See more about Ted's latest book, The Girl with the Crooked Nose, at www.tedbotha.com. His novel, The Animal Lover, is available on Kindle. Ted is a writer whose work has been featured in such publications as The New York Times and Condé Nast Traveler, and he is the author of Apartheid in My Rucksack and Mongo Adventures in Trash. He grew up in South Africa, among other places, and while living in Cape Town he used to take part in open water swims despite having to share the waters with sharks. "I’ve also traveled a lot for work, and I always try to swim wherever I am, which leads to very odd situations. If there’s no pool — and you know what resort pools are like (usually swimmer-unfriendly) — I try to find a body of water nearby that I can use. In West Africa, this led to swimming in the mouth of a river near Grand Lahou and being stung by electric eels."



When he moved to New York and heard about the NYC Swim swims, he signed up as soon as he could. "Swim in the Hudson? Yeah! New York is such a careful city, you knew that if an organization had gotten permission to let people swim in the river, it had to be more than okay." He loved his first swim in the Hudson: "I couldn’t stop telling friends about it. On the one hand, I guess I wanted to shock them a bit, but on the other hand, I wanted to tell them how great it was. Warm and easy and great view all the way! Nothing can come close to that first swim in the Hudson, seeing the famous skyline from an angle few people can get. The most amazing thing was swimming in the shadow of the Intrepid. That was too cool for words. After all these years and after all the publicity that the Hudson clean-up has gotten, lots of people still don't know what's been going on. They still ask 'Do you bump into things? Have you seen any bodies floating around?' The whole concept is for them just so weird, while for me it couldn't be a more obvious place to swim."



You can read more about Ted and his adventures at www.tedbotha.com and www.theexpatconfessions.com.