When Jim Richards left home to make his fortune in a gold rush, he had no language skills, no money and no idea. But when he found diamond-filled pot holes in the remote rivers of Guyana, his problems really began. Chasing gold and diamond rushes around the world, Richards worked with local miners in some of the maddest, baddest and most dangerous places on earth. His dramatic journey ranges from the piranha-infested rivers of South America to the blazing deserts of Australia, from the world's biggest mining scam in Indonesia to the war-torn jungles of Laos. To find the gold, first Jim had to find himself. He learned to dig deep and discover the resilience and fortitude needed to overcome isolation, disease, equipment disasters and gun-toting criminals to come out on top.

Amyr Klink, whose sailing exploits have made him a hero in Brazil, tells of his daring singlehanded circumnavigation below the Antarctic Convergence. Surfing the waves in his custom-built 50-foot "aluminum red truck," PARATII, Klink enjoys the quiet confidence that comes from proper planning, common-sense technology, and a lifelong fascination with the history of Southern Ocean sailing. A modern Moitessier, sailing before an Aerorig mast, Klink proves his seamanship handling tricky boat repairs while underway, navigating icebergs, negotiating gales and williwaws, and surfing gigantic waves.

After their fantastic trip round the world in 2004, fellow actors and bike fanatics Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman couldn't shake the travel bug. And after an inspirational UNICEF visit to Africa, they knew they had to go back and experience this extraordinary continent in more depth. And so they set off on their 15,000-mile journey with two new BMWs loaded up for the trip. Joining up with producer/directors Russ Malkin and David Alexanian and the Long Way Round team, their route took them from John O'Groats at the northernmost tip of Scotland to Cape Agulhas on the southernmost tip of South Africa. Riding through spectacular scenery, often in extreme temperatures, Ewan and Charley faced their hardest challenges yet. With their trademark humour and honesty they tell their story - the drama, the dangers and the sheer exhilaration of riding together again, through a continent filled with magic and wonder.

"Strange Roads is a small gem of travel literature in the tradition of works by John Van Dyke, Carl Lumholtz, Charles Lummus, Mary Austin, Edward Hoagland, and Bruce Chatwin. But for all its absorbing detail about topography, flora, and fauna, its keen observations of character, and its vivid re-creation of the sense of place, it is much more than a travel memoir. For on every page one senses the strength, character, and distinctive perspective of Mary del Villar herself. An uncommon woman by any standards, she seems all the more remarkable when one recalls the profoundly reactionary gender ideologies that prevailed in the postwar era in which she lived and wrote. Like other great female wanderers, she transcended the confining notions of woman her society would have imposed on her, living her life according to the dictates of her own intrepid spirit." -from the foreword by Susan Hardy Aiken The University of Arizona Press's Century Collection employs the latest in digital technology to make previously out-of-print books from our notable backlist available once again. Enriching historical and cultural experiences for readers, this collection offers these volumes unaltered from their original publication and in affordable digital or paperback formats.

Home to mythical kingdoms, wars and expeditions, and strange and magical beasts, the Himalayas have always loomed tall in our imagination. Overrun at different times by Buddhism, Taoism, shamanism, Islam and Christianity, they are a grand central station of the world's religions. They are also a plant hunter's paradise, a climber's challenge, and a traveller's dream. In his quest to explore the region's seismic history, Twigger seeks out the Nagas, who helped his grandfather build a camp for Allied soldiers near Imphal during the Second World War and takes the most scenic bike ride in the world from Lhasa to Kathmandu. The result is a sweeping, fascinating and surprising journey through the history of the world's greatest mountain range.

The story behind the best-selling book One Man’s Wilderness and how author Sam Keith and Dick Proenneke met and forged an everlasting friendship. “Sam, you know right well you don’t want to leave this country. Don’t give up on it. Me and you got to figure something out.� After serving as a US Marine during World War II and attending college on the GI Bill, Sam Keith decided to seek adventure in Alaska as a laborer on the Adak Navy base. There he befriended Dick Proenneke, whose shared love of the outdoors, hard work, and self-reliance quickly bonded an alliance between the two. Together they explored the wilds of South Central Alaska while working on the Navy base, hunting and fishing with friends and breathing in the great outdoors. Keith was ready to leave after three years of finding almost everything he sought—not realizing then how his fate was intrinsically tied to his friend’s and how it would lead to writing the best-selling book One Man’s Wilderness. Sam Keith passed away in 2003. But in 2013, his son-in-law and children’s book author/illustrator Brian Lies discovered in an archive box in their garage a book manuscript, originally written in 1974 after the publication of One Man’s Wilderness. First Wilderness is the story of Keith's own experiences, at times harrowing, funny, and fascinating. Along with the original manuscript are photos and excerpts from his journals, letters, and notebooks, woven in to create a compelling and poignant memoir of search and discovery. Foreword by Nick Jans, one of Alaska's foremost authors and photographers, and Afterword by Keith’s daughter Laurel Lies.

The unbelievable story of how one town truly prayed without ceasing In 1999, a small town on the south coast of England became the birthplace of the extraordinary, accidental, international movement known as 24-7 Prayer. Their inspiration was a seemingly chance visit by founder Pete Greig to Herrnhut in Germany, where the eighteenth-century Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf had initiated the Moravian prayer watch, which ran without ceasing for a hundred years. Five years later, Phil Anderson undertook an aerial road trip on a tiny four-seat airplane from England to Germany, a remarkable journey to uncover the history of Zinzendorf and the movement he led. Part history, part narrative, The Lord of the Ring takes readers on a fascinating journey back to the eighteenth-century Moravian renewal movement and their hundred-year prayer watch. Anderson retraces the steps of Zinzendorf, reconnects with his legacy, and seeks to apply it to life and faith in a new millennium. Learning from the past, readers will discover crucial signposts for grappling with the church's identity and calling as an authentic, relational, missional community.

The companion guide to the hysterical television show of the same name, in which Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant force their arrestingly simple pal Karl Pilkington on a global journey ""He'd have been happier in medieval times in a village where you didn't travel beyond the local community." --Stephen Merchant" A cult celebrity due to his role in "The Ricky Gervais Show," the most-downloaded podcast ever, Karl Pilkington has been accused of being a comic creation, so unburdened is he by complex thought--but that is truly just him. The trio's newest project mines Karl massive provinciality: put simply, Karl is not big on traveling. Given the choice, he'll go on vacation to Devon or Wales or, if pushed, eat English food on a package tour of the Mediterranean. So what happened when he was convinced by Gervais and Merchant to go on an epic adventure to see the Seven Wonders of the World? Does travel truly broaden the mind? Find out in Karl Pilkington's hilarious travel diaries.

Follow the call of the wild with these incredible true stories from an international group of nature lovers, nomads and adventurers. In these pages, you are invited to share the wisdom they gained on their wild journeys. You will walk across the Australian desert with American explorer Angela Maxwell; live with Hamza Yassin and a family of eagles in Scotland; survive for 10 years in an Australian forest with Gregory Smith; hunt in the wilderness with Miriam Lancewood in New Zealand; chart Karl Bushby's passage through the formidable Darien Gap; and set up a surf school for people of colour in California with David Malana. With beautiful illustrations, a foreword from explorer Belinda Kirk and contributions from leading poets, including David Whyte and Fatimah Asghar, this book will inspire you to get out of your comfort zone and connect to your wild, animal soul.

Laurie Charles finished her Ph.D., then took off to West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. Asked to create programs to help adolescent girls stay in school, she found herself enmeshed in the politics and cultural barriers that prevent these girls from creating a better life. But that was not all that was enmeshed. Charles found love, sexual fulfillment, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination, all of which further complexified her stated mission. Her candid assessment of life and work in Africa, the intimate relationships that gave hope to the possibility of change, the emotional and physical highs and lows that affected her ability to function, all become factors affecting her success in improving the lives of African girls. This eloquent narrative should be of interest both to those doing development work and to those interested in autoethnographic exploration of the self.

Robert Twigger, poet and travel author, was in search of a new way up England when he stumbled across the Great North Line. From Christchurch on the South Coast to Old Sarum to Stonehenge, to Avebury, to Notgrove barrow, to Meon Hill in the midlands, to Thor's Cave, to Arbor Low stone circle, to Mam Tor, to Ilkley in Yorkshire and its three stone circles and the Swastika Stone, to several forts and camps in Northumberland to Lindisfarne (plus about thirty more sites en route). A single dead straight line following 1 degree 50 West up Britain. No other north-south straight line goes through so many ancient sites of such significance. Was it just a suggestive coincidence or were they built intentionally? Twigger walks the line, which takes him through Birmingham, Halifax and Consett as well as Salisbury Plain, the Peak district, and the Yorkshire moors. With a planning schedule that focused more on reading about shamanism and beat poetry than hardening his feet up, he sets off ever hopeful. He wild-camps along the way, living like a homeless bum, with a heart that starts stifled but ends up soaring with the beauty of life. He sleeps in a prehistoric cave, falls into a river, crosses a 'suicide viaduct' and gets told off by a farmer's wife for trespassing; but in this simple life he finds woven gold. He walks with others and he walks alone, ever alert to the incongruities of the edgelands he is journeying through.

A revelatory collection of letters written by the author of The Broken Road. Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly gifted friend. The letters in this collection span almost seventy years, the first written ten days before Paddy's twenty-fifth birthday, the last when he was ninety-four. His correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Ann Fleming, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper and his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner; he wrote his first letter to her in his cell at the monastery Saint Wandrille, the setting for his reflections on monastic life in A Time to Keep Silence. His letters exhibit many of his most engaging characteristics: his zest for life, his unending curiosity, his lyrical descriptive powers, his love of language, his exuberance and his tendency to get into scrapes - particularly when drinking and, quite separately, driving. Here are plenty of extraordinary stories: the hunt for Byron's slippers in one of the remotest regions of Greece; an ignominious dismissal from Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque; hiding behind a bush to dub Dirk Bogarde into Greek during the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight, the film based on the story of General Kreipe's abduction; his extensive travels. Some letters contain glimpses of the great and the good, while others are included purely for the joy of the jokes.

The gripping true story of one man's ten year expedition from a village in West Africa to the Arctic Circle WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR Scorching heat, rich, fertile soil, and treacherous snakes marked the landscape in which Tete-Michel grew up in 1950s Togo, West Africa. When he discovered a book on Greenland as a teen, this distant land became an instant obsession - he was determined to journey to the place these pages had revealed to him and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. A book of rich and immersive travel writing, Michel the Giant invites the reader to journey alongside an audacious Kpomassie as he makes his way from the equator to the bitter cold of the artic and settles into life with the Inuit peoples, adapting to their foods and customs. Part memoir, part anthropological observation this captivating narrative teems with nuanced observations on community, belonging and the universality of human experience. This title has been previously published as An African in Greenland

Not many Brits move to Poland to work in a fish and chip shop. Fewer still come back wanting to be a Member of the European Parliament.

Travel writer Ben Aitken moved to Poland in 2016 to understand why the Poles were leaving. He booked the cheapest flight he could find, to a place he had never heard of – Poznan. This candid, funny and offbeat book is the account of his year in Poland, as an unlikely immigrant.

Between peeling potatoes and boning fish, Ben spent time on the road travelling the country. He missed the bus to Auschwitz; stayed with a dozen nuns near Krakow; was offered a job by a Eurosceptic farmer and went to Gdansk to learn how Solidarity rose and communism fell. This is a bittersweet portrait of an unsung country, challenging stereotypes that Poland is a grey, ex-soviet land, and revealing a diverse country, rightfully proud of its colorful identity.

Readers familiar with Randy Wayne White's "Out There" column in Outside magazine will relish this first collection of his best work; those new to White's delectable blend of adventure, hilarity, and spirit can only be envied for the satisfaction of that first encounter. Whether it's `This Dog Is Legend," in which he tells of his cinder-block-retrieving Chesapeake Bay retriever named Gator, or "Coming To America," about the stirring-and sometimes terrifying-Mariel boat lift, White never fails to engross us in a life of sun, boats, work, and sport.

Shortlisted for the NSW Premier's History Awards - Australian History Prize 2021 How vast then is forgetting - of language, of places, of the dead? Are these even things that can be measured? They are not - but they can be described. Amnesia Road is a powerful literary consideration of historic violence in two different parts of the world, the seldom-visited mulga plains of south-west Queensland and the backroads of rural Andalusia. It is also an unashamed celebration of the landscapes where this violence - frontier conflict and civil war - has been carried out. Australian Hispanist Luke Stegemann uncovers neglected history and its victims and asks where such forgotten people can find a place in contemporary debates around history, nationality, guilt and identity. Stegemann writes powerfully about these landscapes, finding threads of forgotten history, particularly the brutal murderous Indigenous history that is so often deliberately ignored and the mass killings of civilians in the Spanish Civil War, in Andalusia and Cadiz in particular. Characterised by beautiful, lush writing that remains unflinching, this book prompts us to consider traumatic history and the places where it unfolded in new ways.

In 2010, Sarah Marquis embarked on a perilous journey: alone and on foot, she walked ten thousand miles across the Gobi Desert, from Siberia, through Thailand, to the Australian outback. Relying on hunting and her own wits, she traversed fever-haunted jungles and scorching deserts, braved harassment from drug dealers, the Mafia, and camp raids from thieves on horseback. Surviving dehydration, dengue fever delirium and crippling infection, Sarah experienced a raw and spiritual communion after three years of walking at the base of a tree in the plains of Australia. Through an inspirational journey, Wild by Nature explores what it is to adventure as a woman in the most dangerous of circumstances, and what it is to be truly alone in the wild.

In her The New York Times best-selling Between You & Me (ISBN 978 0 393 352146), Mary Norris delighted readers with her irreverent tales of pencils, punctuation and punctiliousness over three decades in The New Yorker's celebrated copy department. In Greek to Me, she delivers another wise and witty paean to the art of expressing oneself clearly and convincingly, this time filtered through her greatest passion: all things Greek. From convincing her The New Yorker bosses to pay for Ancient Greek studies to travelling the sacred way in search of Persephone, Greek to Me is an unforgettable account of both her lifelong love affair with words and her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon and reveals the surprising ways Greek helped form English. Filled with Norris's memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine-and more than a few Greek waiters-Greek to Me is the Comma Queen's fresh take on Greece and the exotic yet strangely familiar language that so deeply influences our own.

The book that has captivated millions of Chinese readers, translated into English for the very first time. 'Hypnotic . . . A record of one person's fierce refusal to follow a path laid down for her by the rest of the world' Tash Aw, Paris Review Books of the Year Sanmao: author, adventurer, pioneer. Born in China in 1943, she moved from Chongqing to Taiwan, Spain to Germany, the Canary Islands to Central America, and, for several years in the 1970s, to the Sahara. Stories of the Sahara invites us into Sanmao's extraordinary life in the desert: her experiences of love and loss, freedom and peril, all told with a voice as spirited as it is timeless. At a period when China was beginning to look beyond its borders, Sanmao fired the imagination of millions and inspired a new generation. With an introduction by Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti, this is an essential collection from one of the twentieth century's most iconic figures. 'Every story conveys Sanmao's infectious capacity for wonder' Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti 'Has endured for generations of young Taiwanese and Chinese women' New York Times 'Ground-breaking' Geographical 'A remarkable and brave book. Sanmao was a freewheeling feminist who broke all the rules and did so with a gleeful, mischievous smile' David Eimer, South China Morning Post

Lawrence Ferlinghetti-legendary poet and best-selling author-collects here his travel journals. Traversing the latter half of the twentieth century to the present, Writing Across the Landscape positions Ferlinghetti as a major voice whose personal writings are now added to the fabric of twentieth-century literary history. The volume gives glimpses of figures like William Burroughs in London, Ezra Pound in Italy and Fidel Castro at the dawn of the Revolution. Readers will journey to Mexico, Morocco, Paris and Rome, as well as to post-Stalinist Russia on a harrowing journey on the Trans-Siberian Express. Embedded with new poems and Ferlinghetti's pyrotechnic prose, Writing Across the Landscape evokes the people, places and political movements that have shaped our time.

WINNER OF THE FORTNUM & MASON FOOD AND DRINK AWARDS DEBUT DRINK BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019

WINNER OF THE LOUIS ROEDERER INTERNATIONAL WINE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2018

'Wine is alive, ageing and changing, but it's also a triumph over death. These grapes should rot. Instead they ferment. What better magic potion could there be, to convey us to the past?'

Impelled by a dual thirst, for wine and for knowledge, Nina Caplan follows the vine into the past, wandering from Champagne's ancient chalk to the mountains of Campania, via the crumbling Roman ruins that flank the river Rhône and the remote slopes of Priorat in Catalonia. She meets people whose character, stubbornness and sometimes, borderline craziness makes their wine great: an intrepid Englishman planting on rabbit-infested Downs, a glamorous eagle-chasing Spaniard and an Italian lawyer obsessed with reviving Falernian, legendary wine of the Romans. In the course of her travels, she drinks a lot and learns a lot: about dead conquerors and living wines, forgotten zealots and – in vino veritas, as Pliny said – about herself.

In this lyrical and charming book, Nina Caplan drinks in order to remember and travels in order to understand the meaning of home. This is narrative travel writing at its best.

A young gay man bewildered and lost on the highways of Los Angeles; a gay Muslim in Berlin; a rent boy in Shanghai; a holiday romance in Mexico; a man from Dakar in a bathhouse in Paris; a love hotel in Tokyo; a darkroom in Rio; a hamam in Syria; the burning ghats on the Ganges; Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Shinto and atheist; legal and illegal blazing through 17 countries on six continents, Homo Odyssey is an explicit, upfront, edgy, often funny, travel adventure that will leave you seeing the world and yourself with different eyes. How do men sexually attracted to other men live in different parts of the world? How do they see themselves? How have they survived over the centuries, mostly in places hostile to them?"

Perfect Camping for You in Montana! The new full color edition of Best Tent Camping: Montana, by Jan and Christina Nesset, is a guidebook for car campers who like quiet, scenic, and serene campsites, from the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness in the northwest to the Yellowstone River Valley in the south. This completely updated guidebook includes 50 private, state park, and state and national forest campgrounds divided into distinct regions; detailed campground maps; key information such as fees, restrictions, and dates of operation; driving directions; and ratings for beauty, privacy, spaciousness, security, and cleanliness. Whether you are a native Montanan in search of new territory or a vacationer on the lookout for that dream campground, this book by local outdoor adventurers Jan and Christina Nesset unlocks the secrets to the best tent camping Montana has to offer.

In her mid-twenties, shortly before her father's death, Davina Quinlivan moved from her family home in west London to begin a transitory life in the countryside: here she felt restless and rootless, stuck between Deep England and the technicolour memories of her family's migration story. Beginning in colonial India and Burma, from the indigenous tribes from which the women in Quinlivan's family are descended, and reaching the streets of Southall and Ealing, the stories of her ancestors persisted in the tales, the language, the cooking and culture of her family. Quinlivan conjures a place between continents and worlds in a lyrical debut of migration, and homecoming, marking the arrival of an exceptional new voice.