The Sea of Zanj has been a place of myth and mystery since time immemorial, and its islands have captured countless imaginations. Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues, the Seychelles and Madagascar – Thomas Victor Bulpin recounts their stories and histories; stories of strange animals and exotic places, of pirates and runaway slaves, of forgotten kingdoms and deadly welcomes.

Much has changed in the islands since Islands in a forgotten sea first appeared in the 1950s, and the author has left an invaluable account of an enchanting and often brutal world far removed from the air-conditioned resorts and package tours so familiar to tourists today.

2011 marks the centenary of the death of Edward Whymper, one of the most important figures in the history of mountaineering. His ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, and the deaths of four members of his party on the way down, attracted attention throughout the world, bringing him praise and criticism in equal measure. In later years, he largely devoted his life to lecturing and writing guidebooks, touring Britain, Europe and America. Whymper was an early member of the Alpine Club and in the club's archives is a set of magic lantern slides he used to illustrate his lectures. Based on extensive research, former AC Archivist Peter Berg has combined these images with extracts from Whymper's books and diaries and writings by his contemporaries, to recreate the lecture 'My Scrambles amongst the Alps', first given in 1895. These pictures, mostly not seen for 100 years and never been published as a set before, give us a unique glimpse of the mountain world at the end of the 19th century. We visit the Zermatt valley and its peaks, passes and glaciers, experience Whymper's many attempts to climb the Matterhorn, explore the Mont Blanc region, including the ill-fated building of an observatory on the summit, and share some of the joys and sorrows of mountaineering. Setting the lecture in context, is a foreword by the distinguished mountaineer and former AC President, Stephen Venables.

The years Li Xinfeng spent as a Chinese correspondent in South Africa are evident in the insights he shares in China in Africa: Following Zheng He's Footsteps – the narrative of his research into the traces left by the famed navigator during his travels in and around Africa. Beginning on Kenya's Pate Island, Li's research led him to travel around much of the southern part of the African continent, searching for signs that Zheng He's fleet had been there some six centuries earlier. China in Africa: Following Zheng He's Footsteps is more than just one person's quest to retrace the journey of an alluring historical figure, shrouded in legend: Zheng He has become an important symbol for the Chinese people and the world of peace-loving cultural exchange in general. Li's comprehensive research into the African travels of this iconic figure presents a challenge to the postcolonial world, highlighting the stark contrast between colonising and fair exchange for mutual benefit. A consistent thread in the narrative is how best to respond to the challenge of overturning the exploitation of colonial relationships with friendly collaboration in modern times.

Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of "un-unhappiness." The book uses a beguiling mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Qatar, awash in petrodollars, find joy in all that cash? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? With engaging wit and surprising insights, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.

Island of Lightning is the latest book of travel essays by the prizewinning Robert Minhinnick, poet, novelist, translator, cultural commentator and environmentalist. In it he travels from his home in south Wales to Argentina, China, Finland, Iraq, Tuscany and Piemonte, Malta, New York, Zagreb, Lithuania and the lightning island of Malta. In conventional travel essays and leaps of imaginative narrative his subjects include the annual Elvis convention in Porthcawl, Neolithic sculptures, the cruelties of late twentieth century communism and its aftermath, rugby union, the Argentinian writer Alfonsina Storni, poets playing football, the body of a saint and the definition of cool. His themes are big ones: the relationship of man and landscape, man and time, man and nature, immigration and war, in one sense ultimately humankind itself. Minhinnick explores with the eye of a poet and the gift of a telling image or metaphor. His walk from Cardiff to the Rhondda valleys is almost geological as he passes through the social and cultural strata of the area's history. His astonishment at the sheer number of people - the scale on which society works - in China, results in an inventive grappling with the hugeness of the world (and its growing problems). At the other end of the spectrum his re-imagining of the life of Alfonsina Storni, her love for Borges and her suicide is a delicate commentary on the personal and the solitary. Readers will be entertained, informed and provoked by this series of essays in which Minhinnick takes his subjects as though holding them in his hand, turning them for new perspectives and understanding.

Alexander Burnes travelled up the Indus to Lahore and to the Khanates of Afghanistan and Central Asia in the 1830s, spying on behalf of the British Government in what was to become known as the 'Great Game'. His account of these travels was a bestseller in its day and this brand new edition brings the heady sense of excitement, risk and zeal bursting from the pages.

The beloved Sunday Times bestseller - a touching, hilarious, often outrageous memoir of home-making and family adventures in the world's furthest outposts 'Hilarious, and utterly beguiling - it's a complete treat to be in Keenan's witty and open-hearted company' Esther Freud 'Deliciously effervescent' Sunday Times 'Brigid writes like a dream ... fabulous' Joanna Lumley 'Irresistible' Mail on Sunday When Sunday Times fashion journalist Brigid Keenan married the love of her life in the late Sixties, she had little idea of the rollercoaster journey they would make around the world together. For he was a diplomat - and Brigid found herself the smiling face of the European Union in locales ranging from Kazakhstan to Trinidad, and asking herself questions she never thought she'd have to ask. How do you throw a buffet dinner during a public mourning period in Syria? Where do you track down dog fat in Almaty? And how do you entertain guests in a Nepalese chicken shed? Negotiating diplomatic protocol, difficult teenagers, homesickness, frustrated career aspirations, witch doctors, and giant jumping spiders, Brigid muddles determinedly through - with no shortage of mishaps on the way. 'There are not many books that have actually made me cry from laughing, but this is one of them' Sunday Times

Moving beyond travelogue, V. S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa considers the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of African civilization. Beginning in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, Naipaul's journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and ends, as the country does, in South Africa. Focusing upon the theme of belief - though sometimes the political or economical realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account - Naipaul examines the fragile but enduring quality of the old world of magic. To witness the ubiquity of such ancient ritual, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of this book. 'The quality of Naipaul's writing - simple, concise, engaging - rarely varies . . . Above all, Naipaul's latest African journey is eyewitness reporting at its best' Time

By a winner of the Stanford Dolman Award for Travel Writing "Sayarer is a precise and passionate writer . . . We need writers who will go all the way for a story, and tell it with fire. Sayarer is a marvellous example" HORATIO CLARE On the eve of its centenary year and elections that will shape the coming generations, Julian Emre Sayarer sets out to cycle across Türkiye, from the Aegean coast to the Armenian border. Meeting Turkish farmers and workers, Syrian refugees and Russians avoiding conscription, the journey brings to life a living, breathing, cultural tapestry of the place where Asia, Africa and Europe converge. The result is a love letter to a country and its neighbours - one that offers a clear-eyed view of Türkiye and its place in a changing world. Yet the route is also marked by tragedy, as Sayarer cycles along a major fault line just months before one of the most devastating earthquakes in the region's modern history. Always engaged with the big historical and political questions that inform so much of his writing, Sayarer uses his bicycle and the roadside encounters it allows to bring everything back to the human level. At the end of his journey we are left with a deeper understanding of the country, as well as the essential and universal nature of political power, both in Türkiye and closer to home.

The amazing true story of Julian Smith, who retraced the journey of legendary British explorer Ewart "The Leopard" Grogan, the first man to cross the length of Africa, in hopes of also winning the heart of the woman he loved.

In 1898, the dashing young British explorer Ewart "the Leopard" Grogan was in love. In order to prove his mettle to his beloved--and her aristocratic stepfather--he set out on a quest to become the first person to walk across Africa, "a feat hitherto thought by many explorers to be impossible" (New York Times, 1900).

In 2007, thirty-five-year-old American journalist Julian Smith faced a similar problem with his girlfriend of six years . . . and decided to address it in the same way Grogan had more than a hundred years before: he was going to retrace the Leopard's 4,500-mile journey for love and glory through the lakes, volcanoes, savannas, and crowded modern cities of Africa.

Smith interweaves both adventures into a seamless narrative in Crossing the Heart of Africa the story of two explorers, a century apart, who both traversed the length of Africa to prove themselves . . . and came back changed men.

Throughout history, intrepid men and women have related their experiences and perceptions of the world's great cities to bring them alive to those at home. The thirty-eight cities covered in this entertaining anthology of travellers' tales are spread over six continents, ranging from Beijing to Berlin, Cairo to Chicago, Lhasa to London, St Petersburg to Sydney and Rio to Rome. This volume features commentators across the millennia, including the great travellers of ancient times, such as Strabo and Pausanias; those who undertook extensive journeys in the medieval world, not least Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta; courageous women such as Isabella Bird and Freya Stark; and enterprising writers and journalists including Mark Twain and Norman Lewis. We see the world's great cities through the eyes of traders, explorers, soldiers, diplomats, pilgrims and tourists; the experiences of emperors and monarchs sit alongside those of revolutionaries and artists, but also those of ordinary people who found themselves in remarkable situations, like the medieval Chinese abbot who was shown round the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris by the King of France himself. Some of the writers seek to provide a straightforward, accurate description of all they have seen, while others concentrate on their subjective experiences of the city and encounters with the inhabitants. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling historian Peter Furtado, each account provides both a vivid portrait of a distant place and time and an insight into those who journeyed there. The result is a book that delves into the splendours and stories that exist beyond conventional guidebooks and websites.

"The Island That Dared" is a passionate book from the pen of Dervla Murphy, which begins with a three-generational family holiday in Cuba. Led by their redoubtable hard-walking grandmother, the trio of young girls and their mother soon find themselves camping out on empty beaches beneath the stars with only crabs and mosquitoes for company. This pure Swallows and Amazons experience confirms Dervla in her quest to understand the unique society that has been created by the Cuban Revolution. She returns again and again to explore the island, investigating the experience of modern Cuba with her particular, candid curiosity. Through her own research and through conversations with Fidelistas and their critics alike, "The Island That Dared" builds a complex picture of a people struggling to retain their identity in the face of insistent hostility, and to stand against the all-but-overwhelming fire-power of capitalism. Whatever the fate of Cuba, "The Island That Dared" beautifully fulfils the role of a great travel book, 'to catch the moment on the wing, and stop it in Time' - Colin Thubron.

First Published in 1968. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The first general nonfiction title in thirty years from a giant of American letters, The Search for the Genuine is a sparkling, definitive collection of Jim Harrison's essays and journalism--some never before published New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was a writer with a poet's economy of style and trencherman's appetites and ribald humor. In The Search for the Genuine, a collection of new and previously published essays, the giant of letters muses on everything from grouse hunting fishing to Zen Buddhism and matters of the spirit, including reported pieces on Yellowstone and shark-tagging in the open ocean, commentary on writers from Bukowski to Neruda to Peter Matthiessen, and a heartbreaking essay on life-- and, for those attempting to cross in the ever-more-dangerous gaps, death--on the US/Mexico border. Written with Harrison's trademark humor, compassion, and full-throated zest for life, this chronicle of a modern bon vivant is a feast for fans who may think they know Harrison's nonfiction, from a true "American original" (San Francisco Chronicle).