Travel Writing Memoirs

From village feasts and rustic tavernas to ancient piazzas and moonlit balconies, the smells, tastes, sounds, and soul of Umbria come alive in Marlena de Blasi's evocative memoir. By turns romantic and sensual, joyous and celebratory, touching and humorous, Marlena de Blasi's account of moving with her husband, Fernando, to Orvieto, the largest city in Italy's Umbria, will appeal to anyone who delights in travel and shares the fantasy of beginning a new life in a very different place.

Drawing together a fascinating body of writing from over 14 years of work, Figures in a Landscape ranges from profiles of cultural icons (Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams) to intimate personal remembrances, from thrilling adventures in Africa to literary writings from Theroux's rich and expansive personal reading. Collectively these pieces offer a fascinating portrait of the author himself, his extraordinary life and his restless and ever-curious mind.

Nicolas Vanier lâche son attelage. Devant lui, un défi immense : la Yukon Quest, la course de traîneaux à chiens la plus difficile au monde. 1600 kilomètres entre le Canada et l'Alaska, le long de la route de la ruée vers l'or. Des températures glaciales qui dépassent les - 50 degrés. Des vents qui vous renversent au premier relâchement. Un parcours accidenté exténuant.

In 1930, two novice paddlers - Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port - launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe from the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages.

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content," but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.

In 1831, the HMS Beagle took sail. Onboard was a young Charles Darwin. He would set out on an adventure that would lead him to question everything about man's place in the world. The Voyage of the Beagle is the journal Darwin kept of his observations of the extraordinary and natural wonders he encountered, from volcanoes to the coral reefs of Australia. It would be these natural wonders that would lead to him questioning how the different species of the world came to be and eventually to his radical theories.

Entertainment Weekly calls acclaimed author and essayist J. Maarten Troost a "funny, candid, and down-to-earth travel companion". Both witty and poignant, Headhunters on My Doorstep follows Troost as he retraces Robert Louis Stevenson’s path through the South Pacific. Somewhere between AA meetings in Tahiti and discovering how the Island of Merrymaking got its name, Troost reconnects with himself, his family, and the beauty of life.

An exemplary travelogue of danger and achievement by the Frenchwoman Madame Alexandra David-Neel of her 1923 expedition to Tibet, the fifth in her series of Asian travels and her personal recounting of her journey to Lhasa, Tibet's forbidden city. In order to penetrate Tibet and reach Lhasa, she used her fluency of Tibetan dialects and culture, disguised herself as a beggar with yak hair extensions and inked skin, and tackled some of the roughest terrain and climate in the world.

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Keith Foskett’s dream of escape started with a single step. When the long-distance hiker chose to backpack all 2,180 miles of the Appalachian Trail, he left ordinary life behind for five months. Enduring an incredible test of physical and psychological strength, Foskett was pushed to his limits....

The Traveling Vegan turns digital nomad, traveling for a year and working remotely from a laptop and smart phone, living in 12 cities in 12 months on four continents: Europe, Asia, North and South America. Experience living in a city not as a tourist but as a resident, along with 48 others in the traveling family, who become "tramily". Phil's worldview about what these cities are "really like" will make you laugh a lot, cringe a little, and think more deeply about humanity, politics, history, economics, nutrition, and daily life around the world.

As a child, Maggie Downs often doubted that she would ever possess the courage to visit the destinations her mother dreamed of one day seeing. "You are braver than you think," her mother always insisted. That statement would guide her as, over the course of one year, Downs backpacked through seventeen countries - visiting all the places her mother, struck with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, could not visit herself - encountering some of the world's most striking locales while confronting the slow loss of her mother.

Bougainville profite d'une mission royale aux Malouines pour réaliser son projet de tour du monde dont le but est surtout de découvrir de nouvelles terres dans le Pacifique.

Es ist ein sonniger Junimorgen, als Hape Kerkeling, bekennende "couch potato", endgültig seinen inneren Schweinehund besiegt und in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port aufbricht. Sechs Wochen liegen vor ihm, allein mit sich und seinem elf Kilo schweren Rucksack: über die schneebedeckten Gipfel der Pyrenäen, durch das Baskenland, Navarra und Rioja bis nach Galicien zum Grab des heiligen Jakob, seit über 1000 Jahren Ziel für Gläubige aus der ganzen Welt.

At 35, Leslie Buck made an impulsive decision to put her personal life on hold to pursue her passion. Leaving behind a full life of friends, love, and professional security, she became the first American woman to learn pruning from one of the most storied landscaping companies in Kyoto. Cutting Back recounts Buck's bold journey and the revelations she has along the way.

Travel journalist Kate Wills wasn’t expecting to be divorced after less than a year of marriage, or to be forced to restart a life that had seemed so stable for so long. Luckily, her job as a writer offered her the perfect opportunity to escape from it all. But this time, with no deadlines to hit or all-expenses-paid trips to absorb in a few days before churning out copy for a travel magazine, her jet-setting felt different. There were no photographers working alongside her or assistants booking her flights. For the first time ever, Kate was traveling alone.

Michael Palin journeys to a vast country of unimaginable contrasts - Brazil. An economic powerhouse, it is host to a staggering variety of peoples. He starts his journey in the north, in the remote mountains and forests on the border with Venezuela, and finishes in the south at the legendary Iguaçu Falls. He travels by river-boat, float-plane and foot to visit tribes deep in the jungle, samples life in the agricultural and mining heartland of Brazil, experiences the modernism of Brasília and the heady mix of Rio de Janeiro, and ventures into the favelas.

Charley Boorman is back on his bike exploring the world's second-largest country - home to some of the most stunning and challenging terrain known to man. Canada is a country of extremes, and Charley knows all about pushing the limits. He goes dirt biking in New Brunswick, dives through old shipwrecks in Tobermory and rides along Butch Cassidy's old Outlaw Trail. He also meets a fascinating mix of people on his journey.

Elisabeth Tova Bailey tells the intimate and inspiring story of her year-long encounter with a snail. While an illness keeps her bedridden, she becomes an astute and amused observer of the snail's surprising nocturnal adventures as it lives in a flowerpot on her nightstand. Intrigued by the snail’s clear decision making abilities, hydraulic locomotion, mysterious courtship, and molluscan anatomy, Bailey takes the listener deep into the life of this tiny amazing animal. With wit and grace, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating recounts a remarkable journey of human and gastropod survival and resilience, and shows how the natural world illuminates our own human existence. Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Nonfiction, the John Burrough Medal Award for Natural History, and a National Outdoor Book Award. If you enjoyed Wesley the Owl, The Guest Cat, and Marley & Me, you'll enjoy this unique interspecies audiobook listen.

To anyone interested in small-boat cruising and voyaging, the names Lin and Larry Pardey need no introduction. As world-girdling sailors who roamed the planet on a pair of small, engineless boats that they built themselves, the Pardeys established their hard-earned reputations by eloquently (and sometimes controversially) telling their stories through a series of best-selling books and manuals, and countless seminars and boat shows.