Showing results by publisher "--Tyson Hanks" in Travel Writing & Commentary

Since 2013, Low Pressure is still the best place to hear fun conversations with the skiers, photographers, creatives and all the important people who dedicate their lives to skiing. #LISTENTOSKIING

This is the audiobook millions of Rick Steves fans have been waiting for! A journal of Rick's favorite European stories, his traveling life, and how he started his business, all told in that funny, down-to-earth style that makes Rick America's favorite travel writer. Rick Steves' Postcards from Europe takes you on a European vacation, complete with the sights, sounds, tastes, and people of Europe, without ever leaving that comfy sofa or the relative safety of your own car.

In 1935, Fred A. Birchmore left the small American town of Athens, Georgia, to continue his college studies in Europe. In his spare time, Birchmore toured the continent on a one-speed bike he called Bucephalus (after the name of Alexander the Great's horse). A born wanderer, Birchmore broadened his travels to include the British Isles and even the Mediterranean. After a lengthy, unplanned detour in Egypt, Birchmore put his studies on hold, pointed Bucephalus eastward, and just kept going.

New Year's Day, 2009. Somewhere on the bottom of the world, six teams of adventurers and explorers have gathered to race one another, on foot, to the South Pole. It is the first time that anyone has undertaken such a race in almost a hundred years; the first time since the great Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, beat Captain Scott to the same goal in 1911.

Richard Henry Dana, a law student turned sailor for health reasons, sailed in 1834 aboard the brig Pilgrim on a voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to California. Drawing from his journals, Two Years Before the Mast gives a vivid and detailed account, shrewdly observed and beautifully described, of a common sailor's wretched treatment at sea, and of a way of life virtually unknown at that time.

Francis Parkman's journal - written more than 150 years ago, in 1846 - provides an eye-witness account of one of the grandest adventures in American history. At age 23, the Harvard-educated Bostonian traveled the Rocky Mountains, living among the Dakota Sioux. In his journal, he captured the color, spirit, and perspective of his era, as well as the exuberant confidence that was the mark of his time. Frank Muller's dramatic reading brings this captivating record to life.

Everest Base Camp Trek, also known as EBC Trek, is high on the bucket list of things to do for any of the adventurers around the globe. The hike to Everest Base Camp allows you to see a magnificent close-up view of Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world, from every angle. And this is always a dream for travel lovers and a rare feat that comes once in a lifetime. Everest Base Camp Trek demands not only a sheer amount of determination but also a high caliber of fortune. The hike to Base Camp showcases the extreme beauty of a mixture of well-organized trails along with the raw, rugged side ...

In this inspiring memoir—the antidote to the “just quit your job and ditch all your belongings to backpack the world” mentality—a young woman explores how she took calculated risks to follow her dreams: traveling and living abroad without sacrificing stability and comfort. Helene Sula always knew she wanted to pursue something a little different from a “normal life”—not an outright rejection of the conventional path many of her peers embraced but one that empowered her to experience other cultures and corners of the globe.

Escaping the rat race for a few happy weeks, Tom Chesshyre indulges in the freedom of the tracks. From France (dogged by rail worker strikes) through Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland he goes, travelling as far east as Odessa by the Black Sea in Ukraine. With no set plans, simply a desire to let the trains lead the way, his trip takes him onwards via Hungary, the Balkans and Austria. Along the way he enjoys many an encounter, befriending fellow travellers as well as a conductor or two. This is a love letter to Europe, written from the trackside.

Oliver Sacks, the best-selling author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, is most famous for his studies of the human mind: insightful and beautifully characterised portraits of those experiencing complex neurological conditions. However, he has another scientific passion: the fern.

When Kapka Kassabova was a child, the border zone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece was rumoured to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, so it swarmed with soldiers, spies and fugitives. On holidays close to the border on the Black Sea coast, she remembers playing on the beach, only miles from where an electrified fence bristled, its barbs pointing inwards toward the enemy: the holiday makers, the potential escapees. Today, this densely forested landscape is no longer heavily militarised, but it is scarred by its past.

Hot dogs. Poor people created them. Rich people found a way to charge fifteen dollars for them. They’re high culture, they’re low culture, they’re sports food, they’re kids' food, they’re hangover food, and they’re deeply American, despite having no basis whatsoever in America's Indigenous traditions. You can love them, you can hate them, but you can’t avoid the great American hot dog. Raw Dog is part investigation into the cultural and culinary significance of hot dogs and part travelogue documenting a cross-country road trip researching them as they’re served today.

In We Are Experiencing a Slight Delay, he shares stories of his varied trips around the world. Tag along as he enjoys an unexpectedly transformative stay at a rigorous Italian spa where he and his husband go from deep grumpiness to exaltation. Take a ride on the Orient Express to Venice and discover a surprising side of London, including a hilarious dinner with actress Maggie Smith. And pull up a deck chair to watch the entertainment as Gary embarks on a family cruise on the Queen Mary 2.

For a period of seven years, Wilfred Thesiger canoed through the marshes at the confluence of Iraq's Tigris and Euphrates rivers, living among the native Madan tribes and their islands made of reeds. Now extinct, their ancient way of life is speculated to have existed for 5,000 years, going back to the days of ancient Sumer, and possessed a unique culture found nowhere else in the Middle East. Thesiger documents the tribes' conflicts, traditions, cuisine, relationships, justice systems, and art, and reveals how they built their unique water-borne society

After half a century of travel, from Ethiopia to Tibet, from Belfast to Jerusalem, Pico Iyer asks himself what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict. In a spectacular journey, both inward and outward, Iyer roams from crowded mosques in Iran to a film studio in North Korea, from a holy mountain in Japan to the sometimes spooky emptiness of the Australian outback.

For the first time in my life I felt that death was a possibility; a stupid, pointless, lonely death on the aptly named Mondulkiri Death Highway. The Ho Chi Minh Trail is one of the greatest feats of military engineering in history. But since the end of the Vietnam War much of this vast transport network has been reclaimed by jungle, while remaining sections are littered with a deadly legacy of unexploded bombs. For Antonia, the chance to explore the Trail before it was lost forever was a personal challenge she couldn’t ignore - yet at times it would be a terrifying journey.

Spanning an extraordinary range of subjects and locations, these ten gripping essays show why Jon Krakauer is considered a standard-bearer of modern journalism.

Drive Nacho Drive tells the hilarious and sometimes harrowing story of what happens when Brad and Sheena Van Orden trade in the American dream for a year on the roads of Central and South America aboard “Nacho”, their quirky and somewhat temperamental Volkswagen van. As a result of questionable decision-making skills and intermittent bad luck, Brad and Sheena repeatedly find themselves in over their heads.

Twenty years ago Joe Bennett hitchhiked the length and breadth of New Zealand. The result was A Land of Two Halves, a portrait of the country and its many contradictions that is as telling today as it was then. For as Joe says in his reintroduction to this classic road trip, the name of the All Black first five may have changed but there is still an All Black first five, the waves still thump against Hokitika beach and the debate still rages over the Treaty of Waitangi.

Acclaimed travel writer Oliver Smith sets out to radically reframe our idea of ‘pilgrimage’ in Britain by retracing sacred travel made across time, from murmurs of ritual journeys in the depths of Ice Age to new pilgrimages of the 21st century. He embarks on an epic adventure across sacred British landscapes – climbing into remote sea caves, sleeping inside Neolithic tombs, scaling forgotten holy mountains and once marooning himself at sea.