Written by John Ridgway and published by Victor Gollancz in 1986 and Penguin in 1988 (OUT OF PRINT)

Road to Elizabeth chronicles John Ridgway’s most unlikely adventure. It started as a holiday journey in 1985, with his wife and 18-year-old daughter to a ‘Garden of Eden’ in the magnificent High Andes of Peru. They were hoping to visit Elvin Berg, who had saved John’s life during his Amazon exploit of fifteen years before, and to stay at the coffee grower’s idyllic hacienda in Osambre.

To reach Osambre (1,800m) you have to walk for five days from the end of a dirt road, crossing two snow-covered passes before descending into dense jungle. The Ridgway’s trained for a month, hardening themselves at altitude on the altiplano, before starting towards Osambre; they were prepared for a hard trek across some of the wildest and most beautiful terrain in the world, but not for what followed.

After crossing the Apurimac River, which nearly cost the life of a member of the group, they walked into a war between Maoist guerrillas of the so-called ‘Shining Path’ and government forces – their path lay through mountain regions where coca leaf is harvested in a deadly trade. Here they learned that Elvin Berg had been brutally murdered by the Shining Path on 2 May 1984.

Horrified by Berg’s death, anxious for their own safety and weakened by the hardships of the journey, Ridgway and his group set off on the long road home. Along the way, John caught a fever and they were forced to stop in a remote mountain village. Here they discovered Berg’s 6-year-old daughter Elizabeth: suddenly they realised that ‘everything had been leading to this end’.

Road to Elizabeth is more than a tough journey in extraordinary country, vividly described: the discovery of Elizabeth adds a dimension of sympathy and humane response to the tale, making it John Ridgway’s most heart-warming adventure.

John Ridgway has published eight previous books. In Amazon Journey (1972) he described his expedition to the Peruvian Andes and the meeting with Elvin Berg at Osambre, the Berg’s mountain farm.

Postscript 2003 by John Ridgway. The Peruvian saga became a major part of our lives for a further nine years after we found Isso in 1985. Time and again I returned to Accobamba, sometimes I went alone, sometimes with Marie Christine or Rebecca. And something of those times is told by Rebecca in her book Something Amazing.

Our last visit to was in 1994 and is included in Then we Sailed Away. Leaving the yacht in Andy Adamson’s safe hands in Valdivia, Marie Christine, Isso and I travelled up through Chile and Bolivia to Peru. Our aim was to reunite Isso with Leocadia, her natural mother. Of course, we were anxious lest Isso might choose to leave us and make her life with her family in Accobamba but happily for us she chose to return to Ardmore.

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