Travel Writing Memoirs

After college getting her dream job in New York City, Kristen Van Nest thought she had everything a modern millennial was supposed to want: a sexy zip code, a boyfriend, and a corporate job. But instead of feeling content, she soon realized she had no idea who she was and what made her happy. Naturally, she did what any sane person would do: hopped on a plane and spent the rest of her twenties living abroad and traveling the world in search of love, adventure, and new and exciting places to eat bread.

The audio edition of On the Grand Trunk Road is finally available, revised and updated with new material. Focusing on Coll's journeys in conflict-ridden India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan as a bureau chief for The Washington Post, On the Grand Trunk Road reveals a little-seen area of the world where violence, corruption, and greed have had devastating effects on South Asians from all walks of life.

Timbuktu: the African city known to legend as a land of scholars, splendor and mystery, a golden age in the Sahara Desert. But to many it is a vaguely recognizable name - a flippant tag for "the most remote place on earth." With this fabled city as his goal, author Rick Antonson began a month-long trek. His initial plan? To get a haircut. Aided by an adventuresome spirit, Rick endures a 45-hour train ride, a swindling travel agent, "Third World, three-lane" roads, rivers, and a flat deck ferry boat before finally reaching Timbuktu.

When Susan quit her job in London and set sail off the south coast of England on her beloved sailboat, Isean, she was unaware this spontaneous departure would lead to a three-year journey spanning several countries across the continent. With only the very basics on board, resourcefulness becomes an unexpected source of joy and contentment. But for all the physical and navigational challenges of her journey, the other side of her story reveals a more important change - an inner journey - that took place along the way.

Fifty-year-old canoe racer-turned-explorer West Hansen is planning to kayak the Amazon River when he learns that everyone - cartographers, adventurers, even his own sponsor, National Geographic Society - has misplaced the source of the world's greatest river. One of exploration's great prizes is suddenly back up for grabs, and to claim it all, Hansen has to shepherd a team of irascible Texans and international whitewater stars some 4,200 miles, from the crest of the Peruvian Andes to the Atlantic Ocean.

The Roman Forum, the Leaning Tower, the Piazza San Marco: these are the sights synonymous with Italy. But such landmarks only scratch the surface of this magical country's offerings. In See You in the Piazza, Frances Mayes introduces us to the Italy only the locals know, as she and her husband, Ed, eat and drink their way through all 20 regions - from Friuli to Sicily. Along the way, she seeks out the cultural and historic gems not found in traditional guidebooks.

Christian Beamish, a former editor at The Surfer's Journal, envisioned a low-tech, self-reliant exploration for surf along the coast of North America, using primarily clothes and instruments available to his ancestors, and the 18-foot boat he would build by hand in his garage. How the vision met reality - and how the two came to shape each other - places The Voyage of the Cormorant in the great American tradition of tales of life at sea, and what it has to teach us.

P. J. O'Rourke, 'the funniest writer in America', harbours a guilty pleasure – ever since growing up the son of a car dealer in Ohio, he has been crazy about cars. In Driving Like Crazy, he reveals in his love for all things vehicular. From a thousand-mile expedition across Mexico to a trek through Kyrgyzstan in the back of the Soviet army surplus truck; from an alcohol-fuelled weekend in North Carolina to an eventful journey from Islamabad to Calcutta.

When Romi Grossberg decided, at thirty-five, to give up her job as a social worker in Australia for a two-year contract in the slums of Cambodia, she could never have imagined that the experience would change her life forever. Hip Hop & Hope is part memoir, part history, part travelogue, and completely engaging. Its portrait of Phnom Penh is complicated and indelible. Its story of work in an NGO is inspirational. At this hip hop youth centre, Romi evolves from a frightened burrung to a respected manager who knows the words, the tunes, and the moves.

A typical book about an American founding father doesn’t start at a gay piano bar and end in a sewage ditch. But then, Tom Paine isn’t your typical founding father. A firebrand rebel and a radical on the run, Paine alone claims a key role in the development of three modern democracies. In death, his story turns truly bizarre. Shunned as an infidel by every church, he had to be interred in an open field on a New York farm. Ten years later, a former enemy converting to Paine’s cause dug up the bones and carried them back to Britain.

When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, Orwell, like many other European socialists, was quick to join the fight against fascism. And so, in December that year, he found himself in Catalonia with a 40-year-old rifle, no helmet, uniform, maps or tools, and a platoon of near children under his command.

In 2015, when Alex Silberman was 27 years old, he hitchhiked alone from East Coast America’s chilly Boston Harbor, north and west past Southern Ontario, before finally materializing from a desert mirage in California’s balmy Santa Cruz. Hitchin’ is a nostalgic tribute to the almost lost art of hitting the road and traveling for free (most of the time).

Rosemary Mahoney tells the story of Braille Without Borders, the first school for the blind in Tibet, and of Sabriye Tenberken, the remarkable blind woman who founded the school. Fascinated and impressed by what she learned from the blind children of Tibet, Mahoney was moved to investigate further the cultural history of blindness. As part of her research, she spent three months teaching at Tenberken's international training center for blind adults in Kerala, India, an experience that reveals both the shocking oppression endured by the world's blind, as well as their great resilience.

From Palermo to Castiglione di Sicilia to Alimena, Sicily holds great secrets from the past and unspoken promises. Now, slowly shaking itself free of the Mafia, Sicily is opening itself up to visitors in ways it never has before. Sicilian Splendors explores the history, politics, food, Mafia, and people which John Keahey encounters throughout his travels during his return to Sicily. Through conversing with natives and immersing himself in culture, Keahey illustrates a brand new Sicily no one has ever talked about before.

In November 2015 Sarah Outen completed her five-year, 25,000 mile journey looping the planet by cycling across Europe, Asia and North America and canoeing and kayaking across the North Pacific and most of the North Atlantic.

Bougainville profite d'une mission royale aux Malouines pour réaliser son projet de tour du monde dont le but est surtout de découvrir de nouvelles terres dans le Pacifique.

The incredible true story of four ordinary working mums from Yorkshire who took on an extraordinary challenge and broke a world record along the way, proving it's never too late to go on a life-changing adventure, experience the beauty and power of the elements, push the very limits of your abilities and rediscover who you are.

In the powerful travel-writing tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski and V. S. Naipaul, a haunting memoir of a dangerous and disorienting year of self-discovery in one of the world's unhappiest countries.

When Adam Piggott rode his motorbike across Australia chasing a girl he barely knew, he didn't understand much about anything at all. He wanted to change his life, but he didn't know how or what to change. The girl was the catalyst that forced him out of his comfortable existence. This is the story of how a young man with no direction ended up working as a river guide in a range of exotic locations around the world.

In this classic tale of true-life adventure, David and Daniel Hays, a father and son, sail 17,000 miles from Connecticut to Cape Horn and back. Together they complete this odyssey and join a select group to successfully sail the Drake Passage in a small vessel. It is also the story of conquering inner struggles as well as great distances.