Away from all the modern conveniences and comforts most take for granted, his tale is one of adversity, building a dream with dogged determination. Battling against considerable and powerful opposition, bureaucracy, severe lack of money, unforgiving nature, loneliness and ultimately his own ill health; only to find the dream fulfilled will almost destroy him. A sometimes spiritual and critical tale of self-discovery where ultimately his growing faith in God literally saves him from a very sorry end in the mountainous wilderness of New Zealand. A story that exposes wilderness living as it truly is, not for the faint hearted. However, Out of the Wild is more than just a candid wilderness survival tale, but includes some very interesting snippets of New Zealand's early pioneer history associated to the Fiordland National Park, the Hollyford Valley, Martins Bay, the beautiful deserted ghost town of Jamestown Bay and even the fabled "lost ruby mine" in the inaccessible Red Hills. For the outdoor and "back to basics" enthusiasts Charlie details his accounts of hunting red deer in the thick Fiordland rainforest around his wilderness home to using the old traditional methods to store his kills, through to trapping introduced predators destroying the special rainforest ecosystems of Fiordland. "Out of the Wild" is a very unique New Zealand wilderness tale which will appeal to the outdoor conservative types.

    More unusually, they were at the time travelling together from Moscow to Vancouver by human power — boat, bike, and foot. That day, they were examining a road atlas and in particular the labyrinth of European inland waterways it revealed. Julie traced a route of interconnected canals, rivers, and coastlines that led from Colin’s parents’ homeland of Scotland past her mother’s homeland, Germany, and on to her father’s, Syria. She said, half-seriously: We could row (yes, row, as in propelling a tippy little boat on a pond) all the way from Scotland to Syria to visit our relatives. It was a reckless sort of joke to make, given the couple’s addiction to adventure. The result is Rowed Trip, an odyssey by oar (and bike) from Caithness, Scotland, across the English Channel, through France, across the Rhine, the Main-Donau Canal to the Danube, the Black Sea, the Bosphorous Straits, and the Mediterranean. Julie and Colin each describe how the trip allowed them to test their relationship, to explore their roots, and to indulge to the max their shared taste for adventure.

    If they had, we wouldn't hear the delicious details of how horribly wrong it all went. Like Marrit Ingman's disastrous honeymoon in Maui—and the repercussions of societal pressure for the perfect love escape in paradise. Or of how the entire kitchen of C. Lill Ahrens's new Seoul apartment is literally lost in translation. Or why Ayun Halliday would attempt to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, when her training consisted of drinking beer and rolling her own cigarettes, and her gear cost $14.99 at Sportmart. From Kandahar to Baja to Moscow, these wry, amusing stories capture the comic essence of bad travel, and of the female experience on the road.Roughly translated / C. Lill Ahrens --Kilimanjaro / Ayun Halliday --Hamil's house of fun / Kay Sexton --I could do this in my sleep / Karin Palmquist --Adventure Pete / L.A. Miller --Constipated in Palinuro / Judith Levin --The trail / Erica J. Green --How to travel with a man / Kate Chynoweth --A useful and comprehensive travel dictionary for girls / Buzzy Jackson --Tri training in Russia / Mara Vorhees --Worry warts / Lisa Taggart --In search of Sami / Ann Lombardi --Bigger than France / Spike Gillespie --Souvenirs from Ecuador / Bethany Gumper --Heading South / Samantha Schoech --Knocked off my high horse in New Zealand / Catherine Giayvia --The lion sleeps tonight / Sarah Franklin --No strings attached / Paige Porter --Y2K in Kandahar / Hannah Bloch --Prada on the Plaka / Michele Peterson --Honeymoon in Hell / Marrit Ingman --The occidental tourist / Judy Wolf

    The invitation had come from an intrepid 80 year-old, Diana Hepworth, who in 1947 set sail from England to find a faraway paradise where she and her husband Tom could raise a family.

    Johnny Wray's gripping and often hilarious account of his adventures around the South Pacific has inspired readers and changed lives since its first publication 75 years ago. Fired from his day job during the Great Depression, Johnny begged, borrowed and stole the materials to build his famous yacht Ngataki. With some mates for company and a sextant to steer by, he set sail for the palm-fringed atolls and islands of his dreams - to discover they really did exist. But South Sea Vagabonds is much more than just a ripping yarn; it is a heartfelt hymn to the possibility of living a free life and truly being the master of one's own destiny.

    But this trip in and around the lands of the Pacific may be his boldest, most fascinating yet. From New Zealand's rain forests, to crocodile-infested New Guinea, over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors, daring weather and coastlines, he travels by Kayak wherever the winds take him--and what he discovers is the world to explore and try to understand.

    Battered by year-round freezing rain and constant winds, it is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island, another ship runs aground during a storm. Separated by only twenty miles and the island’s treacherous, impassable cliffs, the crews of the Grafton and the Invercauld face the same fate. And yet where the Invercauld’s crew turns inward on itself, fighting, starving, and even turning to cannibalism, Musgrave’s crew bands together to build a cabin and a forge—and eventually, to find a way to escape. Using the survivors’ journals and historical records, maritime historian Joan Druett brings to life this untold story about leadership and the fine line between order and chaos.

    “For years I’d made my own choices, paid my own bills, shoveled my own snow.” But somehow she had become dependent in quite another way. “I had fallen into the habit of defining myself in terms of who I was to other people and what they expected of me.” But who was she away from the people and things that defined her? In this exquisite book, Steinbach searches for the answer to this question in some of the most beautiful and exciting places in the world: Paris, where she finds a soul mate; Oxford, where she takes a course on the English village; and Milan, where she befriends a young woman about to be married. Beautifully illustrated with postcards from Steinbach’s journeys, this revealing and witty book transports you into a fascinating inner and outer journey, an unforgettable voyage of discovery.

    Her book is about the fear of an ordinary person doing extraordinary things. . . . It is good to read of someone who is just crammed full of courage, guts, spirit and determination." --Smoke Blanchard, Walking Up and Down in the WorldCindy Ross had already hiked the 2000-mile length of the Appalachian Trail when, hoping to escape a deadening daily routine and sort out her life, she returned to the wild. But this time it was a more rugged arena: the Pacific Crest Trail, a mostly mountainous, 2600-mile route from Mexico to Canada, vastly different from the relatively gentle, well-traveled Appalachian Trail.Her trip began--badly--in the California desert, where the hiking "partner" she had selected from an advertisement proved to be totally inexperienced and so strange that they parted company the first day. Continuing alone, Ross soon became the de facto leader of a motley, ever-changing crew of PCT walkers that came to be known as "Cindy's Circus." Long, rugged hiking days produced physical ailments and strong emotions, but in confronting and surmounting these challenges, Ross grew in strength. After many months and several major changes in her life, Ross beat fall snows and storms to reach the Canadian border. More than the end of the trail, this was also a symbolic milestone in her life.In narrating her story, Ross deftly brings the reader into the physical and emotional landscape of long-distance hiking. Her cast of "Crest characters" is sharply drawn in both words and sketches.

    In Travels in Siberia, Frazier reveals Siberia's role in history--its science, economics, and politics--with great passion and enthusiasm, ensuring that we'll never think about it in the same way again.With great empathy and epic sweep, Frazier tells the stories of Siberia's most famous exiles, from the well-known--Dostoyevsky, Lenin (twice), Stalin (numerous times)--to the lesser known (like Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the empress for copying her dresses) to those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Siberian camps under the Soviet regime, forever immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.Travels in Siberia is also a unique chronicle of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, a personal account of adventures among Russian friends and acquaintances, and, above all, a unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the "amazingness" of Russia--a country that, for all its tragic history, somehow still manages to be funny. Travels in Siberia will undoubtedly take its place as one of the twenty-first century's indispensable contributions to the travel-writing genre.

    Josie's travels are as fascinating as they are varied; she endures a horrific storm at sea, samples the deadly puffer fish and visits the two cities which will forever symbolise the horror of war: Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But wherever she goes, no matter how remote or industrious the area, Josie encounters the friendly, quirky and unbelievably generous Japanese people, from those who load her down with cabbages and cans of Pocari Sweat to one couple who left her the key to their shop - and told her to sleep by the till!

    As the Vietnam war took more and more of his friends, and many of those who returned sank further into drugs and despair, Stan looked for meaning and found nothing. His life's purpose lay thirty-three hundred miles northwest, deep in the Tozitna River Valley in the heart of Alaska's frozen interior. Deadly cold, famine, grizzly bears, and one unruly sled dog with a grudge kept Stan on the knife's edge between survival and death. Humbled by the power of nature, the Boston greaser who was destined for prison found a new life in the wild, where one mistake can prove fatal. This is the true story of Stan Zuray's incredible journey; the reformation of a man's heart and mind in the forbidding darkness of Alaska's endless winter.

    When she befriends some Tibetan nomads, her trek quickly evolves from a daredevil adventure to a journey of self-discovery and personal revelation.

    A reporter with a beautiful wife and talented son, Richey couldn’t imagine how it could be any better....Then his marriage falls apart and he can’t imagine how it could be any worse.The divorce leaves Richey questioning everything, while struggling to find a way forward. To get his bearings, he enters the first Ultimate Florida Challenge, an all-out twelve-hundred-mile kayak race around Florida.The UFC is less of a race than it is a dare or a threat. The thirty-day deadline sets a grueling, twenty-four-hour-a-day pace through shark- , alligator- , and even python-infested waters. But those twelve hundred miles are only a fraction of a journey that pulls Richey back to when he was embedded with troops in Iraq, reporting on missing children, and hiking the mountains of Montana with his son, and shows him where he went wrong, where he went right, and how to do it better the second time around.Warren Richey’s memoir Without a Paddle is a remarkable physical and emotional journey that cuts to the heart of what it means to be a man, a husband, and a father.

    Other than his dogs, what was it about these two small islands on the edge of the world that had kept him—an otherwise restless traveller—for really much longer than they seemed to deserve? Bennett thought he'd better pack his bag and find out. Hitching around both the intriguingly named North and South Islands, with an eye for oddity and a taste for conversation, Bennett began to remind himself of the reasons New Zealand is quietly seducing the rest of the world.