The Blind Diaries - the story of Phil and Allie's travel around the world in 2007

THE BLIND DIARIES

10 years on - by Phil and Allie Dunnington

Phil is a widely-travelled yet still rather intolerant Englishman turning 60 (at the time!). Allie is his thirty-something German second wife. He is a bon-vivant whose career in aviation ended up in professional ballooning, whilst she narrowly avoided becoming a nun after an academic career in Oriental languages. They each separately drew up a list of ten places in the world they would most like to experience. Seven of these locations were common to both lists.  

The couple’s own backgrounds and thought processes differ widely, yet the cultures they sample vary from Kim Jung Il’s neo-Stalinist North Korea to New Zealand’s Antipodean parliamentary democracy and Namibia’s post-Apartheid struggle with poverty and crime.

Can they share the rich span of experiences or will these divide the couple? Do their separately recorded memories reveal a transparent honesty or a fundamentally different approach to life?

Phil and Allie wrote daily about what they saw and who they met – the good, bad and awful of 14 countries - without once revealing the content of their diaries to each other. The accompanying photographic record helps illustrate some of their experiences and illuminate their emotions and reactions.

Such a complex combination of personalities has rarely been observed in so much detail.This is the story of their four month journey together around the world covering over 50,000km and all six inhabited continents.