Showing titles in Travel & Tourism

Sunday Times top 10 best seller by the author of Walking the Himalayas, winner of the 2016 Edward Stanford Adventure Travel Book of the Year award.

Walking the Americas chronicles Levison Wood's 1,800 mile trek along the spine of the Americas, through eight countries, from Mexico to Colombia, experiencing some of the world's most diverse, beautiful and unpredictable places.

Danny Wallace was bored. Just to see what would happen, he placed a whimsical ad in a local London paper. It said, simply, 'Join Me'. Within a month, he was receiving letters and emails from teachers, mechanics, sales reps, vicars, schoolchildren and pensioners - all pledging allegiance to his cause. But no one knew what his cause was.

Growing up in the Canadian Rockies, the mountains have always been home for Jenny Tough. Travelling the world, she's always discovered commonalities with mountains—and mountain people. Her major project is to run solo and unsupported across a mountain range on every continent where indigenous mountain people live isolated from the outside, urban world. Running solo and unsupported comes with obvious logistical as well as physical challenges, but running is also a common language.

Environmental writer Laurie King and international best-selling author Miriam Lancewood present a collection of narrative non-fiction stories and poems on the human connection with nature.

This true-life wilderness survival epic recounts 17-year-old Alex Messenger's near-lethal encounter with a grizzly bear during a canoe trip in the Canadian tundra. The story follows Alex and his five companions as they paddle north through harrowing rapids and stunning terrain. Twenty-nine days into the trip, while out hiking alone, Alex is attacked by a barren-ground grizzly. Left for dead, he wakes to find that his summer adventure has become a struggle to stay alive.

A third memoir from the author of the huge international best sellers Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis. In Teacher Man, Frank McCourt reads his own account of his illustrious, amusing, and sometimes rather bumpy long years as an English teacher in the public high schools of New York City.

One of the most important and influential books of the past half-century, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tells the iconic story of a father and son's motorcycle trip across America in the 1960s.

Revised and updated, and with each page alive with facts, history and inspiration, Be More Japan unlocks the secrets behind modern Japanese living - whether you're eating sushi in London or enjoying the cherry blossoms in San Francisco. And if you're dreaming of a future trip to Japan, this book will get you closer to your destination before you've even departed.

Everything you want to know about France and more… in a free podcast. Janine Marsh, Editor of The Good Life France, award-winning travel writer and author of best-selling memoirs about life in France with her unruly chickens, dogs, cats, ducks and geese, quirky neighbours and the joys of renovation, and Olivier Jauffrit, the vintage French music expert at Radio Paris Chanson – have teamed up to make a podcast!

From Amsterdam to Cambodia, from Rome to Indonesia, from New Orleans to Libya, and from Detroit to Ko Pha-Ngan, Geoff Dyer finds himself both floundering about in a sea of grievances and finding moments of transcendental calm. This aberrant quest for peak experiences leads, ultimately, to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where, to quote Tarkovsky's Stalker, 'your most cherished desire will come true'.

"Epic" is a mountaineering term that evokes a sense of treacherous disaster. The climb that went wrong: fighting blinding snowstorms and horrific avalanches; days spent tentbound running low on food, water, and oxygen; surviving broken bones and shattered spirits. This program offers a collection of the most memorable accounts of legend-making expeditions to the world's most famous peaks, often in the worst possible conditions.

So, who is the jeep-jockey in the khaki uniform and the sweat-stained hat, this person you entrust your life to when you venture into the African wilderness? =Lloyd reveals some of the truths and tricks that ensure a dazzling safari experience, while also underscoring the fervour, foibles and frailties of safari guides. His stories interrogate the actions of the people he has worked with, laugh at some fondly held safari legends told as inviolate truths, and question many of the casual life assumptions of the safari guests in his care.

Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times's most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals.

Following on from the events in A Zoo in My Luggage, The Whispering Land sees Gerald Durrell and his wife Jacquie travel to Argentina to collect animals for their newly established zoo. With rare insight and unique charm, Durrell pulls the listener into the tropical landscape of Patagonia, where he witnesses magical moments with penguins, seals and ocelots, and encounters a hilarious cast of characters, including a swearing parrot and a belching guanaco.

Thinking on My Feet is an inspiring journal of walks divided into seasonal sections. Discover the joys and benefits of walking, encounters with the natural and urban world, with the familiar and strange, with animals, people and events. Kate charts her feelings and impressions throughout, capturing the perspectives that only a journey on foot allows. Find out what makes you curious, what makes something memorable.

Acclaimed travel writer Oliver Smith sets out to radically reframe our idea of ‘pilgrimage’ in Britain by retracing sacred travel made across time, from murmurs of ritual journeys in the depths of Ice Age to new pilgrimages of the 21st century. He embarks on an epic adventure across sacred British landscapes – climbing into remote sea caves, sleeping inside Neolithic tombs, scaling forgotten holy mountains and once marooning himself at sea.

At 28,251 feet, the world's second-tallest mountain, K2 thrusts skyward out of the Karakoram Range of northern Pakistan. Climbers regard it as the ultimate achievement in mountaineering, with good reason. Four times as deadly as Everest, K2 has claimed the lives of seventy-seven climbers since 1954. In August 2008 eleven climbers died in a single thirty-six-hour period on K2–the worst single-event tragedy in the mountain's history and the second-worst in the long chronicle of mountaineering in the Himalaya and Karakoram ranges.

Sara Wheeler visited Antarctica as a guest of America's National Science Foundation and soon after her arrival fell in love with the frozen landscape and it's harsh beauty. During her seven month stay the author travelled to the various national sectors, visited several national bases and experienced four seasons. The author has a reverence for the early explorer and visits many historic landmarks in her journey across Antartica.

In the heroic days of rail travel, you could dine on kippers and champagne aboard the Brighton Belle, smoke a postprandial cigar as the Golden Arrow approached Paris or be shaved by the Flying Scotsman's onboard barber. Everyone from schoolboys to socialites knew of these glamorous trains. Andrew Martin recreates famous train journeys by travelling aboard their nearest modern-day equivalents, describing the disappearance of the extravagance and luxury.

Written in 1831, Irving's dreamlike description of the Alhambra, the beautiful Moorish castle that defined the height of Moorish civilization, and the surrounding territory of Granada remains one of the best guidebooks to the region and one of the most entertaining travelogues ever written.