Go Lightly: How to travel without hurting the planet by Nina Karnikowski

$35.00 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

This sustainable travel handbook inspires readers to explore our fascinating planet without causing it further harm. Ten chapters help you go lightly, including how to choose the least impactful methods of travel, how best to protect wildlife, how to pack with more consideration and how to implement min dful practices into each travel day, Go Lightly gives the reader a tool kit of fresh ideas for travelling more consciously. The book also covers eco-friendly activities including biking, boating and camping, and introduces us to some of the world's most inspiring eco-adventure pioneers. ...Show more

Between Two Kingdoms: What Almost Dying Taught Me about Living by Suleika Jaouad

$35.00 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

At just twenty-two, as her friends were setting out on the path to adulthood, Suleika Jaouad was diagnosed with leukemia. For the next five years, her world comprised four white walls, a hospital bed, fluorescent lights and tubes and wires connecting her to an IV pole. Her dreams of becoming a war corre spondent were replaced by a battle for her own life. At the age of twenty-seven, and celebrating her first year of remission, Suleika embarked on an epic road trip, her only companion her three-year-old Schnoodle, Oscar - a certified service dog who had played a huge part in her recovery. Starting in New York City, the roadmap was determined by the home addresses of the people she wanted to visit along the way - some of the many strangers who had responded to her New York Times columns and films, 'Life, Interrupted', and whose own deeply personal stories of surviving illness and tragedy had sustained Suleika during her years of treatment. Between Two Kingdoms is a chronicle of survivorship and beginning anew. Illuminating some of the universal questions about how we live, mourn, heal and grow up, this twist on the classic American road trip is an inspiring and empowering exploration of what it means to survive. ...Show more

The Stubborn Light of Things - A Nature Diary by Melissa Harrison

$32.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

A nature diary by award-winning novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison, following her journey from urban south London to the rural Suffolk countryside. 'A writer of great gifts.' Robert Macfarlane 'A nature writer with a knowledge and eye for detail that recalls Thomas Hardy and John McGahern.' Th e Times When I lived in London I barely noticed the winter solstice. Nothing slowed, contracted or dimmed to mark the shortest day of the year, for, like all cities, London has all but left such trifling considerations behind. But now I am in Suffolk, and the difference could not be more marked. I wake in dim half-light, the yellow windows of nearby farmhouses glimmering across frost-white fields. At three the rooks begin to gather in the leafless trees, and flocks of starlings start to move from place to place. When darkness falls, the nights are blacker than I've ever seen, the starfield so breathtaking that Orion and the Plough are lost amid a million other points of light. The Stubborn Light of Things will transform the way you see the world. A Londoner for over twenty years, moving from flat to Tube to air-conditioned office, Melissa Harrison knew what it was to be insulated from the seasons. Adopting a dog and going on daily walks helped reconnect her with the cycle of the year and the quiet richness of nature all around her: swifts nesting in a nearby church; ivy-leaved toadflax growing out of brick walls; the first blackbird's song; an exhilarating glimpse of a hobby over Tooting Common. Moving from scrappy city verges to ancient, rural Suffolk, where Harrison eventually relocates, this diary - compiled from her beloved Nature Notebook column in The Times - maps her joyful engagement with the natural world and demonstrates how we must first learn to see, and then act to preserve, the beauty we have on our doorsteps - no matter where we live. A perceptive and powerful call-to-arms written in mesmerising prose, The Stubborn Light of Things confirms Harrison as a central voice in British nature writing. ...Show more

Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other by Sam Heughan; Graham McTavish

$34.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

From their faithful camper van to boats, kayaks, bicycles, and motorbikes, join stars of Outlander, Sam and Graham on a road trip with a difference, as two Scotsmen explore a land of raw beauty, poetry, feuding, music, history, and warfare. Unlikely friends Sam and Graham begin their journey in the hea rt of Scotland at Glencoe and travel from there all the way to Inverness and Culloden battlefield, where along the way they experience adventure and a cast of highland characters. In this story of friendship, finding themselves, and whisky, they discover the complexity, rich history and culture of their native country. ...Show more

Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght

$48.00 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

When wildlife researcher Jonathan Slaght was a young Peace Corps volunteer in the Russian Far East, he caught a brief glimpse of a Blakiston's fish owl. It was the furthest south the species had been documented in over a hundred years, and a chance encounter that would change his life. In Owls of the E astern Ice, Slaght tells the story of his decades-long quest to safeguard the world's largest owl from extinction in Primorye, a remote Russian province dominated by Ussuri taiga forest, the only place in the world where brown bears, tigers and leopards co-exist. The fish owl lives exclusively along the rivers of Eastern Russia, Northeastern China, and Japan's Hokkaido Island, and can best be tracked in the winter snows, so very little is known about it. Now Russia's evolving fortunes, logging interests and climate change present new threats to the owl's survival. In this breath-taking nature and adventure story, Slaght recounts his experiences pursuing the owl through its forbidding territory, during months-long journeys covering thousands of miles, so that he and his fellow researchers can learn how to protect this endangered giant. Along the way he spends time with the Russians who inhabit the taiga and must survive in the harshest and most isolating of conditions. As much a portrait of the world's most extraordinary owl as of the Russian Far East itself, Owls of the Eastern Iceis a timely meditation on our relationship with the natural world and what it means to devote one's life to a single pursuit. ...Show more

The Frayed Atlantic Edge by David Gange

$27.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

'This is the book that has been wanting to be written for decades: the ragged fringe of Britain as a laboratory for the human spirit' Adam Nicolson Over the course of a year, leading historian and nature writer David Gange kayaked the weather-ravaged coasts of Atlantic Britain and Ireland from north to south: every cove, sound, inlet, island. The idea was to travel slowly and close to the water: in touch with both the natural world and the histories of communities on Atlantic coastlines. The story of his journey is one of staggering adventure, range and beauty. For too long, Gange argues, the significance of coasts has been underestimated, and the potential of small boats as tools to make sense of these histories rarely explored. This book seeks to put that imbalance right. Paddling alone in sun and storms, among dozens of whales and countless seabirds, Gange and his kayak travelled through a Shetland summer, Scottish winter and Irish spring before reaching Wales and Cornwall. Sitting low in the water, as did millions in eras when coasts were the main arteries of trade and communication, Gange describes, in captivating prose and loving detail, the experiences of kayaking, coastal living and historical discovery. Drawing on the archives of islands and coastal towns, as well as their vast poetic literatures in many languages, he shows that the neglected histories of these stunning regions are of real importance in understanding both the past and future of the whole archipelago. It is a history of Britain and Ireland like no other. ...Show more

Couchsurfing in China: Encounters and Escapades Beyond the Great Wall by Stephan Orth

$37.00 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

China can be a challenging travel destination, with its strict visa conditions, the language barrier and internet censorship. Couchsurfer Stephan Orth chooses a different path than most and gains an insider view of the nation, directly from the living rooms of locals. He talks to them about their dreams and fears, and about where this huge country is heading. Concrete facades sometimes conceal great surprises, and Orth is on a mission to discover the real China. In Couchsurfing in China, the award-winning travel journalist spends three months exploring the Middle Kingdom- from the gamblers' paradise of Macau, to the mountainous region of Yunnan Province, to the city of Dandong on the North Korean border. Orth visits high-tech megacities and remote villages, meeting artists critical of the regime and ethnic minorities forced into re-education camps. Utterly out of place, he finds himself censored as a guest on live TV and almost joins an outlawed sect. On his travels, Orth uncovers the complicated realities of life in a country that encompasses a bewildering mixture of old and new, natural and artificial, beautiful and chaotic - a place poised to become the future number-one world power. The result is an intriguing travelogue full of insight, humour and revelation. ...Show more

Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir by Agatha Christie

$34.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

Agatha Christie's personal memoirs about her travels to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan, where she worked on the digs and wrote some of her most evocative novels. Think you know Agatha Christie? Think again! To the world she was Agatha Christie, legendary author o f bestselling whodunits. But in the 1930s she wore a different hat, travelling with her husband, renowned archaeologist Max Mallowan, as he investigated the buried ruins and ancient wonders of Syria and Iraq. When friends asked what this strange 'other life' was like, she decided to answer their questions by writing down her adventures in this eye-opening book. Described by the author as a 'meandering chronicle of life on an archaeological dig', Come, Tell Me How You Live is Agatha Christie's very personal memoir of her time spent in this breathtaking corner of the globe, living among the working men in tents in the desert where recorded human history began. Acclaimed as 'a pure pleasure to read', it is an altogether remarkable and increasingly poignant narrative, a fascinating, vibrant and vivid portrait of everyday life in a world now long since vanished. ...Show more

The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen Russell

$24.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

When she was suddenly given the opportunity of a new life in rural Jutland, journalist and archetypal Londoner Helen Russell discovered a startling statistic: the happiest place on earth isn't Disneyland, but Denmark, a land often thought of by foreigners as consisting entirely of long dark winters, cur ed herring, Lego and pastries. What is the secret to their success? Are happy Danes born, or made? Helen decides there is only one way to find out: she will give herself a year, trying to uncover the formula for Danish happiness. From childcare, education, food and interior design to SAD, taxes, sexism and an unfortunate predilection for burning witches, The Year of Living Danishly is a funny, poignant record of a journey that shows us where the Danes get it right, where they get it wrong, and how we might just benefit from living a little more Danishly ourselves. ...Show more

The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris by John Baxter

$26.99 NZD

Category: Travel Writing | Reading Level: very good

Thrust into the unlikely role of professional "literary walking tour" guide, an expat writer provides the most irresistibly witty and revealing tour of Paris in years.In this enchanting memoir, acclaimed author and long-time Paris resident John Baxter remembers his yearlong experience of giving "literar y walking tours" through the city. Baxter sets off with unsuspecting tourists in tow on the trail of Paris's legendary artists and writers of the past. Along the way, he tells the history of Paris through a brilliant cast of characters: the favorite cafes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce; Pablo Picasso's underground Montmartre haunts; the bustling boulevards of the late-nineteenth-century flâneurs; the secluded "Little Luxembourg" gardens beloved by Gertrude Stein; the alleys where revolutionaries plotted; and finally Baxter's own favorite walk near his home in Saint-Germain-des-Pres.Paris, by custom and design, is a pedestrian's city-each block a revelation, every neighborhood a new feast for the senses, a place rich with history and romance at every turn. The Most Beautiful Walk in the World is your guide, par excellence, to the true, off-the-beaten-path heart of the City of Lights. ...Show more

How to Climb Mont Blanc in a Skirt,: A Handbook for the Lady Adventurer by Mick Conefrey

$9.99 NZD

$30.00 (66% off)

Category: Travel Writing

Whether a seasoned adventurer or a want-away office worker, How to Climb Mont Blanc in a Skirt is the essential purchase for Christmas in 2011. From using camel fat to improve your love-life to climbing Everest without oxygen, Mick Conefrey offers a vivid insight into the often-overlooked world of femal e explorers. Discover who dressed up as a Tibetan peasant to explore Asia and why you shouldn't let a gorilla near your bedroom. Pairing inspiring stories of famous female explorers with hilarious tips on being an adventurer - such as what to do when attacked by a crocodile - this book is fascinating and entertaining in equal measure. ...Show more

An Artist's Journey Down the Thames by John Doyle

$52.00 NZD

Category: Travel Writing

Creates a unique record of Britain's most distinguished river with fifty watercolor paintings of the towns, villages, and countryside to be found along the banks of the Thames