Travel writing - Page 1

If you think writing a guidebook is easy, think again! Are We Nearly There Yet?: A Family's 8000 Mile Car Journey Around Britain explains how Ben and Dinah were bored, broke, burned out and turning 40, so when they saw the advert looking for a husband and wife team with young kids to write a guidebook about family travel around Britain, they jumped at the chance. With naive visions of staring moodily across Coniston Water and savouring Cornish pasties, they embark on a mad-cap five-month trip with daughter Phoebe, four, and son Charlie, two, embracing the freedom of the open road with a spirit of discovery and an industrial supply of baby wipes.

Part love story and part wine-splattered cookbook, Elizabeth Bard's Lunch in Paris: A Delicious Love Story, with Recipes is a deliciously tart, forthright and funny story about falling in love with a Frenchman and moving to the world's most romantic city. Discovering the real Paris, a heady mix of blood sausage, pain aux chocolats and irregular verbs. Elizabeth finds that learning to cook and building a new life have a lot in common as she learns about everything from gutting her first fish (with a little help from Jane Austen) through to discovering the French version of Death by Chocolate. Peppered with recipes, this mouth-watering love story is the perfect treat for anyone who has ever suspected that lunch in Paris could change their life.

Karen Wheeler's Toute Allure tells how there is so much to look forward to in the months ahead - to lengthening evenings, bike rides past fields of sunflowers or wild meadows of bluebells and poppies (just like the seventies Flake ad) and several months of fetes, vide greniers (car boot sales) and barbecues in friends' gardens. After reaching the heights as a successful fashion editor, Karen said goodbye to all that and set about renovating a run-down house in rural Poitou-Charentes, in central western France, and living a simpler life. Her idyll is almost complete when she is blissfully ensconced in her fully plumbed, tiled, floored and 'warm as the hug of a pashmina' Maison Coquelicot - until, that is, a gang of macho Portuguese builders, a procession of Brits behaving badly and the ghosts of boyfriends past begin to arrive on her doorstep. Karen soon finds her (dancing) feet in the small rural community when she discovers the key to acceptance is le danse country. And after a few shuffles and twirls she meets the love of her life - he has dark, shaggy hair, four paws and a wet nose...

Yossi Ghinsberg's Lost in the Jungle is a harrowing true story of adventure and survival. Four backpackers meet in Bolivia and set off into the rainforest on a dream expedition, lured by the promise of uncharted villages and forgotten tribes hidden in places tourists only dream of seeing. But what begins as the adventure of a lifetime quickly becomes a struggle for survival when they get lost in the wilds of the Amazonian jungle. The group splits up after disagreements, and Yossi and Kevin try to find their own way without a guide. When a terrible rafting accident separates the two men, Yossi is forced to survive for weeks alone in one of the most unpredictable environments on the planet. Stranded without a knife, map or survival training, he must improvise shelter and forage for wild fruit to survive. As his skin begins to rot from his feet during raging storms, he wonders if any of them will make it back alive.Told with gripping immediacy, it's an extraordinary, terrifying tale that you won't be able to put down.

Tired of airport security queues, delays and all those extra taxes and charges, Tom Chesshyre embarks on a series of high-speed adventures across the Continent on its fast trains instead in Tales from the Fast Trains. From shiny London St Pancras, Tom travels to places that wouldn't feature on a standard holiday wish-list, and discovers the hidden delights of mysterious Luxembourg, super-trendy Rotterdam, much-maligned Frankfurt and lovely lakeside Lausanne, via a pop concert in Lille. It's 186 mph all the way - well, apart from a power cut in the Channel Tunnel on the way to Antwerp. Is our idea of 'Europe' changing as its destinations become easier to reach? And what fun can you have at the ends of the lines? Jump on board and find out.

Travelling across the former Soviet Union is a challenge at the best of times - but in a dilapidated VDub! that's got to be plain daft...hasn't it? Thom Wheeler was in his prime, hungry to make a mark on the world Gainful employment in the ex-Soviet Union was a dream come true. A chance job offer at a timber yard in Estonia gives Thom and his old pal Jo a taste for the unknown. So when Uncle Tony asks them to drive to Vladivostok for another job, they can't think of a good reason why not. The result is a classic caper across the former Soviet Union in Max, a rusty old VW camper. Knowing little of the language or the geography ahead, they embark on probably the longest commute ever, encountering corrupt officials, film star mechanics and over-friendly gangsters. Far off the tourist trail, they bear witness to the collapse of one nation and the birth of a new one during the free-for-all that was Russia in the nineties. One Steppe Beyond is a fantastic read for anyone with an interest in Russia or camper vans!

She was particularly taken with the small narrow ledges that ran along either side of the boat. For a cat, four inches is an airport runway - she could dance a Moonwalk along them on her two hind legs, juggling at the same time. Steve Haywood has a new member of crew aboard his narrowboat, Justice - but maybe not the kind he'd have wanted if he'd known the trouble she'd cause. Kit, an untidy bundle of fur with all the attitude you would expect from a 'sarf Lunnun' cat, joins him on a mission to discover lost parts of England. Steve gets a different perspective on the modern world in Too Narrow to Swing a Cat as he cruises the canals through a landscape unchanged for centuries, visiting picturesque towns and waterway festivals along the way.

Steve Haywood has a problem. He doesn't know where he comes from. In the south, people think he's a northerner; in the north, they think he's from the south. Judged against global warming and the sad demise of Celebrity Big Brother, this hardly registers highly on the Richter scale of world disasters. But it's enough to worry Steve. And it's enough of an excuse for him to escape his long-suffering partner Em for a voyage of discovery along England's inland waterways. Travelling by traditional narrowboat, he heads north along two newly opened Pennine canals, a trip that takes him from Banbury in deepest Oxfordshire, through the vibrant modernity of Manchester, to the trendy affluence of Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire's answer to London's ciabatta belt. With irrepressible humour, Narrowboat Dreams recounts the history of the waterways and stories of his encounters with characters along the way, and attempts to define the magic that makes England's waterways so appealing.