Showing results for "John English" in Adventure Travel

For many years, Saint-Germain-des-Pres has been a stronghold of sans culottes, a refuge to artists, a paradise for bohemians. It's where Marat printed L'Ami du Peuple and Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Man. Napoleon, Hemingway, and Sartre have all called it home. Descartes is buried there. Now best-selling author and Paris expert John Baxter takes listeners on a narrative tour of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, which is also where Baxter makes his home.

Will Chaffey is 18 when he boards a plane in New York bound for Australia. Taking time off to work and travel, Will meets an enigmatic wanderer and herpetologist. Together they cross the inland desert to the tropical northwest coast, home to the saltwater crocodile, a known man-eater and a predator who has been hunting since the age of the dinosaurs. They devise a plan to explore the remote Prince Regent River, a trek so dangerous it had never been attempted by outsiders.

As a result of a rowdy night in his local New York bar, ex-Marine and merchant seaman "Chick" Donohue volunteers for a legendary mission. He will sneak into Vietnam to track down his buddies in combat to bring them a cold beer and supportive messages from home. It'll be the greatest beer run ever! Now, decades on from 1968, this is the remarkable true story of how he actually did it. Armed with Irish luck and a backpack full of alcohol, Chick works his passage to Vietnam, lands in Qui Nhon and begins to carry out his quest, tracking down the disbelieving soldiers one by one.

From the moment Peter Mayle and his wife, Jennie, uprooted their lives in England and crossed the Channel permanently, they never looked back. Here the beloved author of A Year in Provence pays tribute to the most endearing and enduring aspects of his life in France—the charming and indelible...

In Skyfaring, airline pilot and flight romantic Mark Vanhoenacker shares his irrepressible love of flying on a journey from day to night, from new ways of mapmaking and the poetry of physics to the names of winds and the nature of clouds. Here, anew, is the simple wonder and transcendent joy of motion and the remarkable new perspectives that height and distance bestow on everything we love.

An intimate journey across America, as told by one of its most beloved writers To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had...

A final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers. Journeying alone, in what he feels will be his last African journey, Paul Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the itineraries of tourists and the hopes of post-colonial independence movements. Having travelled down the right-hand side of Africa in Dark Star Safari, he sets out this time from Cape Town, heading northwards up the left-hand side, through South Africa and Namibia, to Botswana, heading for the Congo, in search of the end of the line.

Learn how to read the clues and signs of nature with this eye-opening and enthralling guide from Sunday Times-bestselling author Tristan Gooley, pioneer in the art of natural navigation 'It's like being given some sort of magical text . . . eye-opening and invaluable.' -INDIA KNIGHT The ultimate...

Leaving from Brooklyn, New York, in August 1911, John Muir, at the age of seventy-three and traveling alone, embarked on an eight-month, 40,000-mile voyage to South America and Africa. The 1911-12 journals and correspondence reproduced in this volume allow us to travel with him up the great Amazon, into the jungles of southern Brazil, to snowline in the Andes, through southern and central Africa to the headwaters of the Nile, and across six oceans and seas in order to reach the rare forests he had so long wished to study.

As Ellie’s 50th birthday approaches and her ambitions of a steady income, a successful career and an ascent of Everest seem as far away as ever, she begins to doubt she’s capable of achieving anything at all. So when her best friend Mick suggests a gruelling cycle ride from Land’s End to John o’Groats, she takes up the challenge. They opt for the scenic route which takes them along cycle paths, towpaths and the back roads and byways of Britain, unable to resist sampling beers in the pubs they pass along the way.

A highly entertaining anecdotal collection of humorous life observations during a trip around the world. Travelling by bus to Kathmandu, the author experiences hair-raising misadventures: a chase through Jerusalem, a gun battle in Jordan, a pummelling by a gargantuan masseur in Istanbul, a python in India, and the terrifying James Bond encounter in Australia. His portrait of an Afghani shopkeeper has a bizarre twist. Time-travelling detours punctuate interesting stories about the Taj Mahal, Sydney Opera House, Tahiti, Easter Island statues and Christ in Rio.

Over the course of twenty years of delivering sailboats to far-flung quaysides, John Kretschmer has had innumerable adventures, both humorous and terrifying. In Flirting with Mermaids, he recounts the most memorable of them. He crosses the Western Caribbean with a crew of eccentric Swedes researching ancient Mayan mariners, lands in Aden at the outbreak of civil war, and endures a North Atlantic crossing during which he discovers the existence of Force 13 winds.

This memoir is an autobiographical account of the events as witnessed by Bernal Diaz - a Conquistador on that journey - a man from Spain who desperately hoped to carve out a life of riches for himself in the new world and instead found himself on an epic journey of conquest, whilst desperately fighting to stay alive, in previously unknown and unimagined lands. This is a true tale written in his own hand and translated into English. It is a gripping account of the events from the soldiers' viewpoint as each day becomes a battle for survival against incredible odds.

John Hooper's marvelously entertaining and perceptive new book is ideal for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Italy and the unique character of the Italians. Looking at the facts that lie behind and often belie the stereotypes, his revealing book sheds new light on many aspects of Italian life: football and Freemasonry, sex, symbolism, and the reason Italian has twelve words for a coat hanger yet none for a hangover.

John Muir (1838 -1914) was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness areas in the United States. In the late 1800s, Muir made several trips to the relatively unexplored territory of Alaska. Travels in Alaska, originally published in 1915, describes the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness and its inhabitants as observed during his travels between 1879 and 1890. In poetic prose, he describes the area’s magnificent glaciers and its animals like bears, bald eagles, wolves and whales.

In the late 1990s John Pollack was working as a Washington speechwriter when, frustrated by the cynicism and hypocrisy on Capitol Hill, he quit his job to pursue a boyhood dream: to build a boat made entirely of wine corks and take it on an epic journey. Cork Boat tells the story of Pollack’s...

It's a life-changing trip. Take it! John Ahern had a high-flying job, big house, loving wife and two great kids. But if this was success, why did he sense he was failing as a husband and father? So John did something insane. He quit the corporate world and bought a busted-up camper-van online to chase an improbable dream: a year travelling together as a family...on the road with kids.

The great unknown of the Southwest is conquered by a one-armed man and his crew of adventurers, placing the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon on the map of the American continent. It is a journey no human being had ever made before. Dangerous rapids, narrow canyon walls offering no escape, terrifying river waterfalls, capsized boats, near drowning, lost equipment and disillusioned men are dramatically described by John Wesley Powell, leader of this adventurous party.

John Kretschmer is sailing’s practical philosopher - as much a doer as a thinker. And that is the overarching theme of this chronicle of a sailing life. Often amusing, sometimes poignant, occasionally terrifying but always inspiring, his deeply personal account is a welcome reminder of the good life waiting at sea. With hundreds of thousands of nautical miles under his keel, John’s adventures have taken him several times around the world.

John Scott hiked the 2160 mile Appalachian Trail to celebrate his life. As a teenage boy in 1970's Scotland he was fascinated by US politics and culture. John explores this fascination as he hikes through 14 states from Georgia to Maine. Over miles and months, he realizes it is the land and people which now captivates him. To the Woods is a walk through a man's life.