As a professional travel writer and editor for the past 40 years, Don George has been paid to explore the world. Through the decades, his articles have been published in magazines, newspapers, and websites around the globe and have won more awards than almost any other travel writer alive, yet his pieces have never been collected into one volume. The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George fills this void with a moving and inspiring collection of tales and reflections from one of America's most acclaimed and beloved travel writers. From his high-spirited account of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro on a whim when he was 22 years old to his heart-plucking description of a home-stay in a muddy compound in Cambodia as a 61-year-old, this collection ranges widely. As renowned for his insightful observations as for his poetic prose, George always absorbs the essence of the places he's visiting. Other stories here include a moving encounter with Australia's sacred red rock monolith, Uluru; an immersion in country kindness on the Japanese island of Shikoku; the trials and triumphs of ascending Yosemite's Half Dome with his wife and children; and a magical morning at Machu Picchu.

In Journeys to Impossible Places, best-selling author and presenter Simon Reeve reveals the inside story of his most astonishing adventures and experiences, around the planet and close to home. Journeys to Impossible Places continues the story Simon started in his phenomenal Sunday Times bestseller Step by Step, which traced the first decades of his life from depressed and unemployed teenager through to his early TV programmes. Now Simon takes us on the epic and thrilling adventures that followed, in beautiful, tricky and downright dangerous corners of the world, as he travelled through the Tropics, to remote paradise islands, jungles dripping with heat and life, and on nerve-wracking secret missions. Simon shares what his unique experiences and encounters have taught him, and the deeper lessons he draws from joy and raw grief in his personal life, from desperate struggles with his own fertility and head health, from wise friends, fatherhood, inspiring villagers, brave fighters, his beloved dogs, and a thoughtful Indian sadhu. Journeys to Impossible Places inspires and encourages all of us to battle fear and negativity, and embrace life, risk, opportunities and the glory of our world.

The essential history of an iconic European city, by Cambridge academic Elizabeth Drayson. 'An admirable achievement... [Drayson has] expertise as a scholar and command as a storyteller' BBC History Magazine 'A glittering homage to one of the world's most beautiful and storied cities' Dan Jones 'Beauty built on blood and brutality... A fascinating new tome' Daily Mail From the early Middle Ages to the present, foreign travellers have been bewitched by Granada's peerless beauty. The Andalusian city is also the stuff of story and legend, with an unforgettable history to match. Romans, then Visigoths, settled here, as did a community of Jews; in the eleventh century a Berber chief made Granada his capital, and from 1230 until 1492 the Nasrids - Spain's last Islamic dynasty - ruled the emirate of Granada from their fortress-palace of the Alhambra. After capturing the city to complete the Christian Reconquista, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella made the Alhambra the site of their royal court. In Lost Paradise, Elizabeth Drayson takes the reader on a voyage of discovery that uncovers the many-layered past of Spain's most complex and fascinating city, celebrating and exploring its evolving identity. Her account brings to the fore the image of Granada as a lost paradise, revealing it as a place of perpetual contradiction and linking it to the great dilemma over Spain's true identity as a nation. This is the story of a vanished Eden, of a place that questions and probes Spain's deep obsession with forgetting, and with erasing historical and cultural memory.

In mid-1964, Keith Widdowson got wind that the Western Region was hell-bent on being the first to eliminate the steam locomotive on its tracks by December 1965. The 17-year-old hurriedly homed in on train services still in the hands of GWR steam power, aiming to catch runs with the last examples before their premature annihilation. The Great Western Steam Retreat recalls Widdowson's teenage exploits, soundtracked by hits from the Beatles, the Kinks and the Rolling Stones, throughout the Western Region and former Great Western Railway lines. He documents the extreme disorder that resulted from that decision, paying tribute to the train crews who managed to meet demanding timings in the face of declining cleanliness, the poor quality of coal and the major problem of recruiting both footplate and shed staff. This book completes the author's Steam Chase series and provides a snapshot into the comradery that characterised the final years of steam alongside the long-gone journeys that can never be recreated.

In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following.
Through these encounters-by turns touching, con-founding, surprising, and funny-Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.

As a practising mortician, Caitlin Doughty has long been fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies. In From Here to Eternity she sets out in search of cultures unburdened by such fears. With curiosity and morbid humour, Doughty introduces us to inspiring death-care innovators, participates in powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in the West and explores new spaces for mourning - including a futuristic glowing-Buddha columbarium in Japan, a candlelit Mexican cemetery, and America's only open-air pyre. In doing so she expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with 'dignity' and reveals unexpected possibilities for our own death rituals.

In the era of the Grand Tour, Venice was the cultural jewel in the crown of Europe and the epitome of decadence. This edited collection of eleven essays draws on a range of disciplines and approaches to ask how Venice's appeal has affected Western culture since 1800.

The Islamic Orient studies the travel accounts of four British travelers during the nineteenth century. Through a critical analysis of these works, the author examines and questions Edward Said's concept of "Orientalism" and "Orientalist" discourse: his argument that the orientalist view had such a strong influence on westerners that they invariably perceived the orient through the lens of orientalism. On the contrary, the author argues, no single factor had an overwhelming influence on them. She shows that westerners often struggled with their own conceptions of the orient, and being away for long periods from their homelands, were in fact able to stand between cultures and view them both as insiders and outsiders. The literary devices used to examine these writings are structure, characterization, satire, landscape description, and word choice, as also the social and political milieu of the writers. The major influences in the author's analysis are Said, Foucault, Abdel-Malek and Marie Louise Pratt.

Interrogating the multiple ways in which travel was narrated and mediated, by and in response to, nineteenth-century British travelers, this interdisciplinary collection examines to what extent these accounts drew on and developed existing tropes of travel. The three sections take up personal and intimate narratives that were not necessarily designed for public consumption, tales intended for a popular audience, and accounts that were more clearly linked with discourses and institutions of power, such as imperial processes of conquest and governance. Some narratives focus on the things the travelers carried, such as souvenirs from the battlefields of Britain's imperial wars, while others show the complexity of Victorian dreams of the exotic. Still others offer a disapproving glimpse of Victorian mores through the eyes of indigenous peoples in contrast to the imperialist vision of British explorers. Swiss hotel registers, guest books, and guidebooks offer insights into the history of tourism, while new photographic technologies, the development of the telegraph system, and train travel transformed the visual, audial, and even the conjugal experience of travel. The contributors attend to issues of gender and ethnicity in essays on women travelers, South African travel narratives, and accounts of China during the Opium Wars, and analyze the influence of fictional travel narratives. Taken together, these essays show how these multiple narratives circulated, cross-fertilised, and reacted to one another to produce new narratives, new objects, and new modes of travel.

'Beautiful . . . Justifies its place alongside nature writing classics such as H is for Hawk' NEW STATESMAN 'Wonderful ... both frank and fearless' TELEGRAPH BEST TRAVEL BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'Fascinating' GUARDIAN TOP TEN NATURE MEMOIRS From Mexico to the Arctic ice, grey whale mothers swim with their calves. Following them, by bus, train and ferry, are Doreen and her toddler Max, in pursuit of a wild hope. Doreen first visited Alaska as a young journalist reporting on climate change among indigenous whaling communities. There, drawn deeply into an Iñupiaq family, she joined the bowhead whale hunt, watching for polar bears under the never-ending light. Years later, now a single mother living in a hostel, Doreen embarks on this extraordinary journey: following the grey whale migration back to the Arctic, where greys and bowheads meet at the melting apex of our planet. 'Soundings got under my skin. I finished it in tears' AMY LIPTROT 'What a voice! What a book!' CHARLES FOSTER 'Soulful, honest, insightful, humane and propulsive' JINI REDDY 'Thrilling, passionate and tender-hearted' HELEN JUKES WINNER OF THE RSL GILES ST AUBYN AWARD ONE OF SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE'S TEN BEST BOOKS ABOUT TRAVEL OF 2022

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A journey along one of Britain's oldest roads, from Dover to Anglesey, in search of the hidden history that makes us who we are today. 'A bravura piece of writing - Bill Bryson on acid' Tom Holland Winding its way from the White Cliffs of Dover to the Druid groves of Anglesey, the ancient road of Watling Street has gone by many different names. It is a road of witches and ghosts, of queens and highwaymen, of history and myth, of Bletchley Park codebreakers, Chaucer, Boudicca, Dickens and James Bond. But Watling Street is not just the story of a route across our island. It is an acutely observed exploration of Britain and who we are today, told with wit and an unerring eye for the curious and surprising.

Experience the world by train alongside best-selling travel writer Tom Chesshyre, as he takes a whistle-stop tour around the globe in 49 unique journeys Why do people love trains so much? Tom Chesshyre is on a mission to find the answer by experiencing the world through train travel - on both epic and everyday rail routes, aboard every type of ride, from steam locomotives to bullet trains, meeting a cast of memorable characters who share a passion for train travel. Join him on the rails and off the beaten track as he embarks on an exhilarating whistle-stop tour around the globe, on journeys on celebrated trains and railways including: India's famed toy train Sri Lanka's Reunification Express The Indian Pacific across the Australian outback The Shanghai maglev And the picturesque rail journeys of the Scottish Highlands Plus trains through Kosovo, North Macedonia, Turkey, Iran, Finland, Russia, America and France, with short interludes in North Korea, Italy, Poland, Peru, Switzerland, England and Lithuania. All aboard!

Positioned at a crossroads between feminist geographies and modernist studies, Excursions into Modernism considers transnational modernist fiction in tandem with more rarely explored travel narratives by women of the period who felt increasingly free to journey abroad and redefine themselves through travel. In an era when Western artists, writers, and musicians sought 'primitive' ideas for artistic renewal, Joyce E. Kelley locates a key similarity between fiction and travel writing in the way women authors use foreign experiences to inspire innovations with written expression and self-articulation. She focuses on the pairing of outward journeys with more inward, introspective ones made possible through reconceptualizing and mobilizing elements of women's traditional corporeal and domestic geographies: the skin, the ill body, the womb, and the piano. In texts ranging from Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark to Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out and from Evelyn Scott's Escapade to Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, Kelley explores how interactions between geographic movement, identity formation, and imaginative excursions produce modernist experimentation. Drawing on fascinating supplementary and archival materials such as letters, diaries, newspaper articles, photographs, and unpublished drafts, Kelley's book cuts across national and geographic borders to offer rich and often revisionary interpretations of both canonical and lesser-known works.

There are still wild places out there on our crowded planet. Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts. Following a route from the Cairngorms of Scotland to the fire-watch lookouts of Washington State; from Iceland's 'Houses of Joy' to the Utah desert; frozen ghost towns in Svalbard to shrines in Japan; Roald Dahl's writing hut to a lighthouse in the North Atlantic, Richards explores landscapes which have inspired writers, artists and musicians, and asks: why are we drawn to wilderness? What can we do to protect them? And what does the future hold for outposts on the edge?

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

A Turn in the South is a reflective journey by V. S. Naipaul in the late 1980s through the American South. Naipaul writes of his encounters with politicians, rednecks, farmers, writers and ordinary men and women, both black and white, with the insight and originality we expect from one of our best travel writers. Fascinating and poetic, this is a remarkable book on race, culture and country. 'Naipaul's writing is supple and fluid, meticulously crafted, adventurous and quick to surprise. And, as usual, there's the freshness and originality of his way of looking at things' Sunday Times 'Naipaul writes as if a modern oracle has chosen to speak through him. It is a tissue of brilliantly recorded hearsay, of intense listening by a man with a remarkable ear' New York Times Review of Books 'This is a journey below the Mason-Dixon line into a society riven by too many defeats; the broken cause of the old Confederacy, and the frustrated anger of Southern blacks whose power is circumscribed . . . It is the best thing outside fiction that I have read on the Old South pregnant with the new since W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South published over fifty years ago' Sunday Telegraph

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 story of the Giro d'Italia - Italy's equivalent of the Tour de France, and its superior in the eyes of many - is as dramatic and full of extraordinary characters as the story of Italy itself. Heroism, suffering, feuds and betrayals, tradition under threat from modernity all play out against a timeless landscape. The iconic riders, mythical stories and career defining exploits are conveyed in rich, vibrant prose.

You have either experienced unemployment or know someone who has. But what is it like to endure joblessness in a foreign country in the middle of an economic crisis? How would one survive cash-strapped circumstances for close to a year? In his beautiful and intelligently written travel memoir, Aponte tackles these questions as he tells his intimate, first-person, true story about triumphing over adversity, in the form of being poor and American, in Japan, during the countrys worst recession, since the second world war. Wayne Lionel Aponte's gift of observation, subtlety, and wry humor make THE YEAR OF NO MONEY IN TOKYO an extraordinary pleasure to read.

The little cottage stood out against a bleak skyline, forlorn, empty, neglected and overgrown. After a three-year search, could it be just what a retired English couple were looking for as a holiday home of their own? A magical holiday to rural France some years before had sowed the seeds of a daring plan for Brenda and Ray Barrington - to spend the early years of their retirement buying and restoring a cottage in the French countryside for use as a maison secondaire. Their budget and time were limited, but their enthusiasm and determination were boundless. The couple soon found themselves deeply engrossed in their dream project and discovering the full ramifications of owning a rural property deep in the land of wine and haute cuisine.

The idea of a journey without companions is too daunting for most travelers. Not so the women of this collection. These contemporary pioneers savor the ultimate freedom of solo travel. Marybeth Bond discovers the dubious pleasures of desert camel-riding when she decides to follow an ancient Indian trading route. Faith Adiele, a black Buddhist nun, enters a deserted train station at 3:00 a.m. in a Thai village controlled by armed bandits. Ena Singh negotiates with Russian police to visit the blue-domed city of Samarkand. In A Woman Alone, these women and others tell their funny, thrilling, occasionally terrifying, ultimately transformative stories of navigating some of the most unusual destinations on the globe.

As spring and summer vacations beckon, this book invites and incites a whole new approach to travel. "Postmarks from a Political Traveler" is a series of travel recollections confronting the troubling topics of roots and racism, polar bears and climate change, anti-Americanism, and the war in Afghanistan. The book opens with the story of the author s experience growing up in the Jim Crow South, traveling in apartheid South Africa, and living in the post-apartheid South Africa of 2009 and 2010. It explores the not-so-dissimilar roots and racism of the United States and South Africa, as well as the cross-fertilization of ideas between the two countries. The next installment chronicles two trips to Churchill, Manitoba, where the planet s largest population of polar bears congregate each October. It recounts the dramatic changes that have occurred in both the human and the polar bear communities in just the last decade and shows how the bears have become an Arctic version of the proverbial canary in the coalmine. Then the book shifts to the author s journey back to the United States on a German freighter with a rabidly anti-American captain. Woven into this account of life aboard a long haul ship are threads of the author s travels and anti-American encounters over a decade of living in Africa and Asia. The book concludes with reflections on trips to Afghanistan in 2004 and in 2012, describing the effects of war and conflict zone politics on women, education, refugees, and aid workers. What ties these episodes together is the author s commitment to social justice and to changing the world through travel and writing that is, affirming travel as a political act."

This comprehensive planning guide to 4x4 travel through eastern Africa (Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia) is based on first-hand travel experience. Introductory chapters give detailed general information and guidance on itineraries, what to take, potential costs, fuel availability, road conditions, security issues, requisite documentation, medical precautions, check lists, bush recipes and more. This is followed by descriptions of the routes traversed by the author and her party through six countries. Route maps and detailed, sensible advice equip future travellers with all the necessary information required to plan and carry out out a trouble-free trip through the region. Originally self-published under the title Beware of Falling Mangoes, this handy companion has easy, bulleted text and contains numerous photographs. An invaluable guide for 4x4 explorers to these less-travelled – but hugely rewarding – parts of our continent.

'Slowly Down the Ganges' is seen as a vintage Newby masterpiece, alongside 'A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush' and 'Love and War in the Apennines'. Told with Newby's self-deprecating humour and wry attention to detail, this is a classic of the genre and a window into an enchanting piece of history. On his forty-forth birthday, Eric Newby sets out on an incredible journey: to travel the 1,200-mile length of India's holy river. In a misguided attempt to keep him out of trouble, Wanda, his life-long travel companion and wife, is to be his fellow boatwoman. Their plan is to begin in the great plain of Hardwar and finish in the Bay of Bengal, but the journey almost immediately becomes markedly slower and more treacherous than either had imagined - running aground sixty-three times in the first six days. Travelling in a variety of unstable boats, as well as by rail, bus and bullock cart, and resting at sandbanks and remote villages, the Newbys encounter engaging characters and glorious mishaps, including the non-existence of large-scale maps of the country, a realisation that questions of pure 'logic' cause grave offense and, on one occasion, the only person in sight for miles is an old man who is himself unsure where he is. Newby's only consolation: on a river, if you go downstream, you're sure to end up somewhere...