Harold Stephens

Biographies, short stories, travel and adventure books set in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific by writer extraordinaire, Harold Stephens, who has explored the South Pacific and Southeast Asia for forty years, writing 24 books about his exciting experiences and about those of others he has met.

The South Pacific and Southeast Asia travel and adventure is brought to you by Harold Stephens who has searched for Lost Cities of Southeast Asia, hunted for sunken treasures in Southeast Asia waters including locating Battleship HMS Repulse, fought Pirates of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, tracked Southeast Asian Big Foot, explored forgotten Caves of Southeast Asia, drove Around the World in a Jeep, bought Yachting to Southeast Asia aboard Schooner Third Sea that he sailed in the search for World War II Wrecks.

Harold Stephens brings us his accounts of adventure travel and exploration in 24 Southeast Asian adventure books and some 4,000 newspaper and magazine articles from Washington Post to Bangkok Post.

When Marco Polo in the 13th century declared Hangzhou the world's most beautiful city. He never went to Qingdao, but I imagine if he had, Qingdao might head that list. I thought about this as I stood at the end of Pagoda Pier and looked back at the city. But then when Marco Polo was in China, Qingdao was nothing more than a tiny fishing village. It was the Germans who changed all that when they took possession of the port in 1898. Then things began to happen. They built a marvelous resort town with a Teutonic influence and, in German style, they established a brewery which today produces some of the finest beer in Asia. They called their new town Tsingtao and the beer, naturally, Tsingtao Beer.

By Harold Stephens
Publication date: May 2007
ISBN 0-9786951-0-0
List Price: $14.95

You have read and enjoyed books by Harold Stephens, and now Wolfenden Publishers is proud to announce the publication of another book by Stephens -- TALES FROM THE PACIFIC RIM. Although this collection of short stories is fiction, Stephens felt he could better tell the truth about the social habits and traditions of the people of the Pacific Rim, from Tahiti across the vast Pacific to Southeast Asia. What happens when a man wants to buy an Asian wife or when an American woman wants to impose her ideas of liberation on an Asian woman? Educate an Asian servant girl and what are the results? What are the consequences when a top gun fighter pilot changes his mind about the war in Vietnam? Can a schoolteacher impose foreign concepts on kids of a different faith, and can a beachcomber find true love in Tahiti?

The answers to these questions and others can be found in this compelling book of short stories by an author who has lived most of his adult life in Asia and the Pacific.

Reader Paul Weissleder sent along the following comments after reading The Last Voyage, and we include them below with his permission:

I can see why there has been no shortage of praise for "The Last Voyage".

I can skip the words "amazing" and "wonderful" because I have had some similar travel experiences. What you have described is not fantasy but real life, as real as it can get. That's what makes it so great.

The book is deeply autobiographical but you are not the hero.

The real heroes are the people you befriended on your voyages, without whom you would not be as happy & successful as you are today.

The Bangkok Restaurant Reviews website re-launched this week.

Perceptive Travel is a new "web magazine written for independent travelers with open senses and open minds." The first issue is running my article Cruising Thailand's Chao Phraya River with Admiral Zheng He.

Originally appeared in the Bangkok Post

The Imperial Russian Ballet is coming to town in early November and Bangkok is beginning to buzz with ballet fever. What excitement. Not since the great ballet dancer Nijinsky performed at The Orient Hotel in Bangkok in 1911 has there been such enthusiasm. The company consists of 40 artists from the best ballet schools of Russia and they will dance Tchaikovsky's famous ballet The Nutcracker, the classic story about the little girl who is swept away to a magical dream world, and will include memorable music such as the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Waltz of the Flowers, the Russian Dance and the Decoration of the Christmas Tree March.

We can only imagine the drama that will take place at the Thailand Cultural Center during rehearsals before and during the two-day performances. I can see them now, warming up, practicing the pas de deux, doing their pirouettes and arabesques, the pas de chat, the port de bras and the most delightful of all dance steps to watch, and for dancers to perform, the emboitein in which the dancers jump, alternating legs moving forward.

It's wonderful, when the dancers are good, to watch them do leaps and bounds, spins and twirls. It was when I saw Maria Tallchief warming up behind stage that I fell in love with her. She was exquisite, divine, a living goddess, and she never even noticed me. It was the summer season when I danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. many years ago. Well, it wasn't the whole season, just part of it.

More than fifty years ago, right after the war in the Pacific ended, US Marines landed in China. Among the two divisions that landed was the 29th Marines, and I was with them, an ammo carrier in Fox Company machine gun platoon. We were told we were going to China to repatriate the Japanese forces that had occupied China for the past 18 years, to send them packing for home. Four years later, the Japanese were gone but the Marines were still there. We may have been there longer still had not General Chang Kai Chek and his Nationalist Army been defeated by Mao Tse-tung and his communist Red Army that came sweeping across China.

To answer your questions, Harold Stephens is currently working on two books at the same time. One is a collection of short stories called "The Man Who Wanted to Buy A Wife, and Other Tales from the Pacific Rim," and is near ready for publication. The other one which he has been working on for many years is "The Asian Woman." It's a book, he considers, that won't win him many favors.

What is he up to? Stephens never stops. He just returned to Bangkok—where he lives in a great old colonial house with a garden and a jungle of plants trees—from India and Nepal where he traced the footsteps of Lord Buddha. He was contemplating building a large boat for exploring the wild rivers of Asia, but has settled for an 18 foot dory (which he just completed) that can be transported overland, say from Bangkok through Cambodia to Vietnam to the mouth of the Mekong River. The same for Burma, he can load the dory aboard a freighter and ship it to Rangoon to explore the Irrawaddi. Other rivers are the Chao Phraya River in Thailand, The Pahang in Malaysia, the Rejang in Borneo and possibly the Sepik in New Guinea. The dory is fully equipped with even bunks for sleeping. We are sure a book will come out of his.

Schooner Third Sea, the topic of my book The Last Voyage, was the subject of an article in the Friday, January 28th, 2005 edition of The Olympian, a newspaper out of Olympia, Washington. I've included the story, written by reporter Barry Ginter, below. -- Harold Stephens

Sunken schooner may yet feel wind in its sails
Residents plan to raise Third Sea from depths of inlet