Showing results for "The River" in Travel Writing & Commentary

The Brahmaputra is by some margin the largest river in India. After its confluence with the Ganga in Bangladesh, it becomes the largest in Asia. In The Braided River, journalist Samrat Choudhury sets out to follow its braided course from the edge of Tibet where it enters India down to where it...

‘A tour de force of luminous writing.’ Mark Cocker, Spectator ‘In 1976 James Crowden left his career in the British army and travelled to Ladakh in the Northern Himalaya, one of the most remote parts of the world. The Frozen River is his extraordinary account of the time he spent there...

Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it - its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport. Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea.

More than twenty years after teaching English to China's first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler's twin daughters became the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand in their local primary school. Through reconnecting with his previous students now in their forties—members of China's "Reform generation"—and teaching his current undergraduates, Hessler is able to tell an intimately unique story about China's incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.

River Cruising Masterclass is a practical, experience-driven podcast for travelers who want to understand river cruising before they book.Hosted by luxury travel advisor Sydney Schellinger, this podcast answers the real questions travelers ask but rarely get clear answers to—like:What is a river cruise, and how is it different from ocean cruising?Which river cruise line is actually worth the money?What’s really included in the fare (and what isn’t)?Who should not take a river cruise?How do Rhine, Danube, Rhône, and other rivers compare?What kind of onboard experience can first-time ...

Over the years, authors, artists and amblers aplenty have felt the pull of the Thames, and now travel writer Tom Chesshyre is following in their footsteps. He's walking the length of the river from the Cotswolds to the North Sea - a winding journey of over 200 miles. Join him for an illuminating stroll past meadows, churches, palaces, country (and council) estates, factories and dockyards.

The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangri-la is a breathtaking account of the ill-fated October 1998 expedition of an American whitewater kayaking team who traveled deep into the Tsangpo Gorge in Tibet to run the Yarlung Tsangpo, known in paddling circles as the "Everest of rivers." For Wick...

In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident.

Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded "the great river" with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. But European settlers and American pioneers had a different vision: the river was a foe to conquer. In this landmark work of natural history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of human attempts to own and contain the Mississippi River, from Thomas Jefferson's expansionist land hunger through today's era of environmental concern

Edward Abbey, who never much liked Alaska, called it "our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state." To others, it has been a cure for despair. When Michael Engelhard moved to Fairbanks more than three decades ago, he was a cheechako, a subarctic tenderfoot. Gathering skills and experiences the hard way, he attained "Sourdough" status while realizing there would always be more to learn, see, and do in the land of midnight sun and auroras.

When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000, he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H. M. Stanley's famous expedition - and travelling alone. Despite warnings that his plan was suicidal, Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots.

To National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez, the desert and the river are landscapes alive with poetry, mystery, seduction, and enchantment. In these two works of fiction, the narrator responds viscerally and emotionally to their moods and changes, their secrets and silences, and their unique power. Desert Notes portrays the mystical power of an American desert, and the reflections it sparks in the characters who travel there. River Notes, a companion piece, celebrates the wild life forces of a river.

With his inimitable combination of wit and wisdom, John Gierach once again celebrates the fly-fishing life in Standing in a River Waving a Stick and notes its benefits as a sport, philosophical pursuit, even therapy: "The solution to any problem-work, love, money, whatever-is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be." After all, fly-fishing does teach important life lessons, says Gierach-about solitude, patience, perspective, humor, and the sublime coffee break.

Steve Nicholls makes an epic journey along the River Tees in north-east England, from the industrial complexes near its estuary to its source high in the Pennine Hills. The Tees estuary was where Steve’s life-long passion for nature was born, launching a long career as a documentary maker. As he travels the length of the eighty-mile river, he uses his years of travelling the world and his work on nature films to place the fauna and flora he encounters along the Tees in a wider context.

When not writing his famous Western novels, Zane Grey was an insatiable angler. Tales of Southern Rivers recounts his tales of fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Keys, the Everglades, and on remote rivers in the jungles of Mexico. With many of these venues being some of today's most popular saltwater fly-fishing destinations, no one will want to miss these highly entertaining and informative stories. Armchair fishing will never be the same.

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.

A product of beige California suburbs, Pam Mandel was overlooked and unexceptional. When her father ships her off on a youth group tour of Israel, he inadvertently catapults his 17-year-old daughter into a world of angry European backpackers, seize-the-day Israelis, and the fall out of Cold War-era politics. With no guidance and no particular plan, Mandel says yes to everything and everyone, embarking on an adventure across three continents and thousands of miles.

At the end of summer 1839, the light changing and autumn in the air, Henry David Thoreau and his brother John clambered into their 15-foot-long homemade boat on an adventure north. They traveled the rivers from Concord, Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire. Henry was two years out of Harvard, and his brother John was a few years older. They wound their way up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by day and camped along the shores at night.

On the West Coast of the South Island, past deep fjords, glassy lakes, forested valleys and snow-capped mountains, lies the Long family cabin. It was here that Chris Long spent the first 17 years of his life, two days' hike from the nearest road. In this heartfelt and captivating audiobook, Chris describes childhood with nature on his doorstep—helping his father catch crayfish and his mother grow vegetables, dreaming of helicopter visits, playing with toys crafted from driftwood and jade and learning to survive in the wild.

Much the way Donald Hall’s Seasons at Eagle Pond captured New England, Sky Time in Gray’s River captures the essence of the rural Northwest. Although Rober Michael Pyle is a lepidopterist, and southwestern Washington is notable for its lack of butterflies, something about the village of Gray's River spoke to him on a visit thirty years ago. Ever since then he has lived in the village, which was one of the first to be established near the mouth of the Columbia River and which still feels only tenuously connected to the twenty-first century.