After a 15-year career as a news reporter and editor, Hong Kong Permanent Resident Brice Minnigh finally left the daily grind in 2005 to pursue his biggest passion – adventure-travel writing and photography – unfettered by the stress and distraction of hourly news deadlines. Having travelled extensively throughout Asia and the Soviet successor states, he’s fallen in love with the vast, empty spaces of Central Asia and Northwest China, and is known to spend months on end cycling through high-altitude deserts on a lightly-loaded mountain bike, dodging xenophobic public security officers and bribing his way across remote mountain borders with cigarettes and spare cash.

Ever since 1995, when China’s Xinhua News Agency recognized him and his longtime expedition cycling partner as the first foreigners to cycle the entire length of the country’s Silk Road – including a long-neglected and sand-covered branch along the southern fringe of the Taklimakan Desert – unsupported extreme travel has become a mounting obsession that has taken him to far-flung corners of places such as Tibet, Kyrgyzstan, Kamchatka and the high Arctic (where he man-hauled from the 89th parallel to the geographic North Pole and back to the 89th, raising US$19,000 to buy surgical equipment for an Orbis eye-care centre in a poor part of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province). His articles and photographs on these and other expeditions are regularly published in regional publications, especially adventure-travel magazine Action Asia and the South China Morning Post.

Having been to every province in mainland China, including the so-called “renegade province” of Taiwan, Brice was struck by the sheer beauty of the mountain-choked island and set out to dispel the myth that it is an industrial wasteland by co-authoring the First Edition of the Rough Guide to Taiwan – the only English-language guidebook with a detailed focus on the country’s amazing outdoor recreation opportunities, from climbing Northeast Asia’s highest peaks to surfing some of the region’s hottest breaks. After a year of travel in Taiwan, highlighted by climbs of its tallest mountains and the discovery of several secluded surf spots, he hopes his practical coverage and photographs will entice travellers to explore what he considers Asia’s most underrated tourist destination.

In between extended trips, Brice has funded his hobbies by working as a reporter and editor for newspapers, magazines and wire services in Hong Kong, mainland China, Russia, Lithuania and the US. His most recent day job was as Asia-Pacific Bureau Chief of basis point, a Reuters-owned financial news service based in Hong Kong, where he managed an 11-strong team of reporters and analysts for three years. His early commitment to journalism and academia led him to complete a US Fulbright Fellowship in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1996, when he conducted research on the newly-independent country’s fledgling free press.

Brice earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and philosophy from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee of the US, and has also studied at the Moscow State University School of Journalism. He speaks Mandarin Chinese and Russian fluently and is conversational in Cantonese and Spanish. Brice's website is www.altunshan.com.