Travel Adventure Writing

What would you do if you're given a €20 note in Greece with an email address scribbled on it: Spend it, slip the suspect counterfeit bill into an enemy’s birthday card, or send an email, hoping it will lead to you finding everlasting love? Brad, a hopeless romantic, chose the latter. Two years later, his love life remains a disaster and his career is misfiring. As he’s about to walk Spain’s fabled Camino de Santiago to ponder some profound life changes, Brad receives a reply.

BESTSELLER travelogue mixes it up on the Asian Trail in a voice that's by turns personal, passionate and ohhhh so very soulful. "So I get up at dawn and marvel at fog burning off into mist tumbling down like the finest mosquito netting of silk. The hills beyond the rivers' confluence, like shoulders of a woman undressing, the way the misty shroud lifts off feminine curves, higher and higher ... I tingle all over, feeling there on Borneo the dream tug of Joseph Conrad's fiction, notably Lord Jim." By turns literarily pathbreaking and intimate, this smorgasbord of travel essays scales down ...

Richard Henry Dana called this book a "a voice from the sea". It had an influence on both Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville, both of whom sang its praises. Dana was a law student at Harvard College who decided, in 1834, to take a break from his studies in order to experience the "real world" by signing on as a common sailor for a two year voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to California. He kept a journal which he turned into a book after the voyage.

John Marshall had read about the growth of voluntourism, and frankly, it was the only kind of extended trip he could afford. He'd heard that some peoples' lives were changed by a week of overseas service - what might half a year accomplish for his family? His wife, Traca, was all in favor of it; his kids, especially his 14-year-old daughter, were strongly opposed. Wide-Open World is the totally engaging, bluntly honest story of the Marshall family's life-changing adventure.

The audio edition of On the Grand Trunk Road is finally available, revised and updated with new material. Focusing on Coll's journeys in conflict-ridden India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan as a bureau chief for The Washington Post, On the Grand Trunk Road reveals a little-seen area of the world where violence, corruption, and greed have had devastating effects on South Asians from all walks of life.

No Baggage is a memoir that will resonate with adventurers and homebodies alike - it's at once a romance, a travelogue, and a bright, modern take on the age-old questions: How do you find the courage to explore beyond your comfort zone? Can you love someone without the need for commitment or any expectations for the future?

When Jamie Maslin decides to hitchhike the entire length of the Silk Road, he decides to travel first and plan later. Then, unexpectedly stranded in Iran - a country he's only read about in newspapers - he wonders whether he'll make it out alive. After crossing the border on foot from Turkey, Maslin finds himself suddenly plunged into the subversive, contradictory world of Iranian subculture, where he is embraced by locals who are happy to show him the true Iran as they see it....

Raised in the extreme religious cult called the Children of God, Juliana Buhring was frequently punished for being a rebel and finally broke away. Her soul mate was an explorer seeking the source of unmapped rivers in Africa. When he was killed by a crocodile, her world went dark. To escape paralyzing grief, Buhring set herself a goal. Never having seriously ridden a bike, she set out to ride one around the world.

Charley's passion for travel and adventure continues in his new challenge - By Any Means. Travelling from his home town in Co Wicklow all the way to Sydney, he will use any means he can to reach his destination, via transport as diverse as steam train, horse, boat, kayak, truck, and tuk-tuk. And of course his beloved motorbike!

Acclaimed travel writer Jonathan Raban invites us aboard his boat, a floating cottage cluttered with books, curling manuscripts, and dead ballpoint pens. He's about to sail alone from Seattle to the Alaskan Panhandle, following an ancient sea route rich in history, riddles, and whirlpools. It's the perfect setting for Raban's prodigious intellect, eloquence, and eye for detail.

From London to New York, Ewan and Charley chased their shadows through Europe, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia, across the Pacific to Alaska, then down through Canada and America. But as the miles slipped beneath the tyres of their big BMWs, their troubles started. Exhaustion, injury and accidents tested their strength. Treacherous roads, unpredictable weather and turbulent politics challenged their stamina.

Early on in his life, Matt craved a return to nature. When he became an adult, he set aside his comfortable urban life and lived entirely off the land. In this riveting narrative that brings together epic adventure and spiritual quest, he shows us what extraordinary things the human body is capable of when pushed to its limits. He learns the secrets of the Tarahumara Indians, which help him run the 1,600-mile Pacific Crest Trail in just 58 days and endure temperature swings of 100 degrees.

In September 1870, Truman Everts was separated from one of the first exploratory parties in what is now Yellowstone National Park. With little food, equipment, or cold-weather clothing, Everts spent more than a month wandering the wilderness before two mountaineers found him alive: frostbitten, scalded, and delirious. Nobody else has been lost so long in Yellowstone and survived.

This beautiful literary collection explores the spectacular natural features of Yosemite through the eyes of some of the most extraordinarily talented writers. In 1851, Lafayette Bunnell chronicled his travels with the Mariposa Battalion, the first non-natives to visit Yosemite Valley. Following in his footsteps, Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Clarence King, Frederick Law Olmsted, Joaquin Miller, and Horace Greeley made their pilgrimages and were moved to recount their observations. Included here as well is the work of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club.

In this captivating book from one of the most influential geochemists in the field, Tamsin Mather takes us along on her globe-spanning excursions from Nicaragua to Hawaii, Santorini to Ethiopia and beyond. With warmth and lyricism, she explores the cultural roles volcanoes play throughout history, and the growing and evolving science behind their formation and eruptions.

After Paul Stutzman finished hiking the Appalachian Trail, he found himself longing for another challenge, another adventure. Trading his hiking boots for a bicycle, Paul set off to discover more of America. Starting at Neah Bay, Washington, and ending at Key West, Florida, Paul traversed the 5,000 mile distance between the two farthest points in the contiguous United States.

In 2001, martial arts-trained biker Glen Heggstad began a journey from California to the tip of South America on his motorcycle and made it as far as Colombia, where he was kidnapped by local rebels and held captive. Undeterred by more than a month of traumatic incarceration, the 'Striking Viking' finished his trip after being released. Three years later he set out into the world on his bike again, this time searching for truth on his own terms in a world that had become strangled by a climate of fear.

For years, British journalist Cash Peters trekked around Europe and America visiting some of the tackiest attractions in the world for his hugely popular public-radio series, The Bad Taste Tours. But a guy can only take so much. Now, as Peters prepares to leave his travel-reporting days behind forever, he takes us along on some of the more ridiculous journeys and adventures of his career.

After years of watching Kenyan athletes win the world's biggest races, Adharanand Finn set out to discover just what it was that made them so fast - and to see if he could keep up. Packing up his life he moved from Devon to Iten, in Kenya, to eat with, interview, sleep beside and - most importantly – run with, some of the greatest runners in the world. In the distance rests his dream, to join the best of the Kenyan athletes in an epic first marathon across the Kenyan plains.

At 35, Leslie Buck made an impulsive decision to put her personal life on hold to pursue her passion. Leaving behind a full life of friends, love, and professional security, she became the first American woman to learn pruning from one of the most storied landscaping companies in Kyoto. Cutting Back recounts Buck's bold journey and the revelations she has along the way.