Rum Shrinks Elephants is a series of travel stories. G M Spencer's account of his amateur exploration through forests up and down the mountains of Malaysia and Indonesia is told with humour and self-deprecation.

“Our benign efforts all add up, they accumulate and have force, even failure has effect.” Suk raises herself out of childhood poverty to become a trek guide in the forests of the kingdom of Thailand. She lives with her friends at LekNaruk Inc, a tiny eating place in the country town of Klong Graitin, and struggles to preserve her independence amidst a miscellany of acquaintances and visitors. Experiencing the full range of the human comedy, including hubris and violence, she has to...

"Kenya and Kilimanjaro were national parks with the additional and unusual advantage of visitors being allowed to walk through them. In the space of a few days, they could traverse big-game haunted natural forest, pass onto heathland and moorland studded with strange phallic vegetation; be baked by the sun, drenched in rain, chilblained in the snow and have difficulty in sleeping at night. With a little imagination it was possible to die of exposure or of pulmonary oedema or get lost ...