Category Archives: Travel Guides
Tibetan Foothold
Dervla Murphy`s first epic journey from Ireland to India by bicycle, “Full Tilt”, is a complete adventure in itself. It is also the first volume of a trilogy of experience that continues with Tibetan Foothold. For the young Irish woman, once she had got herself to India by July 1963, immersed herself in the life
The Waiting Land – A Spell in Nepal
In “The Waiting Land” (first published in 1967) Dervla Murphy affectionately portrays the people of Nepal`s different tribes, the customs of an ancient, complex civilization and the country`s natural grandeur and beauty. This is the third of Dervla Murphy`s early travel books: an exploration of Nepal by a feisty, generous-hearted young Irish woman. Yet it
Where the Indus Is Young
One winter, Dervla Murphy, the four-footed Hallam (the mule) and her six-year-old daughter Rachel explored `Little Tibet` high up in the Karakoram Mountains in the frozen heart of the Western Himalayas – on the Pakistan side of the disputed border with Kashmir. For three months they travelled along the perilous Indus Gorge and into nearby
In Ethiopia With A Mule
In 1966 Dervla Murphy travelled the length and breadth of Ethopia, first on a mule, Jock, whom she named after her publisher, and later on a recalcitrant donkey. The remarkable achievement was not surviving three armed robberies or the thousand-mile trail, but the gradual growth of affection for and understanding of another race.
Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia
Two middle-aged ladies, one Penelope Chetworth, the other her 12-year old mare La Marquesa, explored the high sierra north of Granada in 1961. Together the travellers brought out the best in their Spanish hosts and Chetwode`s compelling account – warm, witty and candid – is informed by her infectious personal fascination for horses, religion and
Travels on My Elephant
With the help of a Maratha nobleman, Mark Shand buys an elephant named Tara and rides her over six hundred miles across India to the Sonepur Mela, the world`s oldest elephant market. From Bhim, a drink-racked mahout, Shand learned to ride and care for her. From his friend Aditya Patankar he learned Indian ways. And
Goodbye Buenos Aires
`Goodbye Buenos Aires` is a vivid and earthy celebration of Argentina, which chronicles the rise and fall of the British colony in the 20`s and 30`s through the imaginative biography of one of its charismatic representatives – a hard-drinking, womanising, emigre Scotsman, who cut his way through the bars and brothels of the city whilst
Travels into Bokhara
Alexander Burnes travelled up the Indus to Lahore and to the Khanates of Afghanistan and Central Asia in the 1830s, spying on behalf of the British Government in what was to become known as the `Great Game`. His account of these travels was a bestseller in its day and this brand new edition brings the
A Time in Arabia
Doreen Ingrams and her husband were the first Europeans ever to live in the Hadhramaut, an extraordinary, isolated region of southern Arabia. Married to an Arabic-speaking British official, she arrived by boat, and during their ten-year residency travelled throughout the region by camel and donkey. Doreen kept a diary in which she detailed their adventures
The Innocent Anthropologist
The wittiest introduction to the life of a social anthropologist ever written. Studying in the Cameroons for his first experience of fieldwork, Barley discovers that the society of the Dowayo people refuses to conform to the rules of his new discipline. Although set amongst a little-known tribe in the Cameroons, this slim volume reaches out
Jackdaw Cake
In “Jackdaw Cake” Norman Lewis recounts the first half of his adventurous life with dry, infectious, laconic wit, observing the transformation of a stammering schoolboy into a worldly wise multilingual intelligence agent on the point of becoming a formidable travel writer.
The Missionaries
In “The Missionaries”, Norman Lewis brings together a lifetime`s experience of travelling in tribal lands in a searing condemnation of the lethal impact of North American fundamentalist Christian missionaries on aboriginal life throughout the world.
A Year in Jamaica: Memoirs of a Girl in Arcadia in 1889
`A Year in Jamaica` is a complex memoir telling the story of two simultaneous journeys: Diana Lewes` 1889 trip from England to visit her family`s sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and more intriguingly, the internal rite of passage of a Victorian girl on her journey to adulthood. For it is in Jamaica that Miss Lewes
The Light Garden of the Angel King: Travels in Afghanistan
From time immemorial Afghanistan has been both a fortress of faith and a mountainous crossroads. Through its high valleys merchants traded Chinese porcelains, bundles of indigo cloth, sacks of lapis lazuli, golden jewellery, emeralds and fine carvings from both east and west. Ancient scrolls and beliefs entered the land in the satchels of Buddhist pilgrims
Central Asia: Through Writers` Eyes
Between these covers, the millennia of mercantile and cultural exchange along the Silk Route are celebrated by travellers and writers from Marco Polo to Sven Hedin, from William of Rubrick to Ella Maillart. Kathleen Hopkirk has spent a lifetime researching this vital heartland, traversed by five, inhospitable deserts but united by ancient chains of trading
Tuscany and Umbria
This series complements their classic travel list, providing travellers with a carefully chosen pocket-sized selection of poems to guide them to their destination.
An Ottoman Traveller
Evliya Celebi was the Orhan Pamuk of the 17th century, the Pepys of the Ottoman world – a diligent, adventurous and honest recorder with a puckish wit and humour. He is in the pantheon of the great travel-writers of the world, though virtually unknown to western readers. This brand new translation by the foremost scholar
Voices of the Old Sea
Voices of the Old Sea recounts Norman Lewis’s return to Spain after the war, where he settled in the remote fishing village of Farol, on what is now the Costa Brava. Voices of the Old Sea describes his three successive summers in the almost medieval community where life revolved around seasonal sardine catches, the Alcalde`s
The Trouble I`ve Seen
Martha was the youngest of sixteen, handpicked reporters who filed accurate, confidential reports on the human stories behind the statistics of the Depression directly to Roosevelt`s White House. From these pages, we understand the real cost of sudden destitution on a vast scale. We taste the dust in the mouth, smell the disease and feel
Libyan Sands
“Libyan Sands” is unmistakably the work of an Englishman, a modest, machine- and desert-loving young officer whose passionate amateur enthusiasm led to the exploration of the Egyptian western desert and the Libyan Sahara on the eve of the second world war.
