Alexander von Humboldt, sometimes called 'the last man who knew everything', was an extraordinary polymath of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1798 he received unprecedented permission from the Spanish Crown to explore its American and Caribbean colonies, which he did from 1799-1804. This is the journal of those explorations, in which he extensively covers the region's topography, geology, fauna and flora, anthropology and comparative linguistics. Volume III sees him recording more information on Venezuela, visiting Cuba where he also writes about local politics and speaks out fervently against the slave trade; he then sails for Colombia. The volume ends with a comprehensive geognostic description of the northern part of South America.

Two Arabic Travel Books combines two exceptional exemplars of Arabic travel writing, penned in the same era but chronicling wildly divergent experiences. Accounts of China and India is a compilation of reports and anecdotes on the lands and peoples of the Indian Ocean, from the Somali headlands to China and Korea. The early centuries of the Abbasid era witnessed a substantial network of maritime trade-the real-life background to the Sindbad tales. In this account, we first travel east to discover a vivid human landscape, including descriptions of Chinese society and government, Hindu religious practices, and natural life from flying fish to Tibetan musk-deer and Sri Lankan gems. The juxtaposed accounts create a jigsaw picture of a world not unlike our own, a world on the road to globalization. In its ports, we find a priceless cargo of information; here are the first foreign descriptions of tea and porcelain, a panorama of unusual social practices, cannibal islands, and Indian holy men-a marvelous, mundane world, contained in the compass of a novella. In Mission to the Volga, we move north on a diplomatic mission from Baghdad to the upper reaches of the Volga River in what is now central Russia. This colorful documentary by Ibn Fadlan relates the trials and tribulations of an embassy of diplomats and missionaries sent by caliph al-Muqtadir to deliver political and religious instruction to the recently-converted King of the Bulghars. During eleven months of grueling travel, Ibn Fadlan records the marvels he witnesses on his journey, including an aurora borealis and the white nights of the North. Crucially, he offers a description of the Viking Rus, including their customs, clothing, tattoos, and a striking account of a ship funeral. Mission to the Volga is also the earliest surviving instance of sustained first-person travel narrative in Arabic-a pioneering text of peerless historical and literary value. Together, the stories in Two Arabic Travel Books illuminate a vibrant world of diversity during the heyday of the Abbasid empire, narrated with as much curiosity and zeal as they were perceived by their observant beholders. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

"God bless the United States and God bless New York City" proclaimed a sign as the bus rolled through a small Indiana town. In October 2001, author Bill Markley was traveling by public bus from Pierre, South Dakota, to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, for a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity celebration. The day Markley left South Dakota began simply enough, but soon tragedy unfolded when a deranged man of Croatian descent slit the throat of a Greyhound bus driver causing an accident and throwing the nation's bus system into disarray. "American Pilgrim" is an honest account of life on the bus, the characters on the bus, bus culture, and the mood of the American people-reflective, patriotic, and upbeat.In those challenging days after the attacks on 9/11, everyone struggled to make sense of the world; as Markley worked on this story; it grew beyond the story of a simple 3,000-mile bus trip. He recalls many of his life's detours, recounting past events at locations the bus traveled through and people associated with those locations-a rambling personal history of people, places, and things. The trip took on new meaning and became a spiritual journey into the country's past and Markley's past.

In late August 1998, Kim Trevathan and his dog, Jasper, set out by canoe on a long, slow trip down the 652 miles of the Tennessee River, the largest tributary of the Ohio. Trevathan wanted to experience the river in its entirety, from Knoxville's narrow, winding channel, which flows past rocky bluffs, to the wide-open waters of Kentucky Lake at its lower end.
Over the course of the five-week voyage, Trevathan rediscovered the people and places that made history on the Tennessee's banks. He crossed the path of the explorer Meriwether Lewis along the Natchez Trace, noted the sites of Ulysses S. Grant's Civil War battles, and passed Hiwassee Island, the spot where a teenaged runaway named Sam Houston lived with Cherokee Chief Jolly.
Trevathan also came to know the modern river's dwellers, including a towboat pilot, two couples who traded in their landlocked homes for life on the river, a campground owner, and a meteorologist for NASA. He placed his life in the hands of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lock operators as he and Jasper navigated the river's nine dams.
Paddling the Tennessee River is a powerful travel narrative that captures the river's wild, turbulent, and defiant past and confronts what it has become--an overused and overdeveloped series of lakes. But first and foremost, the book is the story of a man and his dog, riding low enough to smell the water and to discover the promise of a slow river running through the southern heartland.
The Author: Kim Trevathan, who earned his M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Alabama, works as a new media writer and producer and writes a column for the Maryville Daily Times. His essays and short stories have been published in The Distillery, New Millennium Writings, The Texas Review, New Delta Review, and Under the Sun. He lives in Rockford, Tennessee.

The subzero temperatures were only one of the dangers explorer Frederick Cook (1865-1940) faced in his attempts to reach the North Pole. During his extraordinary and harrowing journey, he fought off arctic wolves and polar bears, lived through ice storms, almost starved on several occasions, and faced long and lonely hours of isolation. His book relates how he learned from Eskimos how to survive in the Arctic, hunting musk ox to survive, harpooning walruses, and traveling by dog sled. After his journey, he defended himself against the charges of fellow explorer Robert Peary, who claimed that Cook had lied about reaching the Pole. My Attainment of the Pole is not only a great read for any armchair explorer, it is also a controversial work that contributed to a dispute that lasted for decades.

In sy nuutste boek het Dana van sy ware ontmoetings geboekstaaf – ontmoetings met mense, maar soms ook met dinge – die vleispastei, of tuisgemaakte braai-apparate. Die stories het hy aanvanklik op Facebook gepos. Die wat die grootste reaksie gekry het is hierin verwerk. 'n Ware interaktiewe Suid-Afrikaanse boek.

Alexander von Humboldt, sometimes called 'the last man who knew everything', was an extraordinary polymath of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1798 he received unprecedented permission from the Spanish Crown to explore its American and Caribbean colonies, which he did from 1799-1804. This is the journal of those explorations, in which he extensively covers the region's topography, geology, fauna and flora, anthropology and comparative linguistics. Volume II covers the period in which he undertake a major exploration of the River Orinoco, as far as the borders of Brazil, finishing in Angostura, then the capital of Spanish Guiana.

In the summer of 2004 we went climbing with Dimitri in the Valle Garrafano in the Apuane Alps, a limestone area famous for its Carrara marble. Dimitri had been a tenant of ours in Cambridge when he had a sabbatical working in the University Library. We returned the following summer and were whisked off again to the rocky valleys of Italy's far northwest. We climbed in the Valle Maira and Valle Gesso in the Maritime Alps, Then we drove further north to the Valle dell'Orco in the Graian Alps near the Parco Gran Paradiso. The rock was superb and we did some great routes following our 'Pied Piper' Dimitri.

THE TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE Drowned. Buried by sand. Decimated by plague. Plunged off a cliff. This is the forgotten history of Britain's lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages: our shadowlands. 'A beautiful book, truly original . . . It is a marvellous achievement.' IAN MORTIMER, author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England 'Well researched, beautifully written and packed with interesting detail.' CLAIRE TOMALIN 'An exquisitely written, moving and elegiac exploration.' SUZANNAH LIPSCOMB 'Consistently interesting . . . Green's passion and historical vision bursts from the page, summoning up the past in surround sound and sensual prose.' CAL FLYN, THE TIMES (author of Islands of Abandonment) Historian Matthew Green travels across Britain to tell the forgotten history of our lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages. Revealing the extraordinary stories of how these places met their fate - and exploring how they have left their mark on our landscape and our imagination - Shadowlands is a deeply evocative and dazzlingly original account of Britain's past. 'An eloquent tour of lost communities.' PD SMITH, GUARDIAN 'A haunting, lyrical tour around the lost places of Britain.' CHARLOTTE HIGGINS, author of Under Another Sky 'A miraculous work of resurrection, stinging in a perpetual present'. IAIN SINCLAIR, author of The Gold Machine 'Beautifully written.' SUNDAY TIMES 'Startling.' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Splendid.' THE HERALD 'Compelling.' HISTORY TODAY 'Excellent.' THE SPECTATOR 'Fascinating.' DAILY MAIL 'Accomplished.' CAUGHT BY THE RIVER 'Outstanding.' MIRROR

This book concerns the significance of the English Channel in British and French literature from the 1780s onwards: a timely subject given the intense debates in progress about the actual and desired relationships between Britain and mainland Europe. The book addresses contemporary authors who use the Channel as a focus for cultural comment, comparing their approaches to those of earlier writers, from Charlotte Smith and Chateaubriand through Hugo and Dickens to historians and travel writers of the 1950s and 1980s.

In these collected stories, Long explores watery, secluded jungle caves in South America, tackles remote thawing iceflows on Baffin Island, and solos cutting-edge rock climbs over a desert hungry for his failure.

Die laaste reis is Karel Schoeman se “reisbriewe” ? mymeringe, gedagtes en herinneringe van sy laaste drie kort reise na Lesotho saam met Jemina Meko en Mamohau Lekula wat hom die afgelope nege jaar versorg het. Dit behels drie kort verslae oor sy besoeke in die maand voor sy dood en is in die vorm van e-posse aan ’n paar “persoonlike korrespondente” gestuur. Vanselfsprekend staan die tema van afskeid sentraal in die briewe.

Queen Victoria so liked the Isle of Wight she built a royal residence here. Thousands of people got stoned here at music festivals in the late 1960s. And, in the very un-hippyish Covid summer of 2020, Hunter Davies and his girlfriend escaped locked-down North London for a week’s holiday on the Isle of Wight, fell in love with its sleepy charm – and ended up buying a Grade II-listed love nest in the elegant Victorian seaside resort of Ryde. Love in Old Age tells the story of their first twelve months on the island. It brings together the themes of love in old age; Covid lockdown; rural escape; the anxieties of house-buying; and the history and curiosities of England’s largest and second most populous island – all bound together by Hunter Davies’s inquisitiveness about people and places, and his irrepressible and ironic sense of humour.

Alexander von Humboldt, sometimes called 'the last man who knew everything', was an extraordinary polymath of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1798 he received unprecedented permission from the Spanish Crown to explore its American and Caribbean colonies, which he did from 1799-1804. This is the journal of those explorations, in which he extensively covers the region's topography, geology, fauna and flora, anthropology and comparative linguistics. Volume I covers his preparations, stop at Tenerife, landfall at Cuman and journeys inland in what is now Venezuela.

The Achuar people have survived in isolation in the Amazonian jungle by aggressively resisting intruders. In this book, Descola depicts an altogether unfamiliar civilisation, whose values often seem bizarre to Western eyes.

"Looking East" explores early modern English attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. To a nation just arriving on the international scene, the Ottoman Empire was at once the great enemy and scourge of Christendom, and at the same time the fabulously wealthy and magnificent court from which the sultan ruled over three continents with his great and powerful army. By taking the imaginative, literary and poetic writing about the Ottoman Turks and putting it alongside contemporary historical documents, the book shows that fascination with the Ottoman Empire shaped how the English thought about and represented their own place within the world as a nation with increasing imperial ambitions of its own.

The Alps have seen the march of armies, the flow of pilgrims and Crusaders, the feats of mountaineers and the dreams of engineers—and some 14 million people live among their peaks today. In The Alps, Stephen O’Shea takes readers up and down these majestic mountains, journeying through their 500-mile arc across France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria and Slovenia. He explores the reality behind Hannibal’s crossing; he reveals how the Alps have influenced culture from Frankenstein to Heidi and The Sound of Music; and he visits the spot of Sherlock Holmes’s death scene, the bloody site of the Italians’ retreat in the First World War and Hitler’s notorious Eagle’s Nest. Throughout, O’Shea records his adventures with the watch makers, salt miners, cable-car operators and yodelers who define the Alps today.

This is the collected travel essays of Elizabeth Taylor, a Victorian adventuress who specialized in traveling to, and writing about, the coldest lands on earth. Throughout her wildly exciting life she collected many 'firsts', including being one of the first recognized explorers of the American Arctic region.

The challenge of rugged, cold places was her romance, and her essays include descriptions on the culture, family life, folklore and natural history of Alaska, Arctic Canada, Iceland, Norway, Scotland and the Faeroe Islands of Denmark. Included in this delicious volume are reprints of her original photos and illustrations.

Taylor traveled by birchbark canoe, steamboat, Red River ox carts and horseback, and even experienced a shipwreck. As a self-taught botanist and zoologist, she wrote about the local flora, fauna and wildlife she observed in her journeys, and today two plants carry her name. She collected plant and fish specimens for the American Museum of Natural History, Cornell University, Catholic University of Washington, the Smithsonian Institution and Pitt Rivers Museum of Oxford University.

"There is a pleasing squishiness about a big puddle, and a little excitement in seeing how deep one is going to go".

"It is unreasonable, I confess. One is scorched by the hot sun, drenched in storms, bitten by mosquitoes, gnats and deer flies, lives on bacon and camp bread, sleeps on the ground, and is perfectly happy withal".

"Another time I should take as many prunes as possible".

THE LAND OF THE CAMEL Tents and Temples of Inner Mongolia By SCHUYLER CAMMANN THE RONALD PRESS COMPANY f NEW YORK Copyright, 1951, by THE RONALD PRESS COMPANY All Rights Reserved The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing 1 from the publisher. PRINTED IN THE XJNITED STATES OF AMERICA To Marcia WHO WAITED FOREWORD This book describes western Inner Mongolia in 1945. For almost nine years this region had been cut off by hostilities with the Japa nese, which began there in 1936, and it will probably be a very long time before any American can get there again. Even before the war it was little known, as the distance from the China coast had prevented foreign contacts, except for a handful of missionaries. The war years had brought marked changes to Inner Mongolia, accelerating the exploitation, terrorization, and dispossession of the Mongols which the Chinese had begun some forty years before. Enough Mongols were still living there, however, to enable us to see and share their life in tents and temples, after the end of the war brought us leisure from other activities. It seemed important to write down what we saw of their strange customs and complex religion, as well as to describe the forces that were undermining their old traditions and their way of life. Thus this is primarily an account of the Mongols we met, and their opponents among the immigrant settlers and border officials. But it would not present a complete picture of the region if it did not also describe the semifeudal realm of the Belgian mission ary fathers, . which has now passed into history. Most of Chapter 10 has previously been published inthe Bulletin of the University Museum, Philadelphia, while some of the passages dealing with Mongolian chess have appeared in an article for Natural History. The writer is especially grateful to Walter Hill and to Dr. William LaSor for their kindness in allowing him to use their photographs. SCHUYLER CAMMANN University of Pennsylvania September, 1950 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 1 First Impressions of Mongolia 3 2 Crossing the Ordos 9 3 The Great Plain IS 4 Camp Life and Recreation 21 5 Farmers of the Great Plain 28 6 The Victory in Shanpa 41 7 Our First Lamasery 48 8 The Mongols at Home 57 9 Meeting Dunguerbo 66 10 The Living Buddha of Shandagu 73 11 Chien-li Temple, Pride of the Oirats 85 12 More Lama Personalities 96 13 Mongol Festival 101 14 Down the Range to Dabatu Pass 106 1 5 Temple in the Gobi 1 14 16 Dunguerbo and His Family 121 17 The Journey to Ago-in Sume 130 18 Temple of the Antelope Cave 137 19 Last Days in Shanpa 143 20 Lo-pei Chao 152 21 South by Camel 163 22 Ninghsia Interlude 173 23 The Second Camel Trip 183 24 Leaving the Ordos 193 Index 199 vii ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Getting the truck aboard the Yellow River ferry 12 Ordos camels in summer, with sagging humps 12 Chinese immigrant farmer ploughing up old Mongol grazing land on Hou-tao Plain 13 Farmers harvesting soy beans on Hou-tao Plain 13 The camp well 24 A Chinese mother rides into Shanpa to market 24 A Provincial army caravan enters Shanpa 24 Typical Chinese tenant farmers homes on Hou-tao Plain 25 Tsong Kapa, founder of the Reformed Sect, with episodes from his life 52 Tara, the Green Goddess. Gilded bronze image from a Mongol lamasery 53 Mongol woman milking goats 64 Yurts in the wasteland, Beilighe Pass 64 Dunguerboturning a giant prayer wheel in a lamasery 65 Shandagu Miao at the base of the mountains. Author in foreground 80 Chortens at Shandagu Miao 80 Yamantaka and other demon-gods 80 The Golden Image at Shandagu Miao 81 Main pieces from two Mongolian chess sets 88 Playing Mongolian Chess 89 Peacock pawns and rabbit pawns from two Mongolian chess sets 89 The Abbot, Lopon Dorje, receives some guests 104 Two Oirat matrons in festival finery 105 A Mongol woman brings her child to the Festival 105 A Temple in the Gobi...

The sea life is embedded in Christian Lamb's DNA. In this delightful memoir she takes her readers on board with her, chronicling her adventures as she cruises the world, to every continent and across every sea, spanning a lifetime. As a passionate plantswoman, an inquisitive historian, and an insatiable traveller, Christian follows the routes of her heroes, the seafarers, botanists and explorers of old, and rediscovers their stories in person, setting them in the context of the modern world. And all along the way, from New York to Patagonia, New Zealand to Moscow, the shipboard characters accompanying the author round out this wry and witty narrative, a charming account of sailing the ocean and exploring the furthest corners of the earth in eighty years.

Exploring the unknown is a personal account of a South African's backpacking journey of self-discovery and adventure off the beaten trail. In 1990, leaving behind a life of white privilege and a career, the author travelled to 35 countries in five years on a shoestring budget as the apartheid regime collapsed with uncertainty. A time of carefree travel, inbred survival instinct and always proudly South African he became set on seeing and experiencing as many cultures and places using maps, travel books and various modes of transport. An exciting and funny account with history and politics enmeshed throughout the story, spanning three continents the author using temporary bases in and around London to springboard his travels-United Kingdom, Ireland and Europe- East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Morocco and South East Asia-Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Hong Kong and Cuba. In 1996, he returned home before choosing a new life in Canada. In 2003, he travelled to Namibia and in 2005 embarked on a special trip to Mozambique.