Travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and, in the course of his travels, describes author's encounters with the people whose stories delay him on the road. This book is a quest or a Wonder Voyage. It is about wandering and exile.
"Songlines" are what Europeans call the labyrinth of invisible pathways that meander all over Australia - they are both intricate sources of personal identity and territorial markers. From these, Bruce Chatwin has traced a great deal about Aboriginal culture, as complex as it is different.
One September, the writer and explorer Peter Matthiessen set out with field biologist George Schaller to journey 250 miles through the Himalayas to the Crystal Mountain on the Tibetan plateau. They wanted to study the wild blue sheep, the bharal, but also hoped to see the snow leopard, a creature so rarely spotted as to be nearly mythical. The Snow Leopard is not only an exquisite book of natural history but an extraordinary account of an inner journey ; a 'true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart.
Michael Booth is the author of six books, including the international bestseller, The Almost Nearly Perfect People, winner of the British Guild of Travel Writers award for Book of the Year, and Sushi and Beyond, which won the Guild of Food Writers award.
Including advice, this title offers French recipes for each season, anecdotes, and tips. It talks us through food and dining, from the author's childhood in Alsace-Lorraine, renowned for its cuisine, where she learned to cook with her mother and grandmother, to Provence with its richly unusual but healthy dishes.
This is a widely appealing idea for a travel/history book from the bestselling author of Italian Ways , in which Tim follows the hair-raising journey of Garibaldi, revolutionary and future architect of a united Italy, 250-miles on foot from Rome to Ravenna across the Appenines, to look at Italy past and present. In the summer of 1849 Giuseppe Garibaldi, legendary hero of guerrilla wars in South America, and future architect of a united Italy, was finally forced to concede defeat in his defence of a revolutionary Roman republic. After holding the city for four long months against overwhelming foreign forces, it was clear that the only surrender could prevent slaughter and destruction at the hands of a huge French army. But Garibaldi was determined to turn defeat into moral victory. On the evening of July 2 he led 4000 men out of the city to continue the struggle for national independence elsewhere. Hounded by both French and Austrian armies, constantly changing direction and often marching at night, he crossed the mountainous Appenines and after endless skirmishes and adventures arrived in Ravenna on August 2 with just 250 survivors. Despite a well-advanced pregnancy, his Brazilian wife Anita insisted on accompanying him and by the time the group commandeered fishing boats on the Adriatic coast in an attempt to reach the revolutionary republic of Venice, which was still holding out against the Austrians, she was seriously ill. When the boats were intercepted by the Austrian navy and forced to beach, Anita died and had to be hurriedly buried in a shallow grave. Garibaldi''s companions split up. Most were rounded up and executed, but the hero himself escaped, travelling back across Italy in disguise until he could finally embark from Genova, first for Africa, then the USA. Ten years later, his revolutionary campaign in Sicily would be the catalyst that brought about the unification of Italy
VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind On buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey. A magnificent account of an ancient world in modern ferment, Thubron covers over 7000 miles in eight months Thubron enduring a near-miss with a drunk-driver, incarceration in a Chinese cell, and undergoing root canal treatment without anaesthetic, along the way.
