Peter Stanger

Born in Borneo, Peter Stanger is British. He lived in Egypt and India as a child, but was educated in England, graduating in music at Cambridge University (Gonville and Caius College). Throughout his music career, he has conducted many hundreds of performances of operas, operettas and musicals, one hundred of which were with Scottish Opera based in Glasgow, where he lived in the 1970s and 80s. During the past seventeen years he has traveled in 33 countries of the world, predominantly in Asia, Africa, Central and South America, as well as living in Canada and South Korea. The resultant 17,000 slide photographs contain portrayals of the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, Komodo and Flores, as well as Sabah and Sarawak in Borneo, and Mindanao in the Philippines. Other Asian lands explored and photographed include most areas of South Korea, as well as throughout China. His African travels have been in Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali, together with Morocco, Namibia and Kenya. At the start of the new millennium festivities, at 00.01 hours on 1st January 2000, he was under arrest in Timbuktu, being interrogated in the police station on a trumped-up charge. In South America, his Brazilian escapades included being a few feet from wild jacare (alligators) in the interior's Mato Grosso, then on a hammock-swinging local steamer down the Amazon from Manaus to Santarem, where in the rain-forest he swam in a placid river full of piranha, having been assured by the locals that the fish weren't in a man-eating mood. In the Andes, he tramped the Llanganuco-Cashapampa trail which climbs to 15,585 feet in central Peru, and descended into the devil-worshipped silver mines at Potosí in Bolivia. On a deserted stretch of the 4000-metre altiplano in winter, he survived a night outside without an insulating mat, with bottles bursting beside him in the fuel-freezing cold. Perhaps because of this, he later set off into the hot Ecuadorian rain-forest, and slept under fronds of palm. In other parts of the world, he swam in the Arctic Ocean in near winter at Prudhoe Bay (Alaska), climbed a high volcano in the center of New Zealand's North Island, and had stones thrown at him while being driven in a remote part of Turkey.