Showing results for "1" in Travel Writing & Commentary

When our hero, Victor, needs a pseudonym to avoid embarrassing his wife after deciding to pen a book about up-sticking to Greece, he dusts off his original name of V.D. Bucket, the name he was stuck with after being abandoned in a bucket as a baby. As Victor adapts to his adopted homeland, he battles an obsession with the exacting hygiene standards he demanded during his illustrious career as a public health inspector against the rather less exacting standards of rural Greece. His attempts to master the complexities of the language lead to a number of embarrassing misunderstandings.

They shouldn't have tear gassed best-selling (bald) author Adam Fletcher. It ruined his supposedly normal holiday in Istanbul, made him curious, and began a quest to visit places everyone else is trying to escape from, and tourists don't normally go to. In this hilarious travel memoir, he'll enter a blizzard in China armed with only biscuits; pose as a scientist to sneak into Chernobyl; be chased by Croatian police boats en route to Liberland (the world's newest country); become a reluctant diving board star in a North Korean water park, and much more.

Perfect Unfolding is a thought-provoking travel memoir about a woman who trades her dream home and fourteen-year firefighting career for the freedom and possibility of the open road.

In his darkest depression, one idea brought Christian Lewis out of the depths - and into a new life. Finding Hildasay, read by the author, is a brutal and beautiful true story of depression, survival, walking, and the meaning of home. ‘Now I was finally out of the force of the wind, my body...

Almost every couple faces a "now what?" moment as their last kid moves out of the house. There's a big empty nest looming over this new and uncertain stage in their lives. David and Veronica James chose to look at this next phase of life as a beginning instead of an ending. Rather than staying put and facing the constant reminders of empty bedrooms and backseats, a plan began to develop to sell the nest and hit the highway.

When Ben Pering sets out to walk from South Devon to the North Devon coast, crossing from the tors of Dartmoor into idyllic valleys and the windswept heights of Exmoor, he is dreaming of finding freedom in the landscapes of his youth. The Two Moors Way is a walking route through 100 miles of breathtaking countryside, and Ben is determined to finish in just four days, carrying everything he needs on his back. But when the first attempt ends in failure, this challenge becomes something more.

Meet Chris Stewart, the eternal optimist. A man who flies to Spain, sees a peasant farm on the wrong side of the river and, with scarcely a second thought, hands over a cash deposit. And then finds he has acquired not just the farm, but the farmer, too, who has no intention of leaving. Not to mention the lack of running water, electricity or even a bridge.

Join Michael Wigge as he immerses himself into fascinating subcultures, rides with Amish farmers in old-fashioned buggies, sleeps on the street with the homeless, and, with the help from alternative lifestylers, learns to nourish himself with flowers. Wigge had only three concerns during his travels: How do I get some food? How will I get to my next destination? Where can I sleep? …all without money! This unusual travel diary combines adventure with humor and contains surprising revelations about when money is really needed - and when it's not.

To live in a pristine land unchanged by man... to roam a wilderness through which few other humans have passed... to choose an idyllic site, cut trees and build a log cabin... to be a self-sufficient craftsman, making what is needed from materials available... to be not at odds with the world but content with one's own thoughts and company. Thousands have had such dreams, but Richard Proenneke lived them.

In 2018, amateur cyclist Jenny Graham left family and friends behind in Scotland to become the fastest woman to cycle around the world. Alone and unsupported, she crossed the finish line at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin four months later, smashing the female record by nearly three weeks. With infectious wit and honesty, Jenny brings listeners into her remarkable Round the World adventure, as she takes on four continents, 16 countries – and countless cups of coffee.

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.

Dead horses, armed border guards and furious Slavs stand in the way. Join Andy on his battered old Suzuki GS1000G as we cross Europe, and ride together through the Iron Curtain to reach the very edge of Asia. Filled with adventure and humor, poignant and accidentally informative, this true-life story tells of travel in an era long gone, when we read paper maps like pirates on the high seas, and friends were made and lost along roads less traveled.

Pip and Shannon dreamed of living the good life. They wanted to slow down, grow their own food and spend more time with the people they love. But jobs and responsibilities got in the way - their chooks died, their fruit rotted and Pip ended up depressed and in therapy. So they did the only reasonable thing - they quit their jobs, pulled the children out of school and went searching for la dolce vita in Italy.

Dolly Faulkner has many heart-stopping moments of terror and anxiety, living much of the time truly alone in the Alaskan wilderness. But she is not lonely, as the awesome space and beauty of the mountains fill her with appreciation of all things of nature. Dolly Faulkner came to Alaska as a young woman with the dream of living in the wilderness. Forty Years in the Wilderness is a true reality of carving out a homestead in the Kilbuck Mountains near a minor hotsprings that the regional Native corporation is now trying to claim.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, the enmity is between these three "tiger" nations and what prevents them from making peace.

With the coming of the first decade of the 21st century, One Place de l'Eglise had become rather derelict. The roof leaked, the mortar in the ancient walls was crumbling; a fertilizer bag stuffed a broken window. There was no electricity to speak of; the plumbing was a lead pipe in one room; the cellar doors had rotted. And there it stood. Shutters and doors firmly locked, the villagers of Causses-et-Veyran passing by to the church next door. Then, an impoverished—in his mind at any rate—Londoner and his wife went a little crazy and bought it. It was love at first sight.

This is what it is like to sail an ocean alone. Not the world-girdling marathon of the Southern Ocean racers or the “cruise in company” as part of a trade-wind rally, but what it is really like to set off for 3,496 miles from the British Virgin Islands to Falmouth in the UK, totally alone. That means no contact with the shore, no high-frequency radio or satphone. No weather forecasts, no texts from loved ones. No news…Just complete and uninterrupted isolation for 44 days. In other words, this is singlehanded ocean sailing at its purest: One man in a world shrunk to its bare essentials.

In 1921, Britain's most illustrious highway, the Great North Road, ceased to exist – on paper at least. Stretching from London to Edinburgh, the old road was largely replaced by the A1 as the era of the motor car took hold. A hundred years later, journalist and cyclist Steve Silk embraces the anniversary as the perfect excuse to set off on an adventure across 11 days and 400 miles. Travelling by bike at a stately 14 miles per hour, he heads north, searching out milestones and memories, coaching inns and coffee shops.

Here, for the first time, is a complete and chronological account: everything from levitating the dog and navigating by smell to meeting his wife Tamsin through the Lonely Hearts column of Time Out and attempting to run away to sea and raise a family on a 27 foot boat.

Why do we travel, what are we looking for, and will we recognize it if we find it? With the author’s 50th birthday looming, there seemed a need for something significant to happen. Not seeing an expiry date on his birth certificate made it hard to gauge when to have a mid-life crisis, but he’d almost definitely left it too late.