Travel Asia

In May 2018, former Monty Python stalwart and intrepid globetrotter Michael Palin ventured into the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, camera crew in tow, to gain a glimpse of life in the most notoriously secretive and cut-off nation on earth. His resulting two-part documentary for Channel 5 fascinated millions and won universal plaudits.

After crossing the final mountain passes of Turkish Kurdistan, Ollivier sets foot in Iran, keen on locating vestiges of the silk trade as he passes through Persia's modern cities and traditional villages, including Tabriz, Tehran, Nishapur, and the holy city of Mashhad. Beyond urban areas lie deserts: first Iran's Great Salt Desert, then Turkmenistan's forbidding Karakum, whose relentless sun, snakes, and scorpions pose continuous challenges to Ollivier's goal of reaching Uzbekistan.

In 1271 a young Italian merchant named Marco Polo embarked on a groundbreaking expedition from Venice, through the Middle East and Central Asia to China. His extraordinary reports of his experiences introduced medieval Europe to an exotic new world of emperors and concubines, amazing cities, huge armies, unusual spices and cuisine, and imperial riches. Marco Polo also revealed the wonders of Xanadu, the summer capital of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan.

Take a trip to old Japan with William Scott Wilson as he travels the ancient Kiso Road, a legendary route that remains much the same today as it was hundreds of years ago. The Kisoji, which runs through the Kiso Valley in the Japanese Alps, has been in use since at least 701 CE. In the 17th century, it was the route that the daimyo (warlords) used for their biennial trips - along with their samurai and porters - to the new capital of Edo (now Tokyo).

Early on August 12, 2000, four of America's best young rock climbers were sleeping in their portaledges high on the Yellow Wall, in the central Asian mountain range of Kyrgyzstan,. By daybreak, they would be taken at gunpoint by militants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which is linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. In a life-and-death journey over six terrifying days, they would be forced to choose between saving their own lives and committing an act none of them thought they ever could.

This is an incredible story of adventure, human ingenuity, persistence, and resilience that shows firsthand what it is to adventure as a woman in the most dangerous of circumstance, what it is to be truly alone in the wild, and why someone would challenge themselves with an expedition others would call crazy. For Marquis, her story is about freedom, being alive and wild by nature.

From the author of the enduring classic The Solace of Open Spaces, here is a wondrous meditation on how water, light, wind, mountain, bird, and horse have shaped her life and her understanding of a world besieged by a climate crisis. Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets, this stunning collection of memories, observations, and narratives is acute and lyrical, Whitmanesque in breadth, and as elegant as a Japanese teahouse.

Mount Kailas is the most sacred of the world’s mountains – holy to one fifth of humanity. Isolated beyond the central Himalayas, it is claimed by myth to be the source of the universe created from cosmic waters and the mind of Brahma. Its summit has never been scaled, but for centuries the mountain has been ritually circled by Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims. Colin Thubron joins these pilgrims, after an arduous trek from Nepal, through the high passes of Tibet, to the magical lakes beneath the slopes of Kailas itself. His trek around the great mountain, revered by multitudinous others, awakes an inner landscape of solitude....

When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the world of his upper middle class youth, what he longed for wasn't so much the exotic as the raw, unfiltered humanity he had experienced in Japanese theater performances and films, witnessed in Amsterdam and Paris.

This book was made for the many decent guys who come to Thailand for whatever reason and find themselves ensnared in a nightmare. This book will save some of you guys a fortune - and it's going to stop you from falling into the traps that have caught up with so many guys before you. You decent guys don't deserve derision - you deserve to know what's going on around you. You need to know what to look out for and when to extricate yourself from a situation.

The relationship between man and horse on the Eurasian steppe gave rise to a succession of rich nomadic cultures. Among them were the Mongols of the 13th century - a small tribe, which, under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, created the largest contiguous land empire in history. Inspired by the extraordinary life nomads lead, Tim Cope embarked on a journey that hadn’t been successfully completed since those times.

Here is William Dalrymple's highly praised and greatly entertaining account of his 1986 trip made while a student at Cambridge, which retraced Marco Polo's route across land from Jerusalem to Xanadu. With him, he took a phial of Holy Oil, 600 pounds and Laura until Lahore, and Louisa from there to Xanadu.

Reap the benefits of cross-cultural expansion when you know how to gracefully navigate Vietnamese culture and etiquette — even if it's your first exposure! Have you ever found yourself bewildered by the labyrinth of Vietnam's fascinating yet equally perplexing customs and traditions? Cannot quite grasp the nuance and subtleties of Vietnamese social norms in both work and marriage?

Adventurer Sylvain Tesson has led a restless life, riding across Central Asia on horseback, freeclimbing the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, and traversing the Himalayas by foot. But while recovering from an accident that left him in a coma, and nursing his wounds from a lost love, he found himself domesticated, his lust for life draining with each moment spent staring at a screen. An expedition to the mountains of Tibet, in search of the famously elusive snow leopard, presented itself as a cure.

It took Lawrence Bransby and his son, Gareth, three journeys into Central Asia before they were able to ride the legendary Bartang Pass. But it's another pass that becomes the focus of this story - Matts Pass in southern Tajikistan - and a motorcycle gets abandoned deep in the Pamir Mountains after father and son push the limits of their bodies and bikes just one step too far. Never before - across Africa, into the Russian taiga, or in the Western Sahara - have they had to abandon a bike and walk out...

Following the mighty river upstream, this highly acclaimed, award-winning travelogue takes the listener on a voyage through 2000 miles of spectacular landscapes and fiercely contested territory, and back through 5000 years of rich and eventful history.

Thailand is officially called the Kingdom of Thailand and was formerly known as Siam. It is located at the center of the Indochinese peninsula in Southeast Asia. It has a total area of approximately 513,000 km2 (198,000 sq. mi), is the world's 50th largest country, and has around a population of 66 million making it the 20th most- populous country in the world.

Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she has come to know all too well the many ways this police state can be described as "Orwellian". The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. The connection between George Orwell and Burma is not simply metaphorical, of course; Orwell's mother was born in Burma, and he was shaped by his experiences there as a young man working for the British Imperial Police.

I Should Have Left the Whiskey is the first book in the Rambling On trilogy–compelling tales from a time when motorcycles were left in the shed and global exploration slowed to the pace of cycling. These diaries divulge two very different journeys in Asia: because progressing into enlightened India required some back-pedalling through darkest Thailand en route to China.

As her heart and relationship held onto their last fraying threads, she made a rash decision to save them both. She quit her job, shoved her things into a backpack, and booked two one-way tickets to Thailand. She was going to become a scuba diver. She was going to try to salvage her relationship. And like a true mermaid, she was going to swim her way out of the blue hole she had drowned herself in while taking a journey through a sensational world within our vast oceans.