Book picks similar to
Vroom by the Sea by Peter Moore


travel
non-fiction
travel-writing
italy

Tales of Iceland or "Running with the Huldufólk in the Permanent Daylight"


Stephen Markley - 2013
    The three young men found a country straddling Europe and North America, recovering from its 2008 economic crisis, struggling to regain its national identity, influenced by the entire globe yet trafficking in its singular Icelandic sagas and legends.With Tales of Iceland, Markley delivers the fastest, funniest memoir and travelogue of an American experience in Iceland.Beware: You will NOT learn how to say "Which way to the potato farm" in the Icelandic language. Nor will you learn how to locate the finest dining options in Reykjavik, or the best opera house. This is not that kind of travel book. Markley and his two irrepressible twenty-something American pals do not like opera, had no money to eat much besides eggs and skyr, and learned only how to say “Skál!” “Takk,” and “Skyr.”The author of the growing cult classic Publish This Book, Markley dives headfirst into Icelandic history and culture while not ignoring all those weird stories found in the best travel writing: a road trip around the golden circle; partying in Reykjavík on National Day; drinking late into the night with gorgeous Icelandic women; hiking over pristine white glaciers featured in Game of Thrones; encountering a drunk, raging Kiefer Sutherland; crashing in the band Of Monsters and Men’s old apartment; getting hit on by a Wiccan in the famed Blue Lagoon; searching for signs of Icelandic “hidden people;” interviewing Jón Gnarr, the actor-comedian who accidentally became the funniest mayor in the world (by vowing not to form a coalition government with anyone who hadn’t watched all five seasons of The Wire); and countless other travel tales of youthful irreverence. If you’re about to pick up this book about Iceland, just know that it will be a little foul. Markley also brings his twisted sense of humor and combative social conscience to bear on why there are no prostitutes in Iceland, how fishing quotas planted the seeds of an economic doomsday, and why one should never invite Icelanders over for an after-party.Tales of Iceland is the indispensable travelogue and required reading for anyone wishing to visit this strange, beautiful, and remarkable country.As Markley reflects: “All I can say with full credibility is that I went to Iceland and kind of fell in love with the place.”Tales of Iceland tells how it happened.A Note from the Publisher, GiveLiveExplore:Travel guides are becoming static and stale. Savvy travelers in today’s connected world are better served using free, curated websites like TripAdvisor and Lonely Planet, and personalized travel tips are better garnered by polling friends, meeting fellow travelers abroad, or talking to locals on the street.While travel information has become a commodity, we believe good, honest tales are in short supply.Tales of Iceland is our answer. It’s the anti-guidebook -- a fun, engaging story with useful cultural context to compliment your own travel experiences. Our hope is not only that this travelogue becomes the book travelers read before or during a trip to Iceland, but also that it inspires more to explore and live out his or her own tales of Iceland.

Travels into the Interior of Africa


Mungo Park - 1799
    The first trip was full of an endearing vulnerability and the heroic generosity of a fit young man, while the second was one of Conradian tragedy, murder, and mayhem. Despite starvation, imprisonment, and frequent illness, he managed to keep a record. Though he failed in the object of his mission-to chart the course of the Niger River-he did succeed in exploring West Africa and opening in trade routes. His first-hand experiences of tribal justice, gold mining, and the slave trade are recorded, as well as his own understated heroism, a story of courage, open-hearted friendship, and betrayal. His vivid record of his travels brought a new image of Africa to the European public, though the continent claimed him for itself in death. Travels is still considered the most readable of all the classics of African exploration.

Step by Step


Simon Reeve - 2018
    After a decade spent making more than 80 programmes he has become a familiar face on British TV, well known for his extraordinary journeys across jungles, deserts, mountains and oceans, and to some of the most beautiful, dangerous and remote regions of the world. But what most people don't know is that Simon's own journey started in a rough area of Acton, West London where he was brought up and left school with no qualifications. For the first time he will tell his life story with a book rich in anecdotes to entertain and inform readers about some of the most fascinating (and often dangerous) places in the world and what it took to reach them.

Anything to Declare?: The Searching Tales of an HM Customs Officer


Jon Frost - 2014
     In his time as a uniformed officer Jon seized presidential aircraft, a working tank, cars, lorries, boats and coffins; and uncovered wild animals, killer snakes, bush meat, animal porn, poisonous vodka, dodgy medicine, bootleg prescriptions, pirated pills, toxic alcohol, firearms, side-arms, swords, explosives, stolen gold, dirty money, blood diamonds, child pornography and every drug known to man and a few as yet unknown ones. And the dead? He searched them too. When you’ve confiscated everything from a suitcase full human hair to a live monkey hidden in the lining of someone’s overcoat, you know you can never return to a normal line of work. But then Jon went into undercover customs work, and things became really interesting . . .

Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo


Eric Hansen - 1988
    Completely cut off from the outside world for seven months, he traveled nearly 1,500 miles with small bands of nomadic hunters known as Penan. Beneath the rain forest canopy, they trekked through a hauntingly beautiful jungle where snakes and frogs fly, pigs climb trees, giant carnivorous plants eat mice, and mushrooms glow at night. At once a modern classic of travel literature and a gripping adventure story, Stranger in the Forest provides a rare and intimate look at the vanishing way of life of one of the last surviving groups of rain forest dwellers. Hansen's absorbing, and often chilling, account of his exploits is tempered with the humor and humanity that prompted the Penan to take him into their world and to share their secrets.

Into Africa


Sam Manicom - 2008
    It’s completely upfront with the adventures, mishaps, dust, heat and the thrills of overlanding. You’ll find that Sam’s perceptions of people, places and the various predicaments have real depth and texture. Whether he’s being shot at, arrested, jailed, knocked unconscious in the depths of the Namibian desert or living in a remote Tanzanian village, you’ll find that he evokes the sights, sounds and smells with a natural ease that takes you right into each scene.

Tequila Oil


Hugh Thomson - 2009
    Just as the alcohol hits your stomach, the chilli will as well and blow it back into your brain. It will take your head off.' Explorer Hugh Thomson takes on Mexico.It's 1979, Hugh Thomson is eighteen, far from home, with time to kill - and on his way to Mexico. When a stranger tells him there's money to be made by driving a car over the US border to sell on the black market in Central America, Hugh decides to give it a go.Throwing himself on the mercy of Mexicans he meets or crashes into, Hugh and his Oldsmobile 98 journey through the region, meeting their fate in the slums of Belize City.Thirty years on, Hugh returns - older but not necessarily wiser - to complete his journey.

Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, And A Journey To The Ends Of The Earth


Daniel Glick - 2003
    He opted for an epic adventure. In the summer of 2001, Dan, Zoe, and Kolya packed up and set off on a six-month tour to see the world's most exotic and endangered habitats.Monkey Dancing takes readers along for this incredible journey. From the python-infested rivers of Borneo to the highest summits of Bali, from Nepal's Gangeatic Plains to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, Glick recounts the adventures they met with, the challenges they confronted, and how they learned to cope with grief, loss, and one another. Along the way, he offers intimate reflection on life, fatherhood, change, and the fragile health of our troubled planet. Acclaimed by reviewers, a BookSense Parenting bestseller, Monkey Dancing is a "poignant, affirming, ultimately courageous book"—Audubon Magazine.

How Not to Travel the World: Adventures of a Disaster-Prone Backpacker


Lauren Juliff - 2015
    I suffered from debilitating anxiety, was battling an eating disorder and had just had my heart broken. I hoped by leaving to travel the world I would be able to heal myself.Instead, Lauren's travels were full of bad luck and near-death experiences. Over the space of a year, she was scammed and assaulted, lost teeth and swallowed a cockroach. She fell into leech-infested rice paddies, was caught up in a tsunami, her motorbike's brakes failed and she experienced a very unhappy ending during a massage in Thailand. It was just when Lauren was about to give up on travel that she stumbled across a handsome New Zealander with a love of challenges...

Cycling the Earth: A Life-changing Race Around the World


Sean Conway - 2016
    He was immediately inspired – but it was a huge undertaking and he’d hardly been on a bike in years. Could he really cycle all the way round the world, solo and unsupported?Six months later, after completing a punishing training schedule and packing up everything he owned into boxes, Sean was in Greenwich Park on the start line of the adventure of a lifetime. Soon he was way ahead of schedule, averaging 180 miles per day, and on course to break the round the world cycling record. But then disaster struck, and Sean was forced to confront the possibility that he may not be able to complete the race...In the course of his 16,000-mile journey, Sean travelled the famous pan-American highway across the Atacama Desert, outran tornados, relied on fellow travellers to ferry water across the Australian outback, and inadvertently joined a cycle club in Mumbai. He learnt things about himself he didn’t know and rediscovered a spirit of adventure that changed everything. This is a book about an amazing and sometimes incredibly difficult journey, but it’s also a book about never giving up when there’s an opportunity to follow your dreams.

My Exile Lifestyle


Colin Wright - 2011
    There are morals to the stories that I tell, but they are usually just one of many lessons that I take away from a given success, failure, or scrape with the unfamiliar.As I’m about to leave Iceland — the fourth country I’ve lived in since selling or giving away everything I owned in Los Angeles and uprooting my life for a location independent lifestyle — it seems like the perfect time to share some of the other stories I’ve been collecting; the ones that I’ve kept to myself as personal reminders, life lessons, or special moments to recall when things are looking bleak.Inside My Exile Lifestyle are stories about the downside of living a ‘rockstar lifestyle’ on the road, the difficulties of mini-relationships while traveling, and the last-minute opportunity that nearly derailed the project by offering me everything I had been aspiring to previously.It’s an understatement to say that I’m incredibly uncomfortable sharing some of the details revealed in this book, but the experience has been a valuable one. Opening up in this way has given me the opportunity to review my choices and my lifestyle and granted me new insight into why I do what I do, and how I will operate in the future.This is a document of my continued personal development, and I’m hoping that you’ll find insight, entertainment and encouragement in seeing my adventures and lifestyle from a different perspective than I’ve shown before.

More Ketchup Than Salsa


Joe Cawley - 2006
    They’re also tired of smelling of fish.When offered the chance to escape from the dreary market stalls of England to run a bar on a sub-tropical island, they recklessly jump at the opportunity - despite their spectacular lack of experience.In Tenerife, dreams of a better life overseas are soon crushed by mini-mafias, East European prostitutes and biblical-grade cockroach infestations.Joe and Joy's foreign fantasy turns into a nightmare as they find themselves trapped with a failing bar in a foreign land, pandering to a bar full of oddball expats while trying to stop their relationship crashing into the rocks.Can they save their business, their dreams, and their relationship before it's too late...

A Town Like Paris: Falling in Love in the City of Light


Bryce Corbett - 2007
    He rents an apartment in Le Marais, the heart of the city’s gay district, hardly the ideal place for a guy hoping to woo French women. He quickly settles into the French work/life balance with its mandatory lunch hour and six weeks of paid vacation. Fully embracing his newfound culture, Corbett frequents smoky cafes, appears on a television game show, hobnobs with celebrities at Cannes, and attempts to parse the nuances behind French politics and why French women really don’t get fat. When he falls in love with a Parisian showgirl, he realizes that his adopted city has become home. As lively and winning as Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French, A Town Like Paris evokes the beauty, delights, and charms of Paris for an ever-eager audience of armchair travelers.

Tales from Nowhere


Don George - 2006
    This volume contains 30 real-life tales of the many Nowheres we visit in our lives, and the many roads we take to get there.

Rowing After the White Whale: A Crossing of the Indian Ocean by Hand


James Adair - 2013
    That will teach you to keep your mouth shut' - Ernest Hemingway Over a boozy Sunday lunch, flatmates James Adair and Ben Stenning made a promise to row across the ocean. At first they considered the Pacific, then the Atlantic, but once James Cracknell and Ben Fogle completed the high-profile Atlantic Rowing Race, their thoughts turned to the Indian Ocean, longer and tougher than the Atlantic and having seen fewer people row across its waters than have walked on the Moon. After years of planning and fund raising, they were ready to launch in Spring 2011. Neither James nor Ben had any rowing or sailing experience. To add to this, James had contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome at the age of 14, which had locked his body into total paralysis for three months (while his mind had remained completely active) and which had left him with paralysed feet. This was a challenge that neither man should have ever considered.