Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Travel & Tourism

On Monday 18th September 2017, Mark Beaumont pedalled through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. 78 days, 14 hours and 40 minutes earlier he set off from the same point, beginning his attempt to circumnavigate the world in record time. Covering more than 18,000 miles and cycling through some of the harshest conditions one man and his bicycle can endure, Mark made history. He smashed two Guinness World Records and beat the previous record by an astonishing 45 days.

Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started. For ten months, the pain was constant, exacerbated by writing, reading, using computers, looking at phones or anything with a screen. Slowly he became a writer who no longer wrote, and a person who could no longer could communicate with the modern world. In literature, and life, Oliver began to disappear. His doctors can't figure out how to fix him. He suffers a breakdown. One evening, high on pain killers, Oliver Googles the only thing he can think of.

An immersive journey through the culture and cuisine of one Japanese town, its forest, and its watershed - where ducks are hunted by net, saké is brewed from the purest mountain water, and charcoal is fired in stone kilns - by an American writer and food stylist who spent years working alongside artisans.

With superb skill and feeling, Graham Greene retraces the experiences and encounters of his extraordinary life. His restlessness is legendary; as if seeking out danger, Greene travelled to Haiti during the nightmare rule of Papa Doc, Vietnam in the last days of the French, Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion. With ironic delight he recalls his time in the British Secret Service in Africa and his brief involvement in Hollywood. He writes, as only he can, about people and places, faith, doubt, fear and not least, the trials and craft of writing.

Michael Williams has spent the past year travelling along the fascinating rail byways of Britain for this new collection of journeys. Here is the 'train to the end of the world' running for more than four splendid hours through lake, loch and moorland from Inverness to Wick, the most northerly town in Britain. He discovers a perfect country branch line in London’s commuterland, and travels on one of the slowest services in the land along the shores of the lovely Dovey estuary to the far west of Wales. Here is a unique travel companion celebrating the treasures of our railway heritage....

Danny Wallace was bored. Just to see what would happen, he placed a whimsical ad in a local London paper. It said, simply, 'Join Me'. Within a month, he was receiving letters and emails from teachers, mechanics, sales reps, vicars, schoolchildren and pensioners - all pledging allegiance to his cause. But no one knew what his cause was.

Ross Kemp's fascinating guide to the worst places in the world. Want to know where to discover the perfect sunset in Fiji? How about a tropical paradise in St Lucia or one of the world’s beautiful natural wonders in the Alps? Well this is NOT the book for you. But if you want to know about meeting transvestite prostitutes in a South African prison or being attacked for a can of tuna in the Congo, buying crack cocaine in a Venezuelan prison or being chased by dogs in a haunted house in Belize, then look no further.

Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn’t leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming”, a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life. Ehrlich captures both the otherworldly beauty and cruelty of the natural forces - the harsh wind, bitter cold, and swiftly changing seasons - in the remote reaches of the American West.

Damian Le Bas grew up surrounded by Gypsy history. His great-grandmother would tell him stories of her childhood in the ancient Romani language: the places her family stopped and worked, the ways they lived, the superstitions and lore of their people. But his own experience of life on the road was limited to Ford Transit journeys from West Sussex to Hampshire to sell flowers. In a bid to better understand his Gypsy heritage, the history of Britain's Romanies and the rhythms of their life today, Damian sets out on a journey to discover the atchin tans, or stopping places.

Remember when you were a kid, and you used to go round to a friend's house to see if they were playing? Well, as adults we're not supposed to do that. Which is a shame... because Dave Gorman likes playing. He REALLY likes games. So he knocked on the biggest door you could ever imagine - the internet - and asked 76,000 people if they fancied a game. This is the story of what happened next.

Danny Wallace is about to turn 30. Recently married and living in a smart new area of town, he's swapped pints down the pub for lattes and brunch. For the first time in his life, he's feeling, well...grown-up.

Travelling a thousand miles and across three billion years, Christopher Somerville (walking correspondent of The Times and author of Coast, The January Man and Ships of Heaven) sets out to interrogate the land beneath our feet, and how it has affected every aspect of human history from farming to house construction, the Industrial Revolution to the current climate crisis. In his thousand-mile journey, Somerville follows the story of Britain's unique geology, travelling from the three-billion-year-old rocks of the Isle of Lewis, to the furthest corner of Essex.

Best-selling author of Italian Ways Tim Parks follows the hair-raising journey of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, 250 miles on foot from Rome to Ravenna, to look at Italy past and present.

In 2016, while working as a journalist in Yangon, Clare Hammond discovered an obscure map that showed a web of new railways spanning the length and breadth of the country - railways not shown on any other publicly available maps. She was determined to uncover the railways' origins, purpose, and most of all, the silence that surrounded them. She would spend three months travelling on these mysterious railways, and the next five years piecing their story together.

This audiobook will take the listener on the slow train to another era when travel meant more than hurrying from one place to the next, the journey meaning nothing but time lost in crowded carriages, condemned by broken timetables. On the Slow Train will reconnect with that long-missed need to lift our heads from the daily grind and reflect that there are still places in Britain where we can stop and stare. It will tap into many things: a love of railways, a love of history, a love of nostalgia.

In an adventure of a lifetime, Alexander Armstrong heads north into an ever more hostile Arctic winter to explore the farthest reaches of the globe. In an epic journey, he navigates some of the Earth's toughest terrain, first travelling through the glittering landscape of Scandinavia then on to the isolated islands of Iceland and Greenland, as far as the infamously treacherous Northwest Passage. His final frontier is Canada and Alaska, where his journey ends on the international dateline between the USA and Russia.

From the Paleozoic volcanoes that stained its soil, to the Saxons who occupied it, to the Tudors who traded its wool, to the Land Girls of wartime, John Lewis-Stempel charts a sweeping, lyrical history of Woodston: the quintessential English farm. With his combined skills of farmer and historian, Lewis-Stempel digs deep into written records, the memories of relatives and the landscape itself to celebrate the farmland his family have been bound to for millennia.

For many years a farmer in England, John Lewis-Stempel yearned once again to live in a landscape where turtle doves purr and nightingales sing, as they did almost everywhere in his childhood. He wanted to be self-sufficient, to make his own wine and learn the secrets of truffle farming. And so, buying an old honey-coloured limestone house with bright blue shutters, the Lewis-Stempels began their new life as peasant farmers.

Walking in the Pyrenees, twenty years ago, Matthew Parris and his sister came upon a magnificent medieval house. It had crests and a date, 1559, chiselled into the stone: its walls and foundations were intact but the ancient oak ridge timber supporting the roof had split and was ready to collapse into the rotten floors beneath. Renovation would be an epic undertaking, a massive investment of time, money and emotion. And, the locals warned, nobody ever left L'Avenc with any money.

Atlantis – from its first account by Plato, to the explorers who searched in vain and the discovery that might finally solve its mystery – takes on a new shape in Damian’s quest. At once a spellbinding love letter to diving, The Drowned Places is also a profound examination of the power that myth has over us, and what happens when it crosses over into reality.