Alan Murphy took off for a six month stint around Europe and the Middle East after finishing a degree in Business Studies in 1992 in Western Australia. Four years later and after plenty of business-related temp work (that he found as exciting as long-distance bus journeys) he was back on home soil. He returned to studies in 1997 looking for a way to combine travel, writing and self-employment. After completing a Graduate Diploma in journalism at Murdoch University he offered his services to Lonely Planet as a trainee editor, graduating a year and a half later as an author. Alan currently lives in Melbourne and enjoys watching Australia flog the opposition in cricket, sniffing out new watering holes, and hopes one day to write a Good Pub guide - a project he began researching years ago. Alan updated the South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland chapters for Southern Africa and is currently researching Senegal and Mauritania for the next edition of Africa on a shoestring.