrote Dad’s Army. (210)
The humour of this book caught me by surprise. Half of it stems from the author’s wry assessment of his own foibles, and the rest from an ability to see the ridiculousness of the myriad awkward situations that confront a traveller. A. J. Mackinnon is funny in a whimsical style, without vulgarity: Bill Bryson meets Tolkien.
Mackinnon lost my good opinion for a while after dismissing Queensland, my beloved home state, in a few terse paragraphs about pollution and animal cruelty. He even resurrected that old chestnut about Queensland being the repository of all the nation’s rednecks. This seemed especially rich coming from someone who hails from Adelaide, the Serial Killer Capital of Australia. But now that I’ve got that out of my system, I have to admit this is exactly what we pay travel writers for: to have opinions. Often we enjoy their acerbic comments about someone else’s special place, but we don’t want them to criticise our own territory.
Mackinnon really can write. He has a gift for description that hits its target with a resounding slap. Standing too close to a mighty waterfall is like being ‘mugged by a gang of rainbows’ (31). He waits in frustration for a sailing date from a skipper who has ‘all the sense of urgency of a Zen oyster’ (62). The sound coming from a truckful of ducks is ‘the sort of croaking gibble-gabble you hear at a crowded cocktail party, but almost deafening in its volume’ (155). With a cyclone in the offing, huge ocean waves are ‘wrangling beneath the keel like pit bulls in a sack’ (83). An Atlantic storm flings raindrops at a window ‘like handfuls of wet gravel’ (8).
The author begins each chapter with an obscure literary quote, makes constant references to fantasy fiction, and frequently uses sentence constructions that might sound pompous if chunks are taken out of their context. For all this, I never felt alienated. Mackinnon is so happy to make fun of his own quirks and failings that he manages not to sound pretentious. He clearly loves animals, nature, art and music, and it doesn’t really occur to him that other people may not. He lives in his own little world, but swings the door to it open wide and invites the reader in.
Mackinnon’s friend Newton, a tall and gangly man who looks ‘like a dishevelled elk’ (286) joins him for the final stages of the odyssey, from Egypt to London. And here the author discovers, as many a travel writer before him has done, that there’s a reason most travel writers travel alone.
(T)here was now an eye-witness to all the improbability, all the magic, all the adventure of the trip. And a Gorgon eye at that. An eye that, falling on the airy spinnings of these pages, on the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of my web-weaving, would wither them to dry dust and hard fact. Someone, in short, who could say in five years’ time, ‘Yes, well. Now let me tell you how it really happened.’ I was going to have to kill him. (254)
Mackinnon doesn’t in fact kill Newton, but for a time, despite the author’s consciousness of this very problem, Newton kills the story just a little. The escapades are just as foolish, the scenery as beautifully described, the locals as charming or as crazy, and yet somehow a little of the colour leaches out of the tale during the Newton chapters. It’s still an interesting book, but for a while it stops being exceptional. Thankfully, The Well at the World’s End regains its momentum towards the end, and finishes in style.
Mackinnon may not always seem to be entirely of this planet, but an incident in New Caledonia shows he knows what life on Earth is like. He is served a disappointing meal of steak and chips, ‘accompanied by two yards of dry French bread that had the texture of asbestos’ (79). The churlish waiter refuses him butter.
The sort of grubby temper I found myself in sitting there in that little bistro is in fact the natural state of the traveller – tea not made how you like it, insecure about the exchange rate, feeling ripped off and sweaty from lugging around an overstuffed rucksack and desperately hoping to meet someone cleanish and relatively sane to talk to. (79)
Yes, Sandy, that’s exactly how we feel. But we come home with a collection of boring photos and some pointless souvenirs, whereas you return with a literary gem. I look forward to reading your next book.
(This review was first posted on M/C Reviews)
Now in his 40s, the author is looking back at events that occurred in 1990. He heads into dangerous seas aboard yachts skippered by suspicious characters. He enters unfriendly countries without a visa, more than once. He persistently fails to carry drinking water or food. He starts freezing winter journeys at 5pm. He urges reluctant yachties to leave him behind on a remote beach, assuring them that his friends are not far away… and as a result is forced to spend the night standing neck-deep in the ocean while ravenous komodo dragons patrol the shoreline.
On various occasions, Mackinnon is interrogated, threatened and imprisoned. He comes within a whisker of being drowned, eaten, shot – or even accidentally married. But don’t pick up this book expecting to read the reckless adventures of a youthful boofhead. This author is a gentle and spiritual soul, who gets himself into scrapes out of not bravado but innocence. He meanders through life with the dreamy impracticality of the poet. He sticks his hand into the jaws of reality expecting a kiss, but gets bitten again and again.
One of the strengths of the book is Mackinnon’s courage in revealing his own foolishness. Occasionally it gets annoying just how constantly he fails to learn, but it is mostly endearing. He also plays it up, knowing that his reader can see what’s coming even though his youthful self did not. At times The Well at the World’s End is the literary equivalent of watching a B grade horror movie and wanting to shout, ‘Don’t open that door!’
While hitchhiking in New Zealand, Mackinnon prattles on about how awful the tourist traps of Rotorua are, only to find that his driver owns a souvenir shop, in Rotorua. His lift ends abruptly at the foot of a volcano in the middle of nowhere. After hours of climbing without water, he sees lakes in the distance.
The day was blindingly hot and I was parched, so I turned that way with considerable eagerness. My route took me across a lunar landscape of bare twisted rock and finally to the tarns, which a sign declared were the Emerald Lakes. Any thoughts of a cooling dip or even a drink faded instantly. They were green in colour: a shiny, serpentine green, the sort of colour you associate with Listerine, or the stuff they spray people down with after nuclear accidents. (29)
Later, after a blundering journey through forbidden and dangerous territories of Laos, he ends up imprisoned in the back blocks of China. Thankfully, his guards speak English, but their often comical incompetence reminds him of Laurel and Hardy.
After a night in the cell, my two policemen came to fetch me off to headquarters and spent the next three days interrogating me. This didn’t exactly involve being beaten with bamboo rods but at times it was frightening, more because of their unpredictability and strange hopelessness than anything else. I spent much of the time wondering if I had wandered into a surreal sketch penned as a co-operative effort by Kafka and the man who wrote Dad’s Army. (210)
The humour of this book caught me by surprise. Half of it stems from the author’s wry assessment of his own foibles, and the rest from an ability to see the ridiculousness of the myriad awkward situations that confront a traveller. A. J. Mackinnon is funny in a whimsical style, without vulgarity: Bill Bryson meets Tolkien.
Mackinnon lost my good opinion for a while after dismissing Queensland, my beloved home state, in a few terse paragraphs about pollution and animal cruelty. He even resurrected that old chestnut about Queensland being the repository of all the nation’s rednecks. This seemed especially rich coming from someone who hails from Adelaide, the Serial Killer Capital of Australia. But now that I’ve got that out of my system, I have to admit this is exactly what we pay travel writers for: to have opinions. Often we enjoy their acerbic comments about someone else’s special place, but we don’t want them to criticise our own territory.
Mackinnon really can write. He has a gift for description that hits its target with a resounding slap. Standing too close to a mighty waterfall is like being ‘mugged by a gang of rainbows’ (31). He waits in frustration for a sailing date from a skipper who has ‘all the sense of urgency of a Zen oyster’ (62). The sound coming from a truckful of ducks is ‘the sort of croaking gibble-gabble you hear at a crowded cocktail party, but almost deafening in its volume’ (155). With a cyclone in the offing, huge ocean waves are ‘wrangling beneath the keel like pit bulls in a sack’ (83). An Atlantic storm flings raindrops at a window ‘like handfuls of wet gravel’ (8).
The author begins each chapter with an obscure literary quote, makes constant references to fantasy fiction, and frequently uses sentence constructions that might sound pompous if chunks are taken out of their context. For all this, I never felt alienated. Mackinnon is so happy to make fun of his own quirks and failings that he manages not to sound pretentious. He clearly loves animals, nature, art and music, and it doesn’t really occur to him that other people may not. He lives in his own little world, but swings the door to it open wide and invites the reader in.
Mackinnon’s friend Newton, a tall and gangly man who looks ‘like a dishevelled elk’ (286) joins him for the final stages of the odyssey, from Egypt to London. And here the author discovers, as many a travel writer before him has done, that there’s a reason most travel writers travel alone.
(T)here was now an eye-witness to all the improbability, all the magic, all the adventure of the trip. And a Gorgon eye at that. An eye that, falling on the airy spinnings of these pages, on the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of my web-weaving, would wither them to dry dust and hard fact. Someone, in short, who could say in five years’ time, ‘Yes, well. Now let me tell you how it really happened.’ I was going to have to kill him. (254)
Mackinnon doesn’t in fact kill Newton, but for a time, despite the author’s consciousness of this very problem, Newton kills the story just a little. The escapades are just as foolish, the scenery as beautifully described, the locals as charming or as crazy, and yet somehow a little of the colour leaches out of the tale during the Newton chapters. It’s still an interesting book, but for a while it stops being exceptional. Thankfully, The Well at the World’s End regains its momentum towards the end, and finishes in style.
Mackinnon may not always seem to be entirely of this planet, but an incident in New Caledonia shows he knows what life on Earth is like. He is served a disappointing meal of steak and chips, ‘accompanied by two yards of dry French bread that had the texture of asbestos’ (79). The churlish waiter refuses him butter.
The sort of grubby temper I found myself in sitting there in that little bistro is in fact the natural state of the traveller – tea not made how you like it, insecure about the exchange rate, feeling ripped off and sweaty from lugging around an overstuffed rucksack and desperately hoping to meet someone cleanish and relatively sane to talk to. (79)
Yes, Sandy, that’s exactly how we feel. But we come home with a collection of boring photos and some pointless souvenirs, whereas you return with a literary gem. I look forward to reading your next book.
(This review was first posted on M/C Reviews)
April 3, 2021
I wanted to like this book more than I did. The humour was there but the more I read, the more frustrated I became. The author’s style of travel was haphazard at best, and down right reckless at worst. The rate of risk taking was quite astounding and I pondered as to why this annoyed me as much as it did. Two words: male privilege.
Here was a young man, mostly traveling solo through some dicey areas, making bad decisions, ending up in potentially life threatening scrapes, and laughing it off.
Now, don’t get me wrong - this level of irresponsible travelling has led to countless men being killed, assaulted, vanishing, whatever... My point is the male privilege at play here is that he felt that he could travel the way he did because it didn’t occur to him that he could be sexually assaulted or killed - or it did but he thought it would be unlikely. Women - especially solo travellers - do not have this luxury.
I was especially annoyed towards the end of the book where he sings the virtues of hitchhiking with this romanticised, idealist attitude about it. Again, male privilege.
And a few other comments- yes Komodo dragons can and do swim! He got very lucky that night.
And as for the ship to India debacle - he showed his hand. He didn’t want to stay on it and get to the Netherlands. No, that would have been too easy. Setting himself the challenge of traveling to Iona without flying was one thing, but jumping ship just to make it all that much more harder for himself, was another. It was almost as if he was trying to gather more ‘wacky travel mishap stories’ for a book. Yeah, call me cynical...
Here was a young man, mostly traveling solo through some dicey areas, making bad decisions, ending up in potentially life threatening scrapes, and laughing it off.
Now, don’t get me wrong - this level of irresponsible travelling has led to countless men being killed, assaulted, vanishing, whatever... My point is the male privilege at play here is that he felt that he could travel the way he did because it didn’t occur to him that he could be sexually assaulted or killed - or it did but he thought it would be unlikely. Women - especially solo travellers - do not have this luxury.
I was especially annoyed towards the end of the book where he sings the virtues of hitchhiking with this romanticised, idealist attitude about it. Again, male privilege.
And a few other comments- yes Komodo dragons can and do swim! He got very lucky that night.
And as for the ship to India debacle - he showed his hand. He didn’t want to stay on it and get to the Netherlands. No, that would have been too easy. Setting himself the challenge of traveling to Iona without flying was one thing, but jumping ship just to make it all that much more harder for himself, was another. It was almost as if he was trying to gather more ‘wacky travel mishap stories’ for a book. Yeah, call me cynical...
November 1, 2022
This is an embellished story about a young man's journey halfway around the world (basically, from New Zealand to England) that he undertakes in a year without resorting to airplanes.
Along the way he has a few misadventures, primarily because of his own foolishness and stubborness, but he seems to always land on his feet, more or less.
It made for interesting reading because he walked/sailed/hitchhiked/rode along his own road, so to speak.
His sense of humor was....okay, if not a bit overdone.
For comparison, I'd prefer the travelogues of Richard Halliburton, with which this book is related. It is still well worth a read if you like travel off the beaten path.
Along the way he has a few misadventures, primarily because of his own foolishness and stubborness, but he seems to always land on his feet, more or less.
It made for interesting reading because he walked/sailed/hitchhiked/rode along his own road, so to speak.
His sense of humor was....okay, if not a bit overdone.
For comparison, I'd prefer the travelogues of Richard Halliburton, with which this book is related. It is still well worth a read if you like travel off the beaten path.
January 18, 2024
A Surprisingly Great Read
Thoroughly entertaining and interesting account of a young man's travels through Australasia, Egypt & Europe. Brought back thoughts of one's youth and dreams of travel and here is someone who actually did it and wrote a wonderful yarn describing in vivid details his own travels. Highly recommend for anyone looking to escape the everyday humdrum or soon to head off on their own adventures. Forget TripAdvisor and your mobile phone and travel where the adventure takes you.
Thoroughly entertaining and interesting account of a young man's travels through Australasia, Egypt & Europe. Brought back thoughts of one's youth and dreams of travel and here is someone who actually did it and wrote a wonderful yarn describing in vivid details his own travels. Highly recommend for anyone looking to escape the everyday humdrum or soon to head off on their own adventures. Forget TripAdvisor and your mobile phone and travel where the adventure takes you.
July 14, 2021
I enjoyed this book, but it wasn’t as good as Jack de Crow, that I read a couple of years ago. He certainly does some amazing things, and has the gift of the true traveller/ writer of engaging with people he meets, and going with the flow. The narrative is well written and literary in parts. He doesn’t big-note himself. So why was I disappointed? I think I was waiting for a Spark, that never quite came. But overall a good read.
March 18, 2024
Mackinnon is that guy who steps off the beaten path, breaks the rules, and writes about it with wild enthusiasm. You can't help envying his defiance of convention, though the world would be even more chaotic than it is if everyone figured rules were for somebody else. So go ahead, open the book, jump in and prepare to gasp, laugh, and be amazed. There's a heap of fun in this book, and readers are invited to re-live Mackinnon's adventures vicariously.
April 2, 2019
He’s a pretty witty guy, is Sandy. The sort of bloke who would make great company over a beer or two.
I enjoyed his yarn very much.
If he’s still at Timbertop, I should look out for him at the Merrijig Pub, might even shout him a beer!
3.5 stars.
I enjoyed his yarn very much.
If he’s still at Timbertop, I should look out for him at the Merrijig Pub, might even shout him a beer!
3.5 stars.
September 23, 2020
Excellent
This is no doubt one of the most entertaining travel stories I have ever read. Sandy, or whatever his name is, is poetic and charming. He writes like a old English gentleman.
Love it, is there anymore?
This is no doubt one of the most entertaining travel stories I have ever read. Sandy, or whatever his name is, is poetic and charming. He writes like a old English gentleman.
Love it, is there anymore?
February 22, 2025
This was like reading someone’s fairy story. The main character was well described as somewhat immature but ‘in love’ with an old story. The description of his emotional journey was good. However the story ended rather suddenly. Was it a prelude to a more detailed story?
Easy reading.
Easy reading.
October 28, 2017
3.5 Stars
November 28, 2018
An interesting read about exciting and crazy adventure traveling the world without flying. Funny and at times completely, unbelievably ridiculous!
July 10, 2019
Tedious.
March 3, 2020
A brilliant enjoyable read. Full of travel adventure and very funny.
February 1, 2024
Such a funny adventure novel, I laughed so many times reading this book
September 3, 2024
Very entertaining to read but I would hate to travel with this guy!
September 25, 2025
Really enjoyed this book. Laughed at the adventure’s that could have ended disastrously.
January 31, 2026
I had meant to purchase William Morris’ book by the same name, but found this book to be refreshing and delightful
February 14, 2021
Australian English teacher Sandy McKinnon decides he will travel to the mythical Well at the World’s End on the remote island Iona, to drink the water which confers eternal youth-as last time he was there he mistakenly swam in it instead. To make things trickier he decides he won’t fly as that would be cheating. Instead he makes his way by yacht, ferry, cart and train, leaving New Zealand in 1990 to arrive in the U.K. a year to the day later. Along the way are a series of beautiful descriptions, madcap adventures and mishaps made worse by his bumbling but refreshing naïveté. Sandy somehow manages to get stranded on a tropical island with Komodo dragons, mistakenly marry a Laotian princess and wind up in a Chinese jail. A humorous romp of a travelogue.
January 22, 2026
I absolutely loved listening to this book. What an adventure! The author is such a great story teller and the narrator did a fantastic job.
April 5, 2015
"The Well at the World's End" is the best sort of travel memoir: both funny and filled with adventure. It records the author's youthful year-long journey from New Zealand to Great Britain in 1990, during which he used every conveyance possible except an airplane. Along the way, he got himself into numerous scrapes, including sneaking across the border into China and getting caught. In each case, he talked, joked or performed amateur magic tricks to get out of trouble, leaving his fellow travelers (and the reader) smiling.
I've read plenty of travel memoirs, and few manage to combine lyrical writing with good humor and real adventure as well as this one does. In the best heroic tradition, the narrator ends his story right where he began, but he is a different person at the end of the journey; or perhaps the same person, but wiser for having traveled (as we all hope we would be).
Author A. J. Mackinnon is an Australian, and has that distinctive Aussie charm and sense of humor. Charm and humor are essential qualities in a traveler — or a travel memoir. Because of them, "The Well at the End of the World" is one of the best travel memoirs I've read. Mackinnon tells stories about places I've never seen and things I could never imagine doing, in a manner that makes it feel as if I've been there myself and had the courage to do the amazing things he did.
I've read plenty of travel memoirs, and few manage to combine lyrical writing with good humor and real adventure as well as this one does. In the best heroic tradition, the narrator ends his story right where he began, but he is a different person at the end of the journey; or perhaps the same person, but wiser for having traveled (as we all hope we would be).
Author A. J. Mackinnon is an Australian, and has that distinctive Aussie charm and sense of humor. Charm and humor are essential qualities in a traveler — or a travel memoir. Because of them, "The Well at the End of the World" is one of the best travel memoirs I've read. Mackinnon tells stories about places I've never seen and things I could never imagine doing, in a manner that makes it feel as if I've been there myself and had the courage to do the amazing things he did.
February 27, 2015
Having revelled in the author's company during our Unlikely Voyage in Jack de Crow, I was up for any adventure as I accompanied MacKinnon in this later book on his long 1990 march/sail from South Australia to England.
We were off to a slow start in New Zealand but readers new to MacKinnon can be assured that the pace picks up at Darwin where our narrator and two other innocents are subjected to the whims of a psychopathic yachtowner as they cruise along the wild, crocodile infested coastal waters of the Kimberleys. More thrills when we were stranded on Komodo (well, not so much on the strand as in neck-deep water just off the strand on which the 12 foot dragons were lumbering around ravening for flesh). Sigh. There were times when I just wanted to smack some common sense into Mr MacKinnon.
But all was not terrors, there were also longueurs, annoyances and delights - the whole narrated with literate flair, an artist's eye and self-deprecating humour. As to the delights, I think anyone would be charmed by the author's description of and experiences in Laos - still a little-known remote mountain paradise full of elephants, tigers and unexploded cluster bombs, dropped during the Vietnam conflict.
And so entertainingly on and on and on for a year and a day till we are back at The Well at the World's End on the Hebridean island of Iona, where the book began.
We were off to a slow start in New Zealand but readers new to MacKinnon can be assured that the pace picks up at Darwin where our narrator and two other innocents are subjected to the whims of a psychopathic yachtowner as they cruise along the wild, crocodile infested coastal waters of the Kimberleys. More thrills when we were stranded on Komodo (well, not so much on the strand as in neck-deep water just off the strand on which the 12 foot dragons were lumbering around ravening for flesh). Sigh. There were times when I just wanted to smack some common sense into Mr MacKinnon.
But all was not terrors, there were also longueurs, annoyances and delights - the whole narrated with literate flair, an artist's eye and self-deprecating humour. As to the delights, I think anyone would be charmed by the author's description of and experiences in Laos - still a little-known remote mountain paradise full of elephants, tigers and unexploded cluster bombs, dropped during the Vietnam conflict.
And so entertainingly on and on and on for a year and a day till we are back at The Well at the World's End on the Hebridean island of Iona, where the book began.
November 13, 2017
To be quite blunt I bought this book thinking it was another book of the same name. I was expecting an over 150 year old fantasy novel, and instead got a memoir. Oh well!
This is the memoir of an English Teacher, in his adventures travelling on foot from Australia to England. This is a memoir, but I’m 95% certain that this book contains at least one or two embellishments. He sails from Australia, to Laos, travels across China, until he gets to Venice and then finally England. In the book he confronts Komodo Dragons, barely escapes bus crashes, gets lost in Greece and more. He gives marriage counseling to a travelling couple, travels to ‘uncivilized’ nations in Asia and attempts to survive without money or resources.
For the rest of my review, click here: https://scribbler.john-mendez.com/2017/08/29/the-well-at-worlds-end-one-mans-epic-cross-continental-quest-for-the-fountain-of-youth-book-review/
This is the memoir of an English Teacher, in his adventures travelling on foot from Australia to England. This is a memoir, but I’m 95% certain that this book contains at least one or two embellishments. He sails from Australia, to Laos, travels across China, until he gets to Venice and then finally England. In the book he confronts Komodo Dragons, barely escapes bus crashes, gets lost in Greece and more. He gives marriage counseling to a travelling couple, travels to ‘uncivilized’ nations in Asia and attempts to survive without money or resources.
For the rest of my review, click here: https://scribbler.john-mendez.com/2017/08/29/the-well-at-worlds-end-one-mans-epic-cross-continental-quest-for-the-fountain-of-youth-book-review/
June 10, 2012
This is an enchanting travelogue and real-life adventure story. Sandy MacKinnon hails from Australia, and it is his wit, descriptive powers, and emphatically British tone that make this book so special. As he travels around the world from Australia to Scotland by any form of transportation but airplane, (boat, train, bus, legs) we are right there with him. His experiences trying to kill a catfish, get out of Laos into China, and countless other wild adventures, including a round with the Laurel and Hardy of the Chinese police world, are very memorable. And all the classical references are marvelous, adding depth and a literary flavor to his amazing recountings.
January 9, 2017
I love Mackinnon's books (both of them). In this book he tells a tale of overland travel from Australia to Iona off the coast of England to their "Fountain of Youth". The best part of Mackinnon's writing is his style. Mackinnon knows how to turn a phrase. Mackinnon is the opposite of Theroux. While Theroux writes as a grumpy old man, Mackinnon writes with the exuberance of youth. His idea of travel seems to be, "I probably shouldn't do this, but what the Hell!". Very rarely do I laugh out loud while reading, but there was one episode where I was laughing so hard I had to put the book down to compose myself! Recommended!
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