The veteran river rafting guide-turned film industry operative, who’s called Queenstown home since 2000, has penned a deeply personal account about his 60,000km journey through 40 countries in 2013 and 2014.
First Pub on the Right, subtitled ‘A wife-changing motorcycle adventure from Cork to Cape Town’, is the 53-year-old’s account of how an idea in a pub led to him and his wife setting out from the Irish city of Cork on two motorbikes.
After their shock split in Israel, he considered abandoning the trip before deciding to carry on alone, Anderson says.
"I decided it would distract myself from the grief, so I plunged headlong into whatever the road had to offer."
The book details "a physical journey but also an emotional one ... I went to some pretty dark places".
Fast-forward to 2020 in Costa Rica, when Anderson got talking about the journey to a rafting customer, who happened to be a book editor in the United States.
She showed interest in the blog and the personal journal he’d written throughout the trip.
"I showed her some of the writing and she really liked it."
However, it wasn’t until a six-month stint working in Antarctica in 2023-2024 that he found the time to knuckle down and write the story.
The result is a deeply personal account of how he was gradually pulled out of an emotional crisis by the kindness of the people he met along the way.
That experience, which continually shattered his misconceptions about different countries and cultures, helped him understand the "common thread that runs through humanity", he says.
"We all have much more in common that we believe."
Anderson will launch First Pub on the Right at The Workshop co-working space, 156 Glenda Dr, this Sunday at 4pm.
The book will be available to buy online and at local booksellers.
