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Books > Sport & Leisure > Travel & holiday > Travel writing
Commemorating Cicerone's 50th year, Fifty Years of Adventure is a
compilation of tales by Cicerone authors. A story to celebrate each
year Cicerone has been publishing outdoor activity guidebooks, the
collection is a delicious hotpot of adventures in their every shape
and form. Soak up the sun, ice-cream in hand, with Aileen Evans on
the Isle of Man coast path; discover the secret side of Snowdon
with Rachel Crolla; cycle downhill for five weeks on the Danube
Cycleway with Mike Wells; climb Kilimanjaro with Alex Stewart; and
feel the sting of sub zero temperatures climbing K2 - the Savage
Mountain - with Alan Hinkes. Also featured are ten tales of mishaps
and misadventures that have befallen Cicerone authors while out and
about, researching for a guidebook. Between stifling giggles and
gasping out loud, gain greater insight into the mighty task that is
guidebook writing. And in 'The Cicerone Story', learn about other
aspects of guidebook creation, and discover how things have changed
over the last fifty years. Accompanied by outstanding photography,
each page of this finely crafted anniversary book is a veritable
visual delight. As enchanting as it is inspiring, Fifty Years of
Adventure is a must for anyone with an appreciation for adventure.
Spellbound by his grandmother s Anglo Indian heritage and the
exuberant annual visits of her friend the Begum, Isambard Wilkinson
became enthralled by Pakistan as an intrepid teenager, eventually
working there as a foreign correspondent during the War on Terror.
Seeking the land behind the headlines, Bard sets out to discover
the essence of a country convulsed by Islamist violence. What of
the old, mystical Pakistan has survived and what has been
destroyed? His is a funny, hashish? and whisky?scented travel book
from the frontline, full of open?hearted delight and a poignant
lust for life.
'This is a joy of a book. I know nothing of sweaters and little of
Iceland, and this book used pictures and words to open Iceland and
its people for me, using Icelandic sweaters and knitting to do it.'
- Neil Gaiman In Iceland there's a piece of knitwear that everybody
has but no one has bought: the lopapeysa, or 'lopi' for short. This
sweater made from unspun Icelandic wool is a treasured piece of the
island's culture passed down from generation to generation, used
and cherished. In this guide, Joan of Dark and Kyle Cassidy take
you on an 800-mile adventure around Iceland's breathtaking
landscapes to explore and experience the island's rich knitting
tradition and to show you how to make your very own lopi-style
knits. By interviewing local experts, wool producers and knitters
they trace the history of the patterns and along the way meet rock
stars, professors and designers who share their knitting-related
stories and reveal some of their country's hidden gems. From
isolated waterfalls, hot springs and iconic movie locations to
beautiful Icelandic horses, giant glaciers and erupting volcanos,
the book is full of stunning photographs at every turn. The journey
inspired 12 beautiful lopi-style knitting patterns all presented
here with photographs, charts and detailed instructions to
carefully guide you through each project whether you are a complete
beginner or an experienced knitter. So pick up your needles and
spend some time in the land of ice and fire! Work your way through
the projects from the traditional sweater to gloves and hats, a
cosy jumper dress and stylish headbands all while finding out why
the lopapeysa is so special and so individual to Iceland.
Over the years, authors, artists and amblers aplenty have felt the
pull of the Thames, and now travel writer Tom Chesshyre is
following in their footsteps. He's walking the length of the river
from the Cotswolds to the North Sea - a winding journey of over two
hundred miles. Join him for an illuminating stroll past meadows,
churches and palaces, country estates and council estates,
factories and dockyards. Setting forth in the summer of Brexit, and
meeting a host of interesting characters along the way, Chesshyre
explores the living present and remarkable past of England's
longest and most iconic river.
'I am already planning the next adventure. The wanderlust that
infected me has no cure.' It all started in Fishguard in the
mid-1970s when, aged fifteen, Martyn Howe and a friend set off on
the Pembrokeshire Coast Path armed with big rucksacks, borrowed
boots, a Primus stove and a pint of paraffin, and a thirst for
adventure. After repeating the route almost thirty years later,
Martyn was inspired to walk every National Trail in England and
Wales, plus the four Long-Distance Routes (now among the Great
Trails) in Scotland. His 3,000-mile journey included treks along
the South West Coast Path, the Pennine Way, the Cotswold Way and
the West Highland Way. He finally achieved his ambition in 2016
when he arrived in Cromer in Norfolk, only to set a new goal of
walking the England and Wales Coast Paths and the Scottish National
Trail. In Tales from the Big Trails, Martyn vividly describes the
diverse landscapes, wildlife, culture and heritage he encounters
around the British Isles, and the physical and mental health
benefits he derives from walking. He also celebrates the people who
enrich his travels, including fellow long-distance hikers, tourists
discovering Britain's charm, farmers working the land, and the
friendly and eccentric owners of hostels, campsites and B&Bs.
And when he is asked 'Why do you do it?', the answer is as simple
as placing one foot in front of the other: 'It makes me happy.'
This is the tale of an epic three-month adventure through
unexplored jungle terrain - and it might even change your life
Fuelled by a zest for life and the desire to explore the world
around her, Pip Stewart took on a world-first challenge: following
Guyana's Essequibo River from source to sea. With the help of
guides from the Wai Wai indigenous community, Pip and her teammates
journeyed through the rainforest, facing peril every day as they
kayaked rapids, traversed waterfalls and hacked their way through
the mountainous jungle of the Guiana Shield, before finally
reaching the Atlantic Ocean. Survival skills and a flesh-eating
parasite weren't the only things Pip took home from the rainforest.
From contending with snakes to learning about the value of
community, forgiveness and self-belief, in Life Lessons from the
Amazon Pip shares many pearls of wisdom that we can all apply to
our own lives. Her hard-won insights invite us to embrace the
wildness within ourselves and live more every day.
This adventure story is also the biography of Heinrich Harrer,
already a famous mountaineer and Olympic ski champion when he was
caught by the outbreak of the World War II while climbing in the
Himalayas.;Being an Austrian he was interned in India but succeeded
in escaping into Tibet. After a series of experiences in a country
never before crossed by a Westerner he reached the forbidden city
of Lhasa. He stayed there for seven years, learned the language and
acquired an understanding of Tibet and the Tibetans.;He became the
friend and tutor of the young Dalai Lama and finally accompanied
him into India when he was put to flight by the Red Chinese
invasion.;As a mountaineer Heinrich Harrer was a member of the
party which successfully ascended the North Wall of the Eiger in
1938.
Comprehensive, illustrated guidebook to the magical land of Ladakh
in the far north of India, beyond the Himalayas. Up to date
information on hotels and transport and practical advice on
planning and budgeting your trip. Detailed explanatory descriptions
of the regions' famous Buddhist monasteries and other sights
besides the stupendous road journeys to Ladakh from Manali and
Kashmir, with entire sections on these two regions. There are
extensive sections on Zanskar, Nubra, and the Pangong-Tsomoriri
lakes, besides a chapter on the treks in Ladakh. Also included is a
detailed introduction to Tibetan Buddhism and a section on the
people and history of Ladakh. Apart from a foldout map of the
Ladakh-Kashmir region at the back, there are some 25 other maps in
the books, and about 270 colour photographs.
Henrietta is a true original. Clever, vivacious and interested in
everything, she managed to balance the demands of high profile
public life with that of a caring mother. She was the home-schooled
daughter of a bankrupt Earl and more than just a little bit in love
with her handsome wayward brother, but had been married off to a
plump pudding of a man, the nabob Edward Clive, governor of Madras.
And her partial escape was to ride across southern India (in a vast
tented caravan propelled by dozens of elephants, camels and a
hundred bullock carts) and write home. For centuries this account,
the first joyful description of India by a British woman, remained
unread in a Welsh castle. Fortunately it was transcribed by a Texan
traveller, who went on to splice this already evocative memoir with
complementary sections from the diary of Henrietta's precocious
daughter, the 12-year old Charly and images of their artist
companion, Anna Tonelli. The resulting labour of love and
scholarship is Birds of Passage, a unique trifocular account of
three very different women travelling across southern India in the
late 18th century, in the immediate aftermath of the last of the
Mysore Wars between Tipoo Sahib and the Raj. Half a generation
later, the well travelled Charly would be chosen as tutor for the
young princess Victoria, the First Empress of India.
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
This two-volume work provides the first edited publication of
Matthew Flinders's fair journals from the circumnavigation of
Australia in 1801-1803 in HMS Investigator, and of the 'Memoir' he
wrote to accompany his journals and charts. These are among the
most important primary texts in Australian maritime history and
European voyaging in the Pacific. Flinders was the first explorer
to circumnavigate Australia. He was also largely responsible for
giving Australia its name. His voyage was supported by the
Admiralty, the Navy Board, the East India Company and the patronage
of Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society. Banks ensured
that the Investigator expedition included scientific gentlemen to
document Australia's flora, fauna, geology and landscape features.
The botanist Robert Brown, botanical painter Ferdinand Bauer,
landscape artist William Westall and the gardener Peter Good were
all members of the voyage. After landfall at Cape Leeuwin, Flinders
sailed anti-clockwise round the whole continent, returning to Port
Jackson when the ship became unseaworthy. After a series of
misfortunes, including a shipwreck and a long detention at the Ile
de France (now Mauritius), Flinders returned to England in 1810. He
devoted the last four years of his life to preparing A Voyage to
Terra Australis, published in two volumes, and an atlas. Flinders
died on 19 July 1814 at the age of forty. The fair journals edited
here comprise a daily log with full nautical information and
'remarks' on the coastal landscape, the achievements of previous
navigators in Australian waters, encounters with Aborigines and
Macassan trepangers, naval routines, scientific findings, and
Flinders's surveying and charting. The journals also include
instructions for the voyage and some additional correspondence. The
'Memoir' explains Flinders' methodology in compiling his journals
and charts and the purpose and content of his surveys. This edition
has a substantial introduction
English spas have a long and steamy history, from the thermal baths
of Aquae Sulis in Bath to the stews of Southwark, the elegant pump
rooms of Cheltenham and Buxton to the Victorian mania for
hydrotherapy and Turkish hammams. 'The Secret History of English
Spas' is an informative but light-hearted social and cultural
history of our obsession with drinking and bathing in spa waters.
It tells the stories of the rich, the famous, the poor and the
sick, all of whom visited spas in hopes of curing everything from
infertility to leprosy and gonorrhoea. It depicts the entrepreneurs
who promoted these resorts - often on the basis of the most dubious
scientific evidence - and the riotous and salacious social life
enjoyed in spa towns, where moral health might suffer even as
bodies were cleansed and purged. And yet English spas also offered
an ideal of civility and politeness, providing a place where social
classes and sexes could mingle and enjoy refined entertainments
such as music and dance - all part of the fashionable pastime
referred to as 'taking the waters'.
The second book in V. S. Naipaul's acclaimed Indian trilogy. In
1964 V. S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness, his
semi-autobiographical account of a year in India. Two visits later,
prompted by the Emergency of 1975, he came to write India: A
Wounded Civilization. In this work he casts a more analytical eye
than before over Indian attitudes, while recapitulating and further
probing the feelings aroused in him by this vast, mysterious, and
agonized country. What he saw and heard - evoked so superbly and
vividly in these pages - reinforced in him a conviction that India,
wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, has not yet found an
ideology of regeneration. A work of fierce candour and precision,
it is also a generous description of one man's complicated
relationship with the country of his ancestors. 'A devastating
work, but proof that a novelist of Naipaul's stature can often
define problems quicker and more effectively than a team of
economists and other experts' The Times
Twee vriendinne besluit om die spoor van die die Nama-mense
(afstammelinge van die Khoi-Khoi) van die Noord-Kaap te volg. Hulle
vertrek met die doel om uit te vind hoe hulle "gefragmenteerde"
kulturele ervaringe eenders of anders as die van Annie en haar
mense, die sogenaamde Kaapse bruinmense is. Maar wat begin het as
'n soeke na "objektiewe" feite en inligting, het mettertyd gelei
tot 'n proses van selfondersoek en 'n ontdekkingstog wat deur noue,
intieme interaksie met die mense van Namakwaland, hoop skep dat
lampe aangesteek kan word wat die "andersheid", maar veral die
"eendersheid" van die verskillende etniese en kulturele groepe in
SA sal uitlig.
Across Palestine, from the Allenby Bridge and Ramallah, to
Jerusalem and Gaza, Marcello Di Cintio has met with writers, poets,
librarians, booksellers and readers, finding extraordinary stories
in every corner. Stories of how revolutionary writing is smuggled
from the Naqab Prison, and about what it is like to write with only
two hours of electricity each day. Stories from the Gallery Cafe,
whose opening three thousand creative intellectuals gathered to
celebrate; and the lost generations of stories contained within the
looted books that sit in Israel's National Library. Pay No Heed to
the Rockets offers a window into the literary heritage of Palestine
that transcends the narrow language of conflict, revealing a
humanity often unreported. Paying homage to the memory of literary
giants like Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani and the
contemporary authors whom they continue to inspire, this evocative,
lyrical journey shares both the anguish and inspiration of
Palestine today.
"Life-affirming and laugh-out-loud funny" - HELEN FIELDING, AUTHOR
OF BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY Shape of a Boy is a hilarious and
eye-opening travel memoir by the mother of three boys as she
documents her travels with her family around the world. 'Have kids,
will travel' is veteran travel journalist Kate's mantra. Her
intrepid spirit is infectious in this warm, engaging account of her
family's adventures and misadventures. She shares the life lessons
learnt on their travels, from overcoming disappointment in Thailand
to saying sorry in Japan, discovering perseverance in Borneo and
learning about conservation in Malaysia. From the jungles of
southeast Asia to the waterfront in Havana and the blazing heat of
Egypt, Shape of a Boy captures the essence of being a parent in the
thick of it and learning on the hoof. Inspirational for anyone who
has dreaded travelling with a baby, toddler, or teen, it is a
life-affirming read for every wannabe-traveller. Kate's vivid
evocation of the highs and lows of family time make you belly-laugh
and bring a lump to your throat. "Hilarious and wonderfully fluent,
Shape of A Boy makes you see each corner of the world afresh. I
read it in one long, lounging read, which took me away from Covid
to a vibrant world of orangutans and elephants and a family growing
together." ANDREW CLOVER, best-selling author of Dad Rules This is
a must-read for every wannabe-traveller grounded by lockdown and
for every parent who has dreaded travelling with a baby.
After a decade of making documentaries about offbeat characters on
the fringes of US society, Louis had the urge to return to America
and track down the people who most fascinated him. It would be a
reunion tour, but this time without the cameras and the sense of
performance being filmed inevitably brings. It would allow him to
get closer to people, to discover what really motivated them and
what had happened to the assorted dreamers, outlaws and eccentrics
since he last saw them. On a journey that took him from the porn
sets of Los Angeles to the gangsta rappers of Memphis, from a
convention of UFO contactees in Arizona to Northern Idaho for a
festive get-together of neo-Nazis, he asked what 'weird people'
have to tell us about our own secret natures. Had he learned
anything about himself by being among them? Do we choose our
beliefs or do our beliefs choose us? Louis Theroux's first book is
a hilarious, thought-provoking and at times surreal voyage into the
heart of weirdness.
Mountaintops have long been seen as sacred places, home to gods and
dreams. In one climbing year Peter Boardman visited three very
different sacred mountains. He began in the New Year, on the South
Face of the Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea. This shark's fin of
steep limestone walls and sweeping glaciers is the highest point
between the Andes and the Himalaya, and one of the most
inaccessible, rising above thick jungle inhabited by warring Stone
Age tribes. During the spring Boardman was on more familiar, if
hardly more reassuring, ground, making a four-man, oxygen-free
attempt on the world's third highest peak, Kangchenjunga.
Hurricane-force winds beat back their first two bids on the
unclimbed North Ridge, but they eventually stood within feet of the
summit - leaving the final few yards untrodden in deference to the
inhabiting deity. In October, he was back in the Himalaya and
climbing the mountain most sacred to the Sherpas: the twin-summited
Gauri Sankar. Renowned for its technical difficulty and spectacular
profile, it is aptly dubbed the Eiger of the Himalaya and
Boardman's first ascent of the South Summit took a committing and
gruelling twenty-three days. Three sacred mountains, three very
different expeditions, all superbly captured by Boardman in Sacred
Summits, his second book, first published shortly after his death
in 1982. Combining the excitement of extreme climbing with acute
observation of life in the mountains, this is an amusing, dramatic,
poignant and thought-provoking book, amply fulfilling the promise
of Boardman's first title, The Shining Mountain, for which he won
the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1979.
Paul Murton journeys the length and breadth of the spectacularly
beautiful Scottish Highlands. In addition to bringing a fresh eye
to popular destinations such as Glencoe, Ben Nevis, Loch Ness and
the Cairngorms, he also visits some remote and little-known
locations hidden off the beaten track. Throughout his travels, Paul
meets a host of modern Highlanders, from caber tossers and
gamekeepers to lairds to pipers. With an instinct for the unusual,
he uncovers some strange tales, myths and legends along the way:
stories of Jacobites, clan warfare, murder and cattle rustling fill
each chapter - as well as some hilarious anecdotes based on his
extensive personal experience of a place he loves to call home.
This is a profoundly original and entertaining history of France,
from the first century bc to the present day, based on countless
new discoveries and thirty years of exploring France on foot, by
bicycle and in the library. Beginning with the Roman army's first
recorded encounter with the Gauls and ending with the gilet jaunes
protests in the era of Emmanuel Macron, each chapter is an
adventure in its own right. Along the way, readers will find the
usual faces, events and themes of French history - Louis XIV, the
French Revolution, the French Resistance, the Tour de France - but
all presented in a shining new light. Graham Robb's France: An
Adventure History does not offer a standard dry list of facts and
dates, but a panorama of France, teeming with characters, full of
stories, journeys and coincidences, giving readers a thrilling
sense of discovery and enlightenment. It is a vivid, living history
of one of the world's most fascinating nations by a ceaselessly
entertaining writer in complete command of subject and style.
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Op Ver Paaie
P.J. Schoeman
Paperback
R163
Discovery Miles 1 630
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