Travel Adventure Writing

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.

It's all here: Adventures in Africa, Azerbaijan and the Arctic. Headhunters and prayer flags, liars and thieves, evil spirits and atrocious food. From Tbilisi to Tibet to the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Common Sense and Whiskey is a crisp survey of what's it's like in the real world. You can handle just about anything out on the road with a believable grin, common sense, and whiskey. That's been the author's theory, anyway, for 25 years of international travel. So far, so good.

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.

Outfitted with a pair of ratty sand shoes and a knapsack full of trade goods, Eric Hansen set off to cross the rainforest of Borneo, one of the last places on earth largely untouched by Western civilization. For seven months Hansen hunted wild pig, gathered roots, and lived among tribes whose longhouses were still decorated with the headhunting swords of their ancestors, completing one of the great adventures of our time.

This is the riveting true story of a young man’s solo bicycle odyssey: freezing in the Anatolian mountains of Turkey, confounded by butterflies in the empty Iranian desert, passing through the rubble of a coup in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and surviving dire illness in Pakistan's Indus valley. His journey ends in the heart of the subcontinent, having glimpsed true freedom. This is an account of humankind’s essential goodness, of trusting unseen hands that can steer us from disaster, and of learning that the way out is through.

If you enjoy a fast-paced, true story, Five Weeks in the Amazon is the book for you. It's an honest story filled with peaks of humor and valleys of despair. Author Sean Michael Hayes has written a book that many would put on their shelf next to Cheryl Strayed's blockbuster success, Wild. His adventure took him into the middle of the jungle alone, but Hayes' unique writing style makes the listener feel as though they are right there with him.

On an international scale, Oslo is a pretty small capital but, with just over 500,000 people, it's Norway's biggest city by far. More than 10% of the country's total population lives here; if we count people in the entire Oslofjord area in the summertime, it amounts to one third of the population in Norway. What makes Oslo unique is its location. The Oslofjord links the city with the sea to the south. In the other three directions you find mountains, lakes and forests within easy reach from the city center.

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.

In his most challenging journey to date, Palin tackles the Himalayas, the greatest mountain range on earth. It is a virtually unbroken wall of rock stretching 1,800 miles from the borders of Afghanistan to south-west China. Penetrated but never conquered, it remains the world's most majestic natural barrier, a magnificent wilderness that shapes the history and politics of Asia to this day.

There are times when sitting on the couch in front of the TV seems infinitely preferable to rolling the motorbike out of the garage for a ride or putting the boots on to go for a hike, yet it’s rare that one regrets the effort. In this collection of motorcycling road trips, garage misadventures, bike reviews, and reminiscences, I try to convey my joy of riding, even when things don’t always work out perfectly. Life is short. The time is now. Do it while you still can.

When fly-fishing guide Rusty Wilson decides he's tired of listening to others talk about their Bigfoot stories and instead wants his own encounter, a strange series of events leads him into the wilds of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, with an eventual rendezvous in the rugged mountains of Montana.

This beautiful literary collection explores the spectacular natural features of Yosemite through the eyes of some of the most extraordinarily talented writers. In 1851, Lafayette Bunnell chronicled his travels with the Mariposa Battalion, the first non-natives to visit Yosemite Valley. Following in his footsteps, Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Clarence King, Frederick Law Olmsted, Joaquin Miller, and Horace Greeley made their pilgrimages and were moved to recount their observations. Included here as well is the work of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club.

In My Holiday in North Korea: The Funniest/Worst Place on Earth, Wendy shares a glimpse of North Korea as it's never been seen before. Even though it's the scariest place on Earth, somehow Wendy forgot to check her sense of humor at the border. But Wendy's initial amusement and bewilderment soon turned to frustration and growing paranoia.

From the authors of the number-one best-selling The Sea Hunters comes more unforgettable true adventures with famous shipwrecks.

An honest look at some of the questions and myths about living overseas, using entertaining and informative real-life examples to illustrate what is true and what is not so true. The goal is to provide the listener with the good and the bad - not to persuade you to become an expat or not - but to provide enough insight to decide what might be best for you.

Richard Henry Dana called this book a "a voice from the sea". It had an influence on both Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville, both of whom sang its praises. Dana was a law student at Harvard College who decided, in 1834, to take a break from his studies in order to experience the "real world" by signing on as a common sailor for a two year voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to California. He kept a journal which he turned into a book after the voyage.

In this collection of his finest work from such magazines as Outside and Smithsonian, Krakauer explores the subject from the unique and memorable perspective of one who has himself battled peaks like K2, Denali, Everest, and, of course, Eiger.

Feeling dissatisfied with her office job and her “stationary home,” in 2016 Noami Grevemberg took a bold step. She quit her job, sold her belongings, and set out in her 1985 VW Vanagon to pursue a life of simplicity and travel with her husband and German Shepherd by her side. In her years living fulltime on the road, Noami has become an expert in the many aspects of vanlife. In her book Living the Vanlife, she digs into all aspects of the lifestyle, from getting over the uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty, to creating a sustainable, thriving life of adventure.

Like a well-crafted stage play, Just Passin' Thru delivers one suspenseful scene after another. But in this historic setting a store on the Appalachian Trail called Mountain Crossings the characters who show up are no fictional creations. Like any good drama, there are the good guys (and gals) and the weirdos, too. Some show up once (and that’s enough), and some appear again and again. But all are united by two things: the author’s story-capturing talent, and whatever it is that lures them to attempt (or conquer) a 2,200-mile path that climbs and plummets from Georgia to Maine.

Disillusioned with corporate London life and with no previous experience as a long-distance cyclist, Anna decides to clamber atop a beautiful pink bicycle (named Boudica) and set out on an 11,000-mile journey on her own, through each and every state of the USA. Dodging floods, blizzards and electrical storms, she pedals side by side with mustangs of the Wild West, through towering redwood forests, past the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains and on to the volcanos of Hawaii.