'Next year I’m going to be 80 years old. My car will be 20 years old. Together we'll be 100. We’re going to drive to London.'

'And what route are you going to take?'

'I have no idea. I think I’ll keep to the right.'

When 80-year old Julia Albu calls in to her favourite radio show with a zany, half-baked idea, she has no idea that it will lead her to the adventure of a lifetime.

From helping push a 30-year-old Toyota bakkie up a precipitous mountain pass in Malawi to being 'adopted' by the riotous ex-pat South African community in Dar es Salaam and being fed mildly hallucinogenic 'herbs' by her Ethiopian driver-guide, nothing deterred 80-year-old Julia Albu from her quest to drive through Africa from the Cape to Cairo.

She and her 20-year-old Toyota Conquest, Tracy - a personality in her own right - travelled through 10 African countries, from South Africa to Egypt (and beyond). Julia was accompanied by a series of companions who added texture to her travels: three of her four grown-up children, her son-in-law, and at least one person who began as a complete stranger and ended up as a friend for life.

Reminiscing about her long and interesting life along the way, and maintaining a bright and upbeat outlook regardless of the circumstances, Julia proves that you're never too old to tackle that bucket list.

After exploring more than twenty other African nations using only public transport, Sihle Khumalo this time roams within the borders of his own country. The familiarity of his own car is a luxury, but what he finds on his journey through South Africa ranges from the puzzling to the downright bizarre.

Voyaging from the northernmost part of South Africa right to the south, the author noses his car down freeways and back roads into small towns, townships, and villages, some of which you’ll have trouble finding on a map.

But this is no clichéd description of beautiful landscapes and blue skies. Khumalo is out to investigate the state of the nation, from its highest successes to its most depressing failures. Whether or not he’s baffled, surprised, or sometimes plain angry, Sihle Khumalo will always find warmth in his fellow South Africans: security guards, religious visionaries, drunks, political activists and the many other colourful personalities that come alive in his riveting account.

In May 2015 Weg/Go journalist Erns Grundling was disillusioned with love, life and himself. Then he decided to embark on a life-changing journey, undertaking a solo walk along the Camino, the famous Spanish pilgrimage – despite being illprepared, overweight, unfit and nursing an injury.

Walk it Off recounts Erns’s 1 025 kilometre journey, completed in 40 days without cell phone, camera or watch, so that he could rediscover what it means to truly live in the moment.

He falls in love (three and a half times), meets a fellow pilgrim who’s his doppelganger, experiences numerous adventures and comes across a series of colourful characters. In the process he sheds 10 kilograms and undergoes an inner transformation.

Walk it Off is something out of the ordinary – a travelogue and memoir, and a life-affirming adventure story that will inspire readers to put on their walking shoes and dare to venture where they haven’t gone before.

In Celebrate celebrity chef and TV personality Lorna Maseko takes you on a food journey starting in Alexandra.

She shares her memories savouring a burger and chips when she participated in the Prix De Lausanne ballet competition; explains how she fell in love with Asian food when she visited Hong Kong; how she participated in MasterChef South Africa and made one of her mom’s favourite chicken dishes.

Lorna lauds the role Chef Carlos Gayton played in her love for fish and Mexican food; she shows how traditional dishes can be recreated using a bit of imagination; how she learned to prepare the perfect steak in chef’s school; how travelling exposed her to international food cultures..

Make all these wonderful dishes in your own kitchen – and celebrate the big moments in your life with food brought to you by Lorna Maseko.

In Dit proe soos huis eer Herman Lensing sy ma met sy uitsonderlike talent. Hy weef haar gunstelingresepte, passie vir kos en hul eie stories ineen. Dit is resepte van onthou dié – ’n kosverhaal wat dít wat is, verbind met dít wat was. Kos is liefde en in die kombuis klop die hart van die huis. 

Told with the immediacy of a diary, which is where the book began, Patrick takes us on a journey to the highest mountain in the world, where one of the greatest tragedies in climbing history was about to unfold. Filled with photographs and sketches from his notebooks we become part of the Radio 702 team sent to cover the South African Everest Expedition of 1996. It would turn out to be the deadliest climbing seasons in the peak’s history.

Twenty years later the controversy around what truly happened on the mountain continues to rage. Conroy kept a meticulous diary and recorded many hours of radio communications between the climbers. Now, two decades later, his memoirs reveal a remarkable and untold story of what happened on the mountain that fateful year. Everest Untold includes hidden insights and never before revealed transcripts that shed new light on the 1996 disaster, including the mysterious disappearance of one of the South African team members in the death zone.

Conroy’s hidden story reopens the debate on the risks of high-altitude mountaineering and what it meant to a young democratic South Africa unaware of the dangers that lay ahead.

Tom David and Warren Handley are two South Africans who at 24 years-of-age took the first steps of a life-changing journey.

This is the honest, gripping account of climbing the highest mountain in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro, and walking 6 000km through six countries on US$2 a day in aid of early childhood development.

In a story of extreme pain and even greater kindness, overcoming challenges and lessons learned, they have a message to share.

South Africa is a country rich in pathways, tracks and roads – both tar and gravel. It is also a country of wonderful stories, blessed with a varied, colourful and contested history.

For more than a year veteran journalist Luke Alfred walked South Africa’s roads through cities, countryside and everything in between.

Early One Sunday Morning I Decided to Step Out and Find South Africa tells the stories of some of the country’s most interesting and sometimes forgotten places.

What’s your cat up to when you’re not around? Do dragons exist? Are clouds alive? Why did three men risk their lives for a single penguin egg?

These are just a few of the questions and stories puzzled over by award-winning travel writer and naturalist Don Pinnock. Assembled from years of wandering around Africa, this is a funny, entertaining and thought-provoking book.

Azille Coetzee gaan studeer in Nederland, kry ’n Nederlandse lover en besluit om in Europa aan te bly. Maar iets voel nie reg nie … Daar is tog altyd die vraag: Watter herkoms hou die styfste vas, Afrika of Europa? Dié is ’n uiters leesbare verhaal van identiteit, reis en liefde: intiem, eerlik en slim.

“Sometime in November 2007 while working as an entertainment and lifestyle journalist, a job that had seen me party and hang out with local and international stars, including John Legend, I realised that I was over my life in South Africa. My job was fab and my life should have been great but it wasn’t because who cares if you get to pose with Beyoncé? I had had enough of writing about people living their wildest dreams. It was time to see what the story of my life would be. I had always had wanderlust, especially for Africa. And so I made the decision to leave South Africa, an urgent need that consumed me and almost drove me to a point of insanity. I planned to spend three months in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Togo and Benin.”

When Lerato Mogoathle left South Africa for a planned three-month break to West Africa little did she know that those three months would turn into five years.

Vagabond is her hilarious and honest account of her five years of living as a drifter in Africa. In between the borders, foreign architecture and interesting new ways of life, Mogoatlhe found passion, love, laughter and heartbreak. On these pages you will find capsules of time spent in 21 countries in five regions of Africa. You will be regaled by the tales of how she tries to worm herself into hotels when she has no money because of unpaid invoices back home. You will be mortified and proud of how she navigates herself out of difficult situations like being misread by a man who tries to force himself on her.

Mogoatlhe’s book is a travel memoir driven by the belief that whatever else Africa is, it is first and foremost a home. It is punctuated with a deep urge to know the continent differently.

Africa is falling. Africa is succeeding. Africa is betraying its citizens. Africa is a place of starvation, corruption, disease. African economies are soaring faster than any on earth. Africa is squandering its bountiful resources. Africa is a roadmap for global development. Africa is turbulent. Africa is stabilising. Africa is doomed. Africa is the future.

All of these pronouncements prove equally true and false, as South African journalists Richard Poplak and Kevin Bloom discover on their 9-year roadtrip through the paradoxical continent they call home. From pillaged mines in Zimbabwe to the creation of an economic marketplace in Ethiopia; from Namibia’s middle class to the technological challenges facing Nollywood in the 21st Century; from China’s investment in Botswana to the rush for resources in the Congo; and from the birth of Africa’s newest country, South Sudan, to the worsening conflict in CAR, here are eight adventures on the trail of a new Africa.

Part detective story, part report from this economic frontier, Continental Shift follows the money as it flows through Chinese coffers to international conglomerates, to heads of state, to ordinary African citizens, all of whom are intent on defining a metamorphosing continent.

Blacks Do Caravan tells the story of a young South African family’s caravan journey, and the everlasting memories created along the way included amazing adventures and wonderful experiences. The book aims to inspire South Africans to take time out of their busy schedules and spend that valuable time with their families to discover the beauty of our country.

Fikile’s trip began on 15 September 2014 and during the journey she came to the realisation that South Africa is still a divided nation. Over twenty years into democracy, boundaries still divide us. Fikile aims to break those boundaries created by the past regime and contribute to the unity that is needed for all South Africans to move forward and experience this country equally. What better way to do it than caravanning?

Fikile and her family visited over 60 caravan parks and extended their travels to the Kingdom of Swaziland, which became an eye opening, mind changing trip of a lifetime.

In 2018, kort op die hakke van sy topverkoper-memoires oor die Camino, Elders, en die kykNET-reeks Elders: Die Camino, reis Erns Grundling met ’n TV-span na Japan om ’n nuwe Elders-reeks te gaan verfilm oor die land waar die Rugbywêreldbeker 2019 sal plaasvind. Sushi en shosholoza is sy verslag van die reis. Kom stap weer saam met Erns, dié keer op die plek waar talle Suid-Afrikaners laat in 2019 die Bokke sal gaan ondersteun. Konnichiwa, Japan!

’n Stuk of 50 stories waarin Dana Snyman besin oor enigiets van fopnuus tot ’n 40ste skoolreünie. Hy vertel van sy kennismaking met Eugène Terre’Blanche en van die Bogosi-gesin wat by hom op Jacobsbaai gewoon het. Hy vertel hoe mense na mekaar probeer uitreik in die land. Hoe ons mekaar soek en nie altyd vind nie. Ten slotte vertel hy van sy verloofde se selfdood en hoe hy daarná byna al sy besittings weggee en die pad vat.

To ten-year-old Bruce, the summer of 1954 seemed, at first, like any other on the lake: floating in the rowboat, watching the seagulls, frogs and herons, catching crayfish. But just when he thinks that life is perfect, everything starts to change, and over the summer both the harshness of the adult world and the patterns of the natural reveal themselves. By the time the weather turns he will be a different child and will have chosen his own path to understanding the wilderness that waits behind the family cottage.

The moving story of one young man's struggle to find peace during war, and the power of music to bring hope to a desperate nation. BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' __________ A man, a piano, a Syrian street under siege . . . One morning on the outskirts of war-torn Damascus, a starving man stumbles through a once familiar street - now just piles of rubble. Everything he once knew has been destroyed by famine and war. In despair he turns to his only comfort and joy, music, and pushes his piano into the street and begins to play. He plays of love and hope, he plays for his family and for his fellow Syrians. He plays even though he knows he could be killed for doing so. As word of his act of defiance spreads around the world, he becomes a beacon of hope and even resistance. Yet he fears for his wife and children, his elderly parents. And he is right to be scared, because the more he plays, the more he and his family are drawn into danger. Finally he is forced to make a terrible choice - between staying and waiting to die, or saving himself, but this would mean abandoning his family . . . Aeham Ahmad's spellbinding and uplifting true story tells of the triumph of love and hope, of the incredible bonds of family, and the healing power of music in even the very darkest of places.

His work has been described by Robert Macfarlane as 'funny, wry and wise, and utterly its own lawmaker' - now Tom Cox returns with Ring the Hill, written in his inimitable voice and studded with his trademark humour. It is a book written around, and about, hills: it includes a northern hill, a European hill, some hills from East Anglia that can barely be called hills at all. Each chapter takes a type of hill - whether it be knoll, cap, cliff, tor, bump or even mere hillock - as a starting point for one of Cox's characteristically unpredictable and wide-ranging explorations. These can lead to an account of an intimate relationship with a beach, a journey into Cox's past or a lesson from an expert in what goes into the mapping of hills themselves. Because a good walk in the hills is never just about the hills: you never know where it might take you.

Car parks: commonplace urban landscapes, little-explored and rarely featured in art and music, yet they shape the aesthetics of our towns and cities. Hotspots for crime, rage and sexual deviancy; a blind spot in which activities go unnoticed. Skateboarding, car stunts, drug dealing, dogging, murder. Gareth E. Rees believes that the retail car park has as much mystery, magic and terror as any mountain, meadow or wood. He's out to prove it by walking the car parks of Britain, journeying across the country from Plymouth to Edinburgh, much to the horror of his family, friends - and, most of all - himself. He finds Sir Francis Drake outside B&Q, standing stones in a retail park, and a dead body beside Sainsbury's. In this darkly satirical work of non-fiction, Gareth E. Rees presents a troubling vision of Brexit Britain through a common space we know far less about than we think.

Iets heerliks gebeur. Dis asof ek nie meer Lanie-op-’n-fiets op ’n mission is nie, maar een word met die natuur om my; of ek nog van altyd af hier was, hier hoort. Asof die lewe nog altyd eenvoudig was. Ek klim af en gaan lê op my rug en kyk deur die herfsblare wat goud aan die bome hang tot by die ysblou lug ver bo. Ek wil iets gee, iets sê…

Net mooi fine is die opvolg van Lanie van Reenen se suksesvolle boek C’est la Vie. Hierin beskryf sy wat gebeur het sedert haar hotelprojek in Frankryk gefaal het; hoe sy die nuwe realiteite van haar eie gestroopte lewe te bowe moet kom terwyl sy ook die verwerende château moet probeer red of verkoop.

Op haar pad na heling onderneem Lanie vele avonture: soms alleen per fiets, soos wanneer sy die Camino Portuguese voltooi; maar ook te voet, soos die tog na die berg Everest se basiskamp wat sy ter wille van liefdadigheid onderneem.

In hierdie ontroerende omstandighede ontstaan die vraag: Wat is die somtotaal van verlies? En hoe groot is die wins wat verlies tot gevolg kan hê as jy bewustelik daarmee omgaan, sodat ʼn mens ten slotte kan sê: “Eintlik is alles net mooi fine”?

Following in the footsteps of great explorers such as Lawrence of Arabia and Wilfred Thesiger, Arabia is Levison Wood's account of his most complex expedition yet: circumnavigating the Arabian Peninsula. Travelling through some of the harshest and most beautiful environments on earth, he seeks to challenge our perceptions of an often misunderstood part of the world, seeing how the region has changed and examining the stories we don't often hear about in the media.

Weinig mense spit diep in hulle spaargeld in, sluit hulle huis en klim vir drie maande van afsondering op ’n kanaalboot in die verre Engeland. Op hul eie. Sonder ervaring. Sonder ’n bootliksens. Sonder die voorwete dat alles goed sal afloop.

Annelie en die ou gryse het besluit om die kanaalpad te vat en reg in die snerpende winter in te vaar. Om te toets wat hulle ná vier-en-veertig jaar van saamwees in mekaar oorhet. Om te besin oor die roete van die allerlaaste vyftien sterkerige jare wat dálk voorlê. Om herinneringe te vergaar vir die stil dae op die ouetehuisstoep. En om mekaar vergifnis te gee vir sovele sondes. Min sou hulle kon voorsien dat die reis van hosannas ook ’n reis van tappende ontberings en rasperende emosies sou wees. En dat hulle meer as een maal die boot wou verlaat en die kinders bel om hulle te kom haal.

Maar tot op die een-en-neëntigste dag het hulle vasgehou aan die idille. En aan mekaar.

The 21st century commuter is a tragic hero. Long-suffering, long-journeying and subject to lengthy delays, he survives through an iron will and by burying his head in a freesheet. Chris Moss's Smoothly from Harrow takes its title from John Betjeman, the bard of Metro-land, but brings the world of the London commuter up to date with facts and fictions, poems and propaganda, statistics and self-help advice. Did you know that John le Carre, Mrs Beeton and Henry VIII were commuters? Did you know Waterloo station 'processes' more than 94 million passengers a year? Did you know that you are not just a number, but a modern-day, latte-drinking flaneur - London's key witness, greatest survivor and chief psychogeographer? This compendium will help you get through the dawns and dusks of your eternal, everyday, Herculean trial: to get to work and back.