The Roman poet Statius called the via Appia "the Queen of Roads," and for nearly a thousand years that description held true, as countless travelers trod its path from the center of Rome to the heel of Italy. Today, the road is all but gone, destroyed by time, neglect, and the incursions of modernity; to travel the Appian Way today is to be a seeker, and to walk in the footsteps of ghosts.
Our guide to those ghosts--and the layers of history they represent--is Robert A. Kaster. In "The Appian Way," he brings a lifetime of studying Roman literature and history to his adventures along the ancient highway. A footsore Roman soldier pushing the imperial power south; craftsmen and farmers bringing their goods to the towns that lined the road; pious pilgrims headed to Jerusalem, using stage-by-stage directions we can still follow--all come to life once more as Kaster walks (and drives--and suffers car trouble) on what's left of the Appian Way. Other voices help him tell the story: Cicero, Goethe, Hawthorne, Dickens, James, and even Monty Python offer commentary, insight, and curmudgeonly grumbles, their voices blending like the ages of the road to create a telescopic, perhaps kaleidoscopic, view of present and past.
To stand on the remnants of the Via Appia today is to stand in the pathway of history. With "The Appian Way," Kaster invites us to close our eyes and walk with him back in time, to the campaigns of Garibaldi, the revolt of Spartacus, and the glory days of Imperial Rome. No traveler will want to miss this fascinating journey.

"In Los Angeles, everyone is a star." - Denzel Washington For more than a century, seekers of sun and celebrity from around the world have flocked to this sprawling metropolis on the Pacific, which Dorothy Parker once described as "72 suburbs in search of a city." But beyond the red-carpet reputation and Tinseltown trappings is a west coast wonderland teeming with unexpected cultural experiences, iconic architecture, gorgeous open spaces, quirky museums, hidden vistas, unconventional art, and obscure stories about the starlets, moguls, personalities, and players who have made Los Angeles their playground. This unusual guidebook explores 111 of the city's most interesting and unknown places and experiences: wander a serpentine path in a spiritual quest of your own making; channel your inner cowboy at a tried and true honky tonk bar; pay homage to the Dude at the bungalow where the big Lebowski lived; turn your car tires into musical instruments on the country's only 'musical' road; sleep with the ghosts of Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin; view a constellation of stars more vivid than anything Hollywood has to offer. From the San Gabriel Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, Angelenos and visitors will fall in love with the real Los Angeles. Adventures beckon. Surprises await. Just imagine how much more scintillating your dinner-party storytelling will be.

"A book to be plundered and raided." -- "New York Times Book Review"
"A portal into a world of timeless travel literature curated by one of the greatest travel writers of our day." -- "USA Today"
Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe in this collection of the best writing from the books that have shaped him as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, "The Tao of Travel "contains excerpts from the best of Theroux's own work interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected:
"Vladimir Nabokov Eudora Welty
Evelyn Waugh James Baldwin
Charles Dickens Pico Iyer
Henry David Thoreau Anton Chekhov
Mark Twain John McPhee
Freya Stark Ernest Hemingway
Graham Greene and many others"
"Dazzling . . . Like someone panning for gold, Theroux reread hundreds of travel classics and modern works, shaking out the nuggets." -- "San Francisco Chronicle"

Inspired by the discovery of his childhood copy of Treasure Island, The Mail on Sunday's Frank Barrett embarks on a literary quest around Britain, from Eliot's East Coker to Austen's Bath, Winnie-the-Pooh's Hartfield to Dracula's Whitby. Armed with a lifetime of reading and his National Trust membership, Frank is on a personal odyssey through the Britain that has inspired so many writers to capture it in lines or verse, the homes they lived in, the museums that remember them. There will be rain, there will be truculent tour guides, there will be satnav misdemeanours (there may even be tuberculosis), but Frank will carry on regardless. Where? To the lighthouse...

The story of extraordinary women who lost their way - their sense of self, their identity, their freedom - and found it again through walking in the wild. 'Moving and memorable' Virginia Nicholson, author of How Was It for You? 'A triumph ... I felt as though I were being lifted, carried up to peaks' Charlotte Peacock, author of Into the Mountain: A Life of Nan Shepherd 'A beautiful and meditative memoir' Publishers Weekly For centuries, the wilds have been male territory, while women sat safely confined at home. But not all women did as they were told, despite the dangers; history reveals women for whom rural walking became inspiration, consolation and liberation. In this powerful and deeply inspiring book, Annabel Abbs uncovers women who refused to conform, who recognised a biological, emotional and artistic need for wilderness, water and desert - and who took the courageous step of walking unpeopled and often forbidding landscapes. Part wild-walk, part memoir, Windswept follows an exhilarating journey from Abbs's isolated, car-less childhood to her walking the remote paths trodden by extraordinary women, including Georgia O'Keeffe in the empty plains of Texas and New Mexico, Nan Shepherd in the mountains of Scotland, Gwen John following the Garonne, Simone de Beauvoir in the mountains and forests of France and Daphne du Maurier along the River Rhone. A single question pulses through their walks: How does a woman change once she becomes windswept?

For more than fifty years, Ward travelled remote areas of the Far East looking for beautiful flowers and shrubs likely to thrive in western gardens and for new botanical specimens. His discoveries included new kinds of rhododendrons, lilies, gentians, primulas and the legendary Tibetan blue poppy. This is a narrative of his adventures and discoveries in Tibet in 1933, illustrated with his own photographs. Ward conveys the excitement of exploration, the thrill of danger and the rewards of discovery as, in one precarious situation after another, he discovers new plants and seeds.

***SILVER AWARD WINNER, 2019 NAUTILUS BOOK AWARDS!*** The Children's Fire forges a trail into Britain's wild and ancient Celtic past. It locates the fragments of a story that still has resonance today; the pulse and surge of an older wisdom that cracks the mendacity of the shopping mall's vacuous promise. It is a passionate evocation of a generous, inclusive, diverse and spiritually significant world - the world of our longing. In the winter of 2009 Mac Macartney walked from his birthplace in England across Wales to the island of Anglesey, once the spiritual epicentre of Late Iron Age Britain, navigating by the sun and the stars, with no map, compass, stove or tent, and in the coldest winter for many years. The Children's Fire records that journey, and seeks to lay bare the aching loss of knowing and understanding sacredness as it applies to everything ordinary that brings joy to the human heart. It asserts the emergence of a new story; the story of a people coming home to a truth made all the more poignant having so painfully broken faith with nature, our deeper humanity, and the paradise we fouled with such casual disrespect. It is a love story and part of a larger narrative that is surfacing all around the world. It seeks to reclaim our future and name it, beautiful.

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.

The 'memsahibs' of the British Raj in India are well-known figures today, frequently depicted in fiction, TV, and film. In recent years, they have also become the focus of extensive scholarship. Less familiar to both academics and the general public, however, are the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors to the memsahibs of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Yet British women also visited and resided in India in this earlier period, witnessing first-hand the tumultuous, expansionist decades in which the East India Company established British control over the subcontinent. Some of these travellers produced highly regarded accounts of their experiences, thereby inaugurating a rich tradition of women's travel writing about India. In the process, they not only reported events and developments in the subcontinent; they also contributed to them, helping to shape opinion and policy on issues such as colonial rule, religion, and social reform. This new set in the Chawton House Library Women's Travel Writing series assembles seven of these accounts, six by British authors (Jemima Kindersley, Maria Graham, Eliza Fay, Ann Deane, Julia Maitland and Mary Sherwood) and one by an American (Harriet Newell). Their narratives - here reproduced for the first time in reset scholarly editions - were published between 1777 and 1854, and recount journeys undertaken in India, or periods of residence there, between the 1760s and the 1830s. Collectively they showcase the range of women's interests and activities in India, and also the variety of narrative forms, voices and personae available to them as travel writers. Some stand squarely in the tradition of Enlightenment ethnography; others show the growing influence of Evangelical beliefs. But all disrupt any lingering stereotypes about women's passivity, reticence, and lack of public agency in this period, when colonial women were not yet as sequestered and debarred from cross-cultural contact as they would later be during the Raj. Their narratives are consequently a useful resource to students and researchers across multiple fields and disciplines, including women's writing, travel writing, colonial and postcolonial studies, the history of women's educational and missionary work, and Romantic-era and nineteenth-century literature.

Originally published in 1908, "Two American Women Journey Through East and South Africa" desribes a trip made by two American women to Uganda and the Transvaal in the hopes of inspiring other Americans to do the same. This fascinating tour of Africa opens the eyes of any traveller, in particular those that enjoy a more comfortable journey. Caroline Kirkland points out that it is possible to see the plains of Africa, rich with zebras, gnus, giraffes, and even lions, from a railway carriage window. Though only claiming to have touched the surface of the vast continent, she describes the African landscape as "dark, mysterious, violent and enchanting."

'An Intrepid Scot' makes an important new contribution to the growing literature on the perceptions of the Islamic world and the 'Orient' in early modern Europe, at the same time as illuminating the attitudes of a Protestant from Northern Europe towards the Catholic South. In this book Edmund Bosworth looks at the life and career of William Lithgow, a tough and opinionated Scots Protestant, who had a seemingly insatiable Wanderlust and who managed to survive various misadventures and near-death experiences in the course of his travels. These took him through a dangerously Catholic Southern Europe to a dangerously Muslim Greece and Istanbul en route for his pilgrimage destination of the Holy Land; on another occasion he went through North Africa and returned circuitously via Central and Eastern Europe; but he was stopped in his tracks whilst endeavouring to reach the court of Prester John in Ethiopia, when he fell into the hands of the Spanish Inquisition and narrowly escaped a horrible death. Lithgow was one of several men of his time who journeyed eastwards, some as far as Persia and India, but unlike many others, he has not been the subject of a special study. Bosworth now places him within the context of the present interest in perceptions of the Islamic world and of the 'Orient' and 'Orientals' in early modern Europe. In addition to the entertainment of the travel narrative, the book shows how one Westerner of the time interpreted the alien East for his readers, and how the Ottoman Empire and its apparently unstoppable might both fascinated and struck fear into the hearts of those outside it.

On 26th April 2014 Huw kayaked away from Anzac Cove at Gallipoli, Turkey, taking the next three months to navigate around the coasts of Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Croatia. Following this, he spent three months walking the full length of the European Alps, taking on Mont Blanc, at 4810m Europe's highest mountain, in the process. Having left the Alps behind, he biked through Southern France and across Spain before paddling his sea kayak along the coast of Andalucia to Gibraltar and across the Straits of Gibraltar, between the Pillars of Hercules, to North Africa. This was a major achievement, a full traverse of Europe in eight months; 7,500 km from Turkey. However, for Huw, this was only the half-way point. During winter, the coldest and stormiest for many years, Huw continued the journey by bike through Morocco, Algeria and into Tunisia. The ever-worsening situation in the region forced him to abandon his bike in favour of an alternative mode of transport. A wonderful set of coincidences and circumstances saw Huw use an ocean rowboat to row, by night and day, the 1,500 km to Turkey with a young Slovenian adventurer. It was the first time he had ever rowed in his life.For the final month Huw kayaked the last 1,000 km to where it all began along a Turkish coast now awash with the flotsam and jetsam of the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. After 363 days Huw arrived back to Gallipoli, in time for the centenary commemoration of Anzac Day. His incredible journey included many memorable events such as being held on a Turkish military island after inadvertently landing to camp, meeting an amazing one-legged hiker while crossing the Alps and arriving dog-tired and starving by kayak to Africa after local kindnesses beat back British and Spanish political differences over Gibraltar to allow a crossing of the Straits of Gibraltar. Huw took in the extraordinary land and seascapes, the rich and varied cultures and peoples and the current state of many of those countries. This is a fascinating story of endurance, and throughout this epic journey Huw raised funds for the children of war-torn Syria, in the process becoming Save the Children Australia's highest-ever individual fundraiser.

An Inspiration for Anyone Who Wonders If the Time for Adventure Has Passed This is the story of a middle-aged businesswoman who left a successful career to see if she could find something more meaningful to do with her life. A noncyclist, Eloise Hanner joined the first Big Ride (sponsored by the American Lung Association), in which more than seven hundred bicycle riders crossed the country from Seattle to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1998. To Hanner, the ride represented a new beginning fraught with challenges and opportunities. Starting from zero, she trained for several months to work up to where she could ride and average of more than eighty miles a day. What started as a bicycle odyssey, however, developed into a distilled version of life, where storms became life-threatening and strong friendships formed in days instead of weeks or months. More than a travelogue, Hanner's account of the inaugural Big Ride is an examination of career and values and what to do with the second half of life—a question asked by many baby boomers as they approach fifty.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) is a work of travel literature by British explorer Isabella Bird. Adventurous from a young age, Bird gained a reputation as a writer and photographer interested in nature and the stories and cultures of people around the world. A bestselling author and the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society, Bird is recognized today as a pioneering woman whose contributions to travel writing, exploration, and philanthropy are immeasurable. In 1872—after a year of sailing from Britain to Australia and Hawaii—Isabella Bird journeyed by boat to San Francisco before making her way over land through California and Wyoming to the Colorado Territory. There, she befriended an outdoorsman named Rocky Mountain Jim, who guided her throughout the vast wilderness of Colorado and accompanied her during a journey of over 800 miles. Traveling on foot and on horseback—Bird was an experienced and skillful rider—the two formed a curious but formidable pair, eventually reaching the 14,259 foot (4346 m) summit of Longs Peak, making Bird one of the first women to accomplish the feat. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, Bird’s most iconic work, was a bestseller upon publication, and has since inspired generations of readers. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains is a classic of American literature and travel writing reimagined for modern readers.

WINNER: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER READER AWARD FOR BEST TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016 WINNER: BOOKS ARE MY BAG READER AWARD FOR BEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY OR BIOGRAPHY 2016 Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to celebrate the green and kindly island that had become his adopted country. The hilarious book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, was taken to the nation's heart and became the bestselling travel book ever, and was also voted in a BBC poll the book that best represents Britain.Now, to mark the twentieth anniversary of that modern classic, Bryson makes a brand-new journey round Britain to see what has changed. Following (but not too closely) a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, by way of places that many people never get to at all, Bryson sets out to rediscover the wondrously beautiful, magnificently eccentric, endearingly unique country that he thought he knew but doesn't altogether recognize any more. Yet, despite Britain's occasional failings and more or less eternal bewilderments, Bill Bryson is still pleased to call our rainy island home. And not just because of the cream teas, a noble history, and an extra day off at Christmas. Once again, with his matchless homing instinct for the funniest and quirkiest, his unerring eye for the idiotic, the endearing, the ridiculous and the scandalous, Bryson gives us an acute and perceptive insight into all that is best and worst about Britain today.

In this journal of his travels in Bolivia and Peru, Nouwen ponders the presence of God in the poor, the challenge of a persecuted church, the relation between faith and justice, and his own struggle to discern the path along which God is calling him. "Nouwen puts his inexhaustible curiosity and hunger for religious experience gladly at the service of a worldwide audience".--The Boston Globe.

Isaac Titsingh was head of the Japanese station of the Dutch East India Company 1780-94. He was a career merchant, but unusual in having a classical education and training as a physician. He could also read Chinese. In Japan, his impact was enormous. He became a friend and confidant of the shogun's father-in-law, the famously wise but wily Shimazu Shigehide, almost causing war between father and son-in-law. He also attempted the project of equipping Japan with an ocean-going fleet. However, he left Japan disappointed in the ability of the country to embrace change. After many years in India he settled in Paris, where he wrote down his experiences. It is one of the most exciting journals of the period and reveals the almost unknown world of eighteenth-century Japan, discussing politics, history, poetry and rituals. The Illustrations of Japan appeared posthumously in 1822 in English and French. This fully annotated edition makes the original English version available for the first time in 180 years.

This is a narrative of travels in Japan undertaken in 1878 by someone who is probably the most famous female traveller and writer of the Victorian era. Travelling alone as a woman, she was the first to enter parts of Japan which had had no cultural contact whatsoever with a European, let alone a woman on her own. The letters which make up this work give a real picture of Japan and Japanese life at the time.

It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still Australia teems with life - a large portion of it quite deadly. In fact, Australia has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way than anywhere else. Ignoring such dangers - and yet curiously obsessed by them - Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country. And who can blame him? The people are cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted and unfailingly obliging: their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water; the food is excellent; the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines. Life doesn't get much better than this...

Delving into Brazil's baroque past, Peter Robb writes about its history of slavery and the richly multicultural but disturbed society that was left in its wake when the practice was abolished in the late nineteenth century. Even today, Brazil is a hation of almost unimaginable distance between its wealthy and its poor, a place of extraordinary levels of crime and violence. It is also one of the most beautiful and seductive places on earth. Using the art and the food, and the books of its great nineteenth century writer, Machado de Assis, Robb takes us on a journey into a world like Conrad's Nostromo. A world so absurdly dramatic, like the current president Lula's fight for power, that it could have come from one of the country's immensely popular TV soap operas, a world where resolution is often only provided by death. Like all the best travel writing, A Death in Brazil immerses you deep into the heart of a fascinating country. Vivid, obsessive and intelligent, this is an utterly enthralling account.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE The original bestseller from the beloved author of UNDERLAND, LANDMARKS and THE LOST WORDS - Robert Macfarlane travels Britain's ancient paths and discovers the secrets of our beautiful, underappreciated landscape 'The Old Ways confirms Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature' Scotland on Sunday Following the tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast ancient network of routes criss-crossing the British Isles and beyond, Robert Macfarlane discovers a lost world - a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ritual, of stories and ghosts; above all of the places and journeys which inspire and inhabit our imaginations. 'Sublime... It sets the imagination tingling, laying an irresistible trail for readers to follow' Sunday Times 'Read this and it will be impossible to take an unremarkable walk again' Metro 'He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful' Antony Gormley

This is the story of Stevenson's Pacific travels on the Casco and the Equator. It is a beautifully observed account of island peoples and their life; it is also the story of the beginning of his love affair with the Pacific, and of his growing commitment to the island cause. "In the South Seas" has been described as "the most solid of Stevenson's general writings;" it is certainly his least known book as well as a unique gem of Pacific literature, and richly deserves to be rediscovered.