An exciting memoir of the adventures of investment banker turned adventurer Miles Morland—from the stock markets of London and New York to the backstreets of Baghdad.
Miles Morland is an adventurer. He was born in India to a naval father and a mother once described as the "most dangerous woman in India." His parents divorced and Miles followed his mother to Tehran, which they had to leave in a hurry after the Shah was first expelled, and on to Iraq, which they had to leave in a hurry after a revolution. These years were filled with desert journeys, riots, and adventures out of Kipling.
Having survived boarding school in England, Morland rowed in an Oxford crew that broke the boat race record and left Oxford to become a beach bum in Greece. Years followed "shouting down a phone" on Wall Street and London but got better when Miles left his job, bought a giant motorbike, and set off to discover Africa in 1990. He is credited with reinventing investing in Africa; he soon found himself the biggest foreign investor in most African markets.
Africa was interspersed with increasingly foolish solo motorbike trips, over the Andes in the tire-treads of Che Guevara, round South India, the nearest thing, he said, to assisted suicide, through southern Japan in a typhoon, and dodging ’roos in the Australian outback.
Epic in scope, keenly observed, and told with razor sharp wit, Cobra in the Bath is a hilarious and riveting account of a life lived to the fullest by a man in possession of an unassailable enthusiasm for life.