A Dozen Dirty Dumplings

A new memoir about travelling across Asia in the 1980s.

About A Dozen Dirty Dumplings

In the early 1980s – long before smartphones, budget flights, or the soothing certainty that Google Maps will always find a way – Chris Price set off to cross Asia the slow way. He had a backpack, a half-functioning compass, and a stack of honest but occasionally unhinged diary entries. What he did not have was a plan, reliable transport, or much understanding of what the next thirteen countries had in store for him. He did not use guidebooks, only maps, and he could not understand the Chinese one.

The journey that followed veered wildly between wonder and idiocy. One week he was swimming in the Ganges under a sky thick with incense and diesel fumes; the next he was hitchhiking with the People’s Liberation Army, trying to decide whether the soldiers were amused by him or simply taking inventory of his organs. He shared lunch with tribal elders in the North-West Frontier, all armed with AKs and Mausers—which, in retrospect, felt like both an honour and a clerical error. In Tibet, he ate rancid butter for breakfast with nomads who lived at altitudes that made his bowels draft resignation letters. And in between these moments were countless bus rides held together by rust, string, and blind faith, along with guesthouses whose plumbing posed existential questions.

A Dozen Dirty Dumplings is not nostalgic for “the old days” of travel; if anything, it asks why anyone survived them. Yet amid the heat, dust, border guards, intestinal mutinies, and questionable decisions, Chris kept stumbling into moments of quiet humanity: a shared cigarette on a rooftop in Lahore, unexpected kindness from strangers in remote Burma, the hush of desert before dawn, friendships that lasted just long enough to matter.

Drawn directly from the diaries he kept on the road—and left intentionally raw around the edges—the book captures the thrill and terror of independence, the stupidity that accompanies youth, and the peculiar clarity that only arrives decades later. It is by turns funny, bleak, reflective, and sharply observed: a record of a world that has since been paved over, polished, and algorithmically “recommended.”

This is travel writing from before travel became a product. No filters, no curated sunsets, no safety net. Just movement, misjudgement, and the strange, stubborn beauty found in between. Chris’s Shadow Line.

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About the author

Chris Price is a middle-class Brit who, at 67, is still mildly surprised to be here. Before crossing Asia in the early 1980s, he spent eighteen unpredictable months travelling through Africa — an education in improvisation, heat, gorillas and guerrillas, and situations best not explained to close relatives.

The Asian journey that followed, undertaken with a backpack and handwritten diaries, became the basis for A Dozen Dirty Dumplings and his earlier book, We Don’t Shoot Khawajas. Both draw on encounters with tribal elders, armed men, border officials, and strangers whose kindness often outweighed their judgement, and smiling kids everywhere.

In later life, Chris endured a long stint in banking to pay the school fees, before escaping to own and run a small hotel in rural Japan — an experience best described as Fawlty Towers of the Orient. He now describes himself as a travel bum and writer and has his eyes on the Gringo trail.