Showing titles in Adventure Travel

Antarctica lends itself to tales of adventure and heartbreak. The landscape is polarized, beautiful and deadly in equal measure. But Alexa doesn't scale mountains or trek to the Pole. Instead, armed with an old cookbook, she attempts to create three-course meals with no electricity or running water and struggles to defrost meat in sub-zero temperatures. Life in a thin nylon tent in the company of scientists, explorers, and eccentrics soon begins to take on extraordinary dimensions.

John Hooper's marvelously entertaining and perceptive new book is ideal for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Italy and the unique character of the Italians. Looking at the facts that lie behind and often belie the stereotypes, his revealing book sheds new light on many aspects of Italian life: football and Freemasonry, sex, symbolism, and the reason Italian has twelve words for a coat hanger yet none for a hangover.

“Well, now I’m committed,” he thought to himself after telling a national TV game show audience that he wanted to ride a motorcycle to Mongolia with his winnings. He felt the fear that commitment always induced in him; he was hoping they might have edited that bit out. Commitments are something he tried to get as far away from as possible, the only other constants in his life being twenty-five years of financial prudence, travel and motorcycle obsession.So there he was, committed to going very, very far on a motorcycle with his meager prize money. Consequently, he spent a winter on eBay and a spring in the garage preparing his $1000 KLR 650 for an uncertain life on the road.

New Zealand is one of the "hot" fly-fishing spots in the world today, known for brilliant, crystal clear rivers. Zane Grey's account of his adventure in New Zealand conjures up images of huge and mythic trout. In Tales of the Angler's Eldorado, he describes fishing these now legendary streams as well as his pursuit of huge swordfish off the coast of the New Zealand shores. It's both a fishing story and adventure story from one of America's favorite storytellers.

In his number-one best seller The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger describes Linda Greenlaw as "one of the best sea captains, period, on the East Coast." Now Greenlaw tells her own riveting story of a 30 day swordfishing voyage aboard one of the best-outfitted boats on the East Coast, complete with danger, humor, and characters so colorful they seem to have been ripped from the pages of Moby Dick. The excitement starts immediately, even before Greenlaw and her five-man crew leave the dock.

A collection of transcendent, lyrical essays on life in the American West, the classic companion to Gretel Ehrlich’s new book, Unsolaced “Wyoming has found its Whitman.” —Annie Dillard Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of...

Rising from the depths of the North Pacific lies a fabled island, now submerged just 15 feet below the surface of the ocean. Rumors and warnings about Cortes Bank abound, but among big wave surfers, this legendary rock is famous for one simple (and massive) reason: this is the home of the biggest rideable wave on the face of the earth.

A loving and hilarious—if occasionally spiky—valentine to Bill Bryson’s adopted country, Great Britain. Prepare for total joy and multiple episodes of unseemly laughter. Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. The...

Joshua Slocum was believed to be the first man to sail single-handed around the world. After a distinguished career, where he worked his way up from cabin boy to captain, Joshua Slocum wrecked his ship off the coast of Brazil. Turning this catastrophe to his advantage, he built a sailing canoe from the wreckage and sailed back to New York. Moreover, he wrote Voyage of the Liberdad, a chronicle of his trip, and earned some literary success.

The Still Point is a meditation on risk, empathy, and attention, told through 20 years of travel across 65 countries. From the Afghan desert to the streets of Beirut, from the markets of Lagos to the mountain roads of Peru, Scott H. Blake reflects on what danger, culture, and human instinct can teach us about perception and about ourselves.

Laura was in her early twenties and directionless when she quit her job to backpack in Bolivia. Fate landed her at a wildlife sanctuary on the edge of the Amazon jungle where she was assigned to a beautiful and complex puma named Wayra. Wide-eyed, inexperienced, and comically terrified, Laura made the scrappy, make-do camp her home. And in Wayra, she made a friend for life.

Ever since he can remember, Dom Joly has been fascinated by travel to odd places. In part this stems from a childhood spent in war-torn Lebanon, where instead of swapping marbles in the schoolyard, he had a shrapnel collection - the schoolboy currency of Beirut. Dom's upbringing was interspersed with terrifying days and nights spent hunkered in the family basement under Syrian rocket attack or coming across a pile of severed heads from a sectarian execution in the pine forests near his home.

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than $200. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, atop Maine's Mount Katahdin, she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it."

Walkabout is about the people, places, and experiences that you discover when you step out on the trail. In this audiobook, you will meet peak-baggers, day-trippers, thru-hikers, tribes, ruckers, and the earthy set, all finding their way to whatever that five miles at a time reveals to them at different moments. How to prepare for your first hike and things to not forget to remember on your thousandth hike. Learning to deal with the deuce. Utilizing hiking for mental health and self discovery, mindfulness, and slowing down and being present.

Join Clara Parkes on a cross-country adventure and meet a cast of characters that includes the shepherds, dyers, and countless workers without whom our knitting needles would be empty, our mills idle, and our feet woefully cold. Travel the country with her as she meets a flock of Saxon Merino sheep in upstate New York, tours a scouring plant in Texas, visits a steamy Maine dyehouse, helps sort freshly shorn wool on a working farm, and learns how wool fleece is measured, baled, shipped, and turned into skeins.

In her honest and heart-warming memoir, writer and adventurer Niamh McAnally shares the story of her liberating journey from being unemployed, homeless, and divorced in her fifties, to embarking on a global quest to find purpose through volunteering and ultimately finding a profound love that changed her life. From volunteering for marine conservation projects on remote islands in Belize, Vanuatu, and Tonga, to exploring exotic destinations like Bora Bora, Palau, Fiji, and St Barths, Niamh takes listeners on a captivating journey where each destination unveils a layer of her self-discovery.

Joe Tasker lies, struck down by illness, in a damp, bug-infested room in the Himalaya, wondering if he will be well enough to climb Dunagiri, his first venture to the "big" mountains. One of Britain’s foremost mountaineers and a pioneer of lightweight climbing, he is about to attempt one of the first true "Alpine-style" climbs in the Greater Ranges. The Dunagiri attempt forms part of Tasker’s striking tale of adventure in the savage arena of the mountains.

From a small-town boy flipping through almanacs and tracing my fingers across dusty globes, to a seasoned world traveler who’s stepped foot in 90 countries—this is the inspiring story of a life shaped by curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to explore the world as much as possible. In 3 Star Gypsy, Jeff shares how a childhood fascination with maps and foreign lands led to a life of real-world adventure. After joining the U.S. Navy, the dream of travel became a reality, with ports of call that opened the door to a world beyond imagination. But the journey didn’t stop there.

This riveting history is a firsthand account of the long and arduous search for one of the greatest explorers of the 19th century. Journalist and adventurer Henry M. Stanley was known for his search for the legendary David Livingstone, and their eventual meeting led to the popular quotation "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" A real-life adventure story, How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa tells of the incredible hardships - disease, hostile natives, tribal warfare, impenetrable jungles, and other obstacles - faced by a daring explorer. This must-have account also includes a wealth of information on various African peoples.

On the morning of July 3, 1994, the site of a forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado was wrongly recorded by the district's Bureau of Land Management office as taking place in South Canyon, thereby mislabeling forever one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. That...