A gruelling pan-American trek. Will one Englishman dare to face his fears? Short-listed for Outdoor Book of the Year by The Great Outdoors magazine. Born traveller Keith Foskett had thousands of miles of thru-hiking experience when he prepared for his toughest challenge yet: a gruelling 2,640-mile hike from Mexico to Canada. In a six-month journey along America’s Pacific Crest Trail, he crossed the arid expanses of California’s deserts, the towering peaks of Oregon’s volcanic landscape, and the dense forests of Washington.Battling phobias of bears, snakes, critters and camping in the woods after dark, can Foskett find new ways to achieve his ultimate goal when the worst winter in years bears down on the trail?Shortlisted for The Great Outdoors magazine Outdoor Personality of the Year and Book of the Year multiple times, veteran storyteller Keith Foskett lets you join him for a trek across the greatest long-distance hiking trail on Earth. With witty humour, astute observations, and a delightful cast of characters, you’ll discover a compelling narrative that turns the travelogue formula on its head.The Last Englishman is an extraordinary travel memoir by an experienced long-distance hiker. If you believe there’s more to life than work, yearn for new horizons and challenges, and believe in overcoming adversity, then you’ll love Keith Foskett’s tale of exploration.Discover The Last Englishman to embark on a journey of tenacity today!

    A riotous account of the world’s worst housewife’s efforts at running two holiday homes in remotest France and her love/hate relationship with her guests.

    The encounter changed Mühling’s life, triggering a number of journeys to Ukraine and deep into the Russian heartland on a quest for stories of ordinary and extraordinary people. Away from the bright lights of Moscow, Mühling met and befriended a Dostoevskian cast of characters, including a hermit from Tayga who had only recently discovered the existence of a world beyond the woods, a Ukrainian Cossack who defaced the statue of Lenin in central Kiev, and a priest who insisted on returning to Chernobyl to preach to the stubborn few determined to remain in the exclusion zone. Unveiling a portion of the world whose contradictions, attractions, and absurdities are still largely unknown to people outside its borders, A Journey into Russia is a much-needed glimpse into one of today’s most significant regions.

      No matter where one goes in India, one will find a landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes of Indian culture. Every place in this vast landscape has its story, and conversely, every story of Hindu myth and legend has its place. Likewise, these places are inextricably tied to one another—not simply in the past, but in the present—through the local, regional, and transregional practices of pilgrimage.  India: A Sacred Geography tells the story of the pilgrim’s India. In these pages, Diana Eck takes the reader on an extraordinary spiritual journey through the living landscape of this fascinating country –its mountains, rivers, and seacoasts, its ancient and powerful temples and shrines.  Seeking to fully understand the sacred places of pilgrimage from the ground up, with their stories, connections and layers of meaning, she acutely examines Hindu religious ideas and narratives and shows how they have been deeply inscribed in the land itself.  Ultimately, Eck shows us that from these networks of pilgrimage places, India’s very sense of region and nation has emerged. This is the astonishing and fascinating picture of a land linked for centuries not by the power of kings and governments, but by the footsteps of pilgrims.  India: A Sacred Geography offers a unique perspective on India, both as a complex religious culture and as a nation. Based on her extensive knowledge and her many decades of wide-ranging travel and research, Eck's piercing insights and a sweeping grasp of history ensure that this work will be in demand for many years to come.

    Along the way you'll meet Sufi saints, fake fakirs and homesick soldiers. You'll get stuck in an icy road river and be miraculously rescued. You'll feel the stress an average Kashmiri experiences everyday. You'll see how blind and dangerous religion can be if it is only followed in rituals and illogical beliefs.You'll see how friendly and hospitable everyone is on the roads of India.You'll come away feeling exhilarated, entertained and yes, also exhausted by the physical arduousness of the motorcycle ride. Witty, reflective and honest, One Life to Ride is a daring, real-life adventure guaranteed to keep you turning the pages. Maybe even make you wish you were riding pillion.

    Setting Dickens against the city that was the backdrop and inspiration for his work, it takes the reader on a memorable and haunting journey, discovering the places and subjects which stimulated his imagination. Here are captivating photographs of famous landmarks such as the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square and Westminster Abbey, alongside coaching inns, the Thames before the Embankment was built, the construction of the Metropolitan Underground Line, the docklands that studded the river and the many villages that make up London today.Authoritatively written and beautifully illustrated, this book will appeal to anyone who loves this beguiling city and wants to explore it as it was in Dickens' day.

    Four years later, he had successfully walked the length or width of 21 countries on five continents and fulfilled a childhood dream. Nearly everywhere on the five continents he crossed, he found familes that invited this American stranger into their homes (sometimes for weeks), and new friends that put him in touch with their friends. In addition to lives of the everyday people that he wrote about in his bi-weekly newspaper dispatches, he had dozens of adventures straight out of a novel or a movie. Among those adventures were wars, a struggle with a blizzard in the Spanish Pyrenees, wild boars that treed him for an entire night in Algeria, bandits in Thailand that nearly chopped off his head, a circus in Greece he worked in for two weeks, a smalltown newspaper in Australia he ran for two months, a flash flood in Australia, and arrests and interrogations in Algeria, Yugoslavia and Turkey. Through it all, Newman proved himself willing to learn from other cultures and to become quickly adaptable to strange cultures and unforgiving natural settings such as jungles and deserts and even fires the size of American states. As the Oregonian newspaper succinctly put it: “Newman, irrepressible, indomitable, indefatigable…always fascinating, records his experience with poetrical eloquence.”

    It just sort of happened over the course of a decade." And so goes Lawton Grinter's compelling collection of short stories that have been over ten years and 10,000 trail miles in the making. I Hike brings the reader trailside with blissful moments on the highest mountain ridges to the mental lows of mosquito hell and into some peculiar situations that even seasoned hikers may find unbelievable. Between jobs and in search of something more, Lawton Grinter spent the better part of a decade hiking America's longest trails. In doing so he came face to face with things that go bump in the night, the kindness of strangers, a close encounter with hypothermia and the absurd rights of passage common to the eccentric people that call themselves long-distance hikers.Anyone who's ever stepped off the pavement will appreciate these humorous and sometimes agonizing accounts of trail life. I Hike will make you laugh, cry, cringe and leave you wanting to read more!

    It documents 115 little-known sites in the City of Angels where struggles related to race, class, gender, and sexuality have occurred. They introduce us to people and events usually ignored by mainstream media and, in the process, create a fresh history of Los Angeles. Roughly dividing the city into six regions—North Los Angeles, the Eastside and San Gabriel Valley, South Los Angeles, Long Beach and the Harbor, the Westside, and the San Fernando Valley—this illuminating guide shows how power operates in the shaping of places, and how it remains embedded in the landscape.

    It is an observant and wry memoir and travelogue, intensely personal yet speaking to universal experiences of love and loss. Along the narrow roads and hairpin turns, the narrative reveals the beauty of the ordinary and the commonplace and asks stark questions about how we fill the empty places that a loved one leaves behind. It is a meditation on the possibility of faith, one that is unflinching, uncompromising, and altogether unsentimental when confronted by the ultimate test of belief. This book is not only a well-told memoir, but a testimony to the truth that love is stronger than death.

    

    Encouraged by her neighbors, Li decides to join a family of Kazakh herders as they take their 30 boisterous camels, 500 sheep and over 100 cattle and horses to pasture for the winter. The so-called "winter pasture" occurs in a remote region that stretches from the Ulungur River to the Heavenly Mountains. Li vividly captures both the extraordinary hardships and the ordinary preoccupations of the day-to-day of the men and women struggling to get by in this desolate landscape. Her companions include Cuma, the often drunk but mostly responsible father; his teenage daughter, Kama, who feels the burden of the world on her shoulders and dreams of going to college; his reticent wife, a paragon of decorum against all odds, who is simply known as "sister-in-law."In bringing this faraway world to English language readers here for the first time, Li creates an intimate bond with the rugged people, the remote places and the nomadic lifestyle.

    She started in Olympia, WA and continued to draw wherever she was: mushroom hunting in California; touring Belgium, Germany, and Sweden; back through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Utah, then finally back home to the Northwest.This book collects all 90 drawings that were made between January 19 and November 15, 2012, reprinted at their original 5″ x 7″ size. Taken as a whole they form an illustrated essay – a year in the life of an artist on the road. A signed special edition printed on windsor blue paper is also available. These are limited to 100 copies and each has a unique Field Study drawn by Aidan at the end of the book.Aidan Koch was born in Seattle, WA. She received her BFA in Illustration at the Pacific NW College of Art in Portland, OR. Her previous books include The Whale, Xeric award winner The Blonde Woman as well as the anthology Astral Talk, which she edited.

    From the Aeolian Islands in Italy to Lamu, Kenya; North Goa, India; and Jose Ignacio, Uruguay—Gypset Travel delves into the glamorous yet casual lifestyle of these bohemian wanderers through intimate photography and first-person anecdotes.

    His journey through Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso touches a dizzying array of subjects, including the consequences of civil war, mounting religious strife and the challenges of globalisation. Along the way, the stories of those he meets offer a deeply personal perspective on the lives of some of the least privileged individuals on earth.

    Read this book to find out what God is doing in Africa through music and missions. Read this book if you enjoy adventures and their inevitable unpredictability. Read this book if you want to know what an ethnomusicologist really does for a living.”Rob vividly recounts eight varied and challenging journeys he made to different locations in Togo and Benin (West Africa) in his role as an ethnomusicologist. With fascinating cultural observations, intriguing musical traditions, amazing scenery, frequent setbacks, and plenty of humour to keep you entertained from start to finish!

    With mordant wit, this biography of a city spares neither half of its split-personality: from moody, magical Madras to bursting-at-the-seams, tech-savvy Chennai. And, a minute into the book, the reader knows they are inseparable-and Bishwanath Ghosh refuses to take sides.And yet, he tells us, while Chennai is usually known as conservative and orthodox, almost every modern institution in India-from the army to the judiciary, from medicine to engineering-traces its roots to Madras’s Fort St George, which was built when Delhi had only just become the capital of the Mughal Empire, and Calcutta and Bombay weren’t even born. Today, the city once again figures prominently on the global map as ‘India’s Detroit’, a manufacturing giant, and a hub of medical tourism. There have been sweeping changes since pre-Independent India, but even as Chennai embraces change, its people hold its age-old customs and traditions close to their heart. ‘This is what makes Chennai unique,’ says Ghosh, ‘the marriage of tradition and technology’.Bishwanath Ghosh wears a reporter’s cap and explores the city he has made his home, delving into its past, roaming its historic sites and neighbourhoods, and meeting a wide variety of people-from a top vocalist to a top sexologist, from a yoga teacher to a hip transsexual, from a yesteryear film star to his own eighty-five-year-old neighbour, from the ghosts of Clive, Wellesley, Hastings and Yale to those of Periyar and MGR, two people who redefined the political skyline of Tamil Nadu.What emerges is an evocative portrait of this unique city, drawn without reservation-sometimes with humour, sometimes with irony-but always with love.

    Learn how to order the perfect beer, match it with the tastiest wurst, and ask around for what traditional souvenirs are the best to buy and where to buy them; all with your trusted travel companion. With language tools in your back pocket, you can truly get to the heart of wherever you go, so begin your journey now!Get More From Your Trip with Easy-to-Find Phrases for Every Travel Situation!Feel at ease with essential tips on culture, manners, idioms and multiple meaningsOrder with confidence, explain food allergies, and try new foods with the menu decoderSave time and hassles with vital phrases at your fingertipsNever get stuck for words with the 3500-word two-way, quick-reference dictionaryBe prepared for both common and emergency travel situations with practical phrases and terminologyMeet friends with conversation starter phrasesGet your message across with easy-to-use pronunciation guidesInside Lonely Planet German Phrasebook & Dictionary:Full-colour throughoutUser-friendly layout organised by travel scenario categoriesSurvival phrases inside front cover for at-a-glance on-the-fly cuesConvenient features5 Phrases to Learn Before You Go10 Ways to Start a Sentence10 Phrases to Sound like a LocalListen For - phrases you may hearLook For - phrases you may see on signsShortcuts - easy-to-remember alternatives to the full phrasesQ&A - suggested answers to questions askedCoversBasics - time, dates, numbers, amounts, pronunciation, reading tips, grammar rulesPractical - travel with kids, disabled travellers, sightseeing, business, banking, post office, internet, phones, repairs, bargaining, accommodation, directions, border crossing, transportSocial - meeting people, interests, feelings, opinions, going out, romance, culture, activities, weatherSafe Travel - emergencies, police, doctor, chemist, dentist, symptoms, conditionsFood - ordering, at the market, at the bar, dishes, ingredientsThe Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet German Phrasebook & Dictionary, a pocket-sized comprehensive language guide, provides on-the-go language assistance; great for language students and travellers looking to interact with locals and immerse themselves in local culture.Looking for just the basics? Check out Lonely Planet's Fast Talk German, a pocket-sized, essential language guide designed to get you talking quickly; perfect for a quick trip experience. Authors: Written and researched by Lonely Planet, Gunter Muehl, Birgit Jordan, Mario KaiserAbout Lonely Planet: Started in 1973, Lonely Planet is the world's leading travel guide publisher with guidebooks to every destination on the planet, and has been connecting travellers and locals for over 25 years with phrasebooks for 120 languages, more than any other publisher! With an award-winning website, a suite of mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community, Lonely Planet enables curious travellers to experience the world and to truly get to the heart of the places they find themselves. The world awaits!*#1 phrasebook publisher. Source: Nielsen Bookscan UK, US & AUS