Showing results by publisher "----RM Alexander" in Travel & Tourism

In April 2008, Jon Faine and his son Jack closed the door on their Melbourne home and, leaving jobs, studies, family and friends, took six months and went overland to London in their trusty 4-wheel-drive. This intelligent and funny recount of the countries they visited, people they met, and trouble they got into, is also the story of a tender father-son relationship.

Carrot Quinn fears that she's become addicted to the Internet. The city makes her numb, and she's having trouble connecting with others. In a desperate move, she breaks away from everything to walk 2,660 miles from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail. It will be her first long-distance hike.

Joe Simpson, with just his partner, Simon Yates, tackled the unclimbed West Face of the remote 21,000-foot Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in June of 1985. But before they reached the summit, disaster struck. A few days later, Simon staggered into Base Camp, exhausted and frostbitten, to tell their non-climbing companion that Joe was dead. For three days he wrestled with guilt as they prepared to return home. Then a cry in the night took them out with torches, where they found Joe, badly injured.

For centuries, fame and fortune was to be found in the west—in the New World of the Americas. Today, it is the east which calls out to those in search of adventure and riches. The region stretching from eastern Europe and sweeping right across Central Asia deep into China and India, is taking centre stage in international politics, commerce and culture—and is shaping the modern world. This region, the true centre of the earth, is obscure to many in the English-speaking world. Yet this is where civilization itself began, where the world’s great religions were born and took root.

In his major new work, Michael Palin - former Monty Python stalwart and much-loved television globe-trotter - brings to life the world and voyages of HMS Erebus, from its construction in the naval dockyards of Pembroke, to the part it played in Ross’s Antarctic expedition of 1839-43, to its abandonment during Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition, and to its final rediscovery on the seabed in Queen Maud Gulf in 2014.

A final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers. Journeying alone, in what he feels will be his last African journey, Paul Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the itineraries of tourists and the hopes of post-colonial independence movements. Having travelled down the right-hand side of Africa in Dark Star Safari, he sets out this time from Cape Town, heading northwards up the left-hand side, through South Africa and Namibia, to Botswana, heading for the Congo, in search of the end of the line.

What would happen if you were cycling to the office and just kept on pedalling? Needing a change, Mike Carter did just that. Following the Thames to the sea he embarked on an epic 5,000-mile ride around the entire British coastline—the equivalent of London to Calcutta. He encountered drunken priests, drag queens and gnome sanctuaries. He met fellow travellers and people building for a different type of future. He also found a spirit of unbelievable kindness and generosity that convinced him that Britain is anything but broken.

Rory Stewart's sparsely poetic and highly acclaimed account of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002 has been hailed as a modern classic of travel writing. Traveling entirely on foot and following the inaccessible mountainous route, Stewart was nearly defeated by the hostile conditions. With the help of an unexpected companion and the generosity of the people he met on the way, however, he survived to report back on a region closed to the world by twenty-four years of war.

In 1960, John Steinbeck set out in his pick-up truck with his dog, Charley, to rediscover and chronicle his native USA, from Maine to California. He felt that he might have lost touch with its sights, sounds and the essence of the American people. Moving through the woods and deserts, dirt tracks and highways to large cities and glorious wildernesses, Steinbeck observed - with remarkable honesty, insight and a humorous eye - the gamut of America and the people who inhabited it.

Born in Darwin in 1929, Jacqueline's childhood was spent in a succession of bush towns before she was sent to school in Darwin. Returning to her beloved territory, Jacqueline met and married stockman Ken Hammar, and they moved to a vast property in one of the most inaccessible areas of Australia. With only a kerosene stove, scant possessions and a bed, Jacqueline’s determination and courage helped her survive many hardships as they created a prosperous 1,000,000 acre cattle station.

Join the adventure as 33-year-old Rene Cormier politely removes himself from the working world that surrounds him and cashes in what few possessions he has to finance a three-year-long motorcycle journey around the world. Never one to let excessive planning get in the way of a good ride, Rene runs out of money half way through the tour and ultimately takes five years to cover the 41-country, 154,000 kilometer (95,000 mile) route.

What do you do when your adult kids fly the nest and you are having a midlife crisis during a global pandemic? You buy a 22 room derelict villa in Italy while grocery shopping of course. Well, that is what Rosie did.

Accompanied by Lucy Renshaw, Edwards toured Egypt in the winter of 1874. They journeyed southwards from Cairo in a manned houseboat. The two women visited Philae and ultimately reached Abu Simbel, where they remained for six weeks. Their boat joined a flotilla with another female English traveler, Marianne Brocklehurst, also travelling with a female companion.

This book, the second posthumous collection of his journalism, brings together pieces from near and far. He was ferociously well travelled, and once wrote that for all our ability to cross the world at will, 'abroad is as foreign and funny and strange and shocking as it ever was, and our need to know our neighbours every bit as great'. This is a book about meeting those neighbours.

Our choice of location, time, direction, duration, walking companion and gait, as well as the weather we opt to walk in, can transform our daily stroll. Here, Annabel Streets shares the thrill of 52 walking styles, explaining the latest science behind each one, and provides practical tips for making the most of your daily steps. 52 Ways to Walk is a revelatory and informative handbook for anyone stuck in a walking rut, curious about the lesser-known benefits of walking or merely in need of some on-foot novelty and adventure.

In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Paul Theroux retraces the steps he took thirty years ago in his classic The Great Railway Bazaar. From the Eurostar in London, he once again sets out on a journey to the East, travelling overland through Eastern Europe, India and Asia. Infused with the changes that have shaped the exterior landscape and enriched with developments to his own perceptions and psychology, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is an absorbing and beautifully written follow-up to The Great Railway Bazaar.

The third and most ambitious of Michael Palin's adventures is a voyage of epic proportions - the circumnavigation of the Pacific Rim. He travels for almost a year through the 18 countries that border the world's largest ocean, and is forced to negotiate mountains, plunging gorges, cross glaciers and dodge icebergs. Volcanoes also mark Palin's journey. He climbs one which has freshly erupted and follows great rivers like the Yangtze and the Amazon to some of the most remote places on earth.

Daniel Everett, then a Christian missionary, arrived among the Pirahã in 1977 - with his wife and three young children - intending to convert them. What he found was a language that defies all existing linguistic theories and reflects a way of life that evades contemporary understanding. The Pirahã have no counting system and no fixed terms for color. They have no concept of war or of personal property.

In 1973, Norma Cobb, her husband Lester, and their five children pulled up stakes in the lower 48 and headed north to Alaska to follow a pioneer dream of claiming land under the Homestead Act. The only land available lay north of Fairbanks near the Arctic Circle where grizzlies outnumbered humans 20 to one. In addition to fierce winters and predatory animals, the Alaskan frontier drew the more unsavory elements of society's fringes. From the beginning, the Cobbs found themselves pitted in a life or death feud with unscrupulous neighbors who would rob from new settlers.

In 1834, Osborne Russell joined an expedition from Boston, which proceeded to the Rocky Mountains to capitalize on the lucrative salmon and fur trade. Beginning at the age of 20, he detailed the life of a trapper in his journal and recorded his adventures through treacherous terrain, encounters with dangerous wildlife, and confrontations with the Rockies natives of the Rockies. Osbourne would remain there for the next nine years. Journal of a Trapper is his remarkable account as he developed into an experienced trapper and a seasoned mountain man of the Rockies.