Travel Diaries

When expat blogger and mother of four Eva Melusine Thieme first harbors the idea of ringing out her three years in Africa on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, it sounds easy. In fact, it has all the trappings of a dream vacation: no cooking, no fighting kids, and an army of porters to lug everything up the mountain. What can go wrong? Tag along as Eva takes you on her journey up the slopes of Kilimanjaro together with her teenage son and a group of hilarious South African friends.

From the million-copy-selling author of The Roman Mysteries comes a nail-biting time-travel adventure in Roman London - where past meets present. Billionaire Solomon Daisy is obsessed with the skeleton of a blue-eyed girl from Roman London. He has managed to invent a time machine so that he can go and find her, but it's estimated that for each hour spent in the past, the time traveller's life will be shortened, so Solomon recruits a potential child time traveller: Alex Papas, a 12-year-old boy who knows a smattering of Greek and Latin.

Hotel 81 is commonly thought of by Singaporeans as a cheap love-hotel chain in Geylang, frequented by horny, old men with their "girlfriends". But though that might've been the case a long time ago, up until today, it's less-than-stellar reputation remains difficult to shake off. Take a peek at the hotel's esteemed clientele through the eyes of Rice Media.

Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn’t leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming”, a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life. Ehrlich captures both the otherworldly beauty and cruelty of the natural forces - the harsh wind, bitter cold, and swiftly changing seasons - in the remote reaches of the American West.

For the first time ever Roland Huntford presents each man's account of the race to the South Pole in their own words. In 1910, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen set sail for Antarctica, each from his own starting point, and the epic race for the South Pole was on. 2010 marks the centenary of the last great race of terrestrial discovery. For the first time Scott's unedited diary entries run alongside those of Amundsen and Bjaaland, never before translated into English.

Alex and his friend Dinu vowed never to time travel again. But now it's summer, and Alex and Dinu have been offered a luxury summer holiday in Athens. After a rooftop banquet the evening they arrive, everyone gets food poisoning and is told not to eat for 48 hours. When Alex and Dinu feel better, they decide to stretch their legs. But the moment they step out of the hotel, their limo pulls up with their dangerous mentor, Solomon Daisy, who now has a new mission for them.

This work is a collection of fictional observations by the narrator as he travels around the countryside of southern New South Wales and Victoria in the 1880s. He presents the life of the various rural dwellers, including bullock drivers, squatters and itinerant travelers, and also attempts to convey the accents of Irish, Scottish and Chinese personalities he encounters. This tale provides insight into the stories and hardships of rural dwellers in Australia in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as well as the narrator’s own philosophy of life.

Nelson Algren’s two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume. Notes from a Sea Diary offers one of the most remarkable appraisals of Ernest Hemingway ever written. Who Lost an American? is a whirlwind spin through Paris and Playboy clubs, New York publishing and Dublin pubs, Crete, and Chicago.

Alain de Botton was given unprecedented, unrestricted access to wander around Heathrow, one of the world’s biggest airports, having been appointed its Writer-in-Residence. He spoke with everyone from airline staff and senior executives to travellers passing through, and based on these conversations he produced this extraordinary account of life at an airport and what it says about modern existence.

Edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez, Journeys offers access to Ramanujan's personal diaries and journals, providing a window into his creative process. It will include literary entries from his travels, his thoughts on writing, poetry drafts, and dreams. His diaries and journals served as fertile ground where he planted the seeds for much of his published work....

This hilarious new book records the tongue-in-cheek journey of an expat in Singapore, told through vignettes, snapshots and Top 10 lists: "10 sure signs you're in a Singapore taxi"; "Things first-time visitors to Singapore say"; "10 signs you've overstayed"; "Politically-incorrect expat profiling by nationality"; and many more.

After ten years away to build a family, Mallory returns to Floreana Island in the Galápagos, and to Gavin, the mentor with whom she had a long-ago affair. Their project is to build nests to revive the vulnerable penguin population. But Mallory doesn’t dare tell Gavin why she’s really come back. Then she discovers old journals hidden in a lava cave—confessions of another woman who needed to disappear.

"Cuadernos de un viajador". Donde confluyen el viajero y el trabajador, volumen 2, prosigue la colección de crónicas escritas por Saravia durante su paso por distintas naciones con historias agitadas a principios del siglo XXI. Hay un repaso de su recorrido por países sudamericanos como Uruguay, Chile y Paraguay, también un viaje intenso a la Sudáfrica que lleva todavía las marcas del apartheid. Al recuerdo del levantamiento del gueto mientras visita Varsovia le sigue el panorama de la vida actual de los palestinos en Ramallah, Belén y Jerusalén.

Mary fought for a place as a professional artist without having to live as a tragic heroine. She married George Reid, Canadian muralist, and while their relationship was more equal than most, this was still the Edwardian age. How do you find time to paint when you need to get to the market to buy a chicken for dinner?

"Cuadernos de un viajador. Donde confluyen el viajero y el trabajador volumen 1", rejunta crónicas que Mariano Saravia escribió desde el año 2000 y mientras visitaba países muy diferentes. Su actitud está abiertamente alejada de la del turista. Es más bien una actitud de curiosidad profunda, la actitud de alguien que busca las pequeñas y grandes historias de cada región, sus heridas y logros en la persistencia por ser felices los humanos sobre la faz de este Mundo.

Eat, Pray, Love meets Claude Monet in this epistolary ode to Paris. What started as a whim in a Latin Quarter café blossomed into Janice MacLeod’s years-long endeavor to document and celebrate life in Paris, sending monthly snippets of her paintings and writings to the mailboxes of ardent followers around the world. Now, Dear Paris collects the entirety of the Paris Letters project: 140 illustrated messages discussing everything from macarons to Montmartre.

Preparing for the first winter in his new home, ready to embrace the slower pace of early retirement, he soon discovers that it’s not working. From floods to explosions, from protection rackets to hospitalisations, from coping with the death of his hero to trying to find solace in a confusing and abstract relationship, this is a frank, funny and always heartfelt story of how not working doesn’t always work out, and it might just be Graham’s wildest ride yet.

1842 brach der junge und schon gefeierte Autor Charles Dickens zu einer Lesereise nach Amerika und Kanada auf - von Boston bis St. Louis, von Richmond bis Quebec, mit Bahn oder Schiff. Zunächst stellte er sich ein Amerika vor, in dem eine tolerante und demokratische Zukunftsgesellschaft entstehen würde, ohne den Dünkel der englischen Aristokratie. Umso enttäuschter war er über den amerikanischen Kapitalismus und vor allem über die Sklaverei. Seine Kritik an Land und Leuten formulierte er unmittelbar und nicht ohne Ironie in seinen "Aufzeichnungen aus Amerika", gelesen von Christian Brückner.

I'm Humza Khan, the greatest 11-year-old rapper Eggington ever had. I've also faced deadly alien slugs, killer aunties and double maths. But now, I (and my best friend Umer I guess) face something even scarier - my dad! He's pretty fed up with us being naughty, so he's sending us away...to school. But this is not ordinary school. This is a special summer school in Pakistan, and man, something weird is going on - someone has been messing with time! I may have to save the world again....

In the spirit of the diaries of Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, McNeil mixes travelogue, popular science, and memoir to examine the history of our fascination with ice. In entering this world, McNeil unexpectedly finds herself confronting her own upbringing in the Maritimes, the lifelong effects of growing up in a cold place, and how the climates of childhood frame our emotional thermodynamics for life.