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Appealing to road-hardened know-alls and armchair-bound
stay-at-homes alike, the Journeys series delves into the world's
hidden places, capturing the spirit of place and the nature of
travel, illuminating unfamiliar cultures and recounting the odd
adventure along the way.
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Now Available: |
The Blue Man: Tales of Travel, Love & Coffee
J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons; Larry Buttrose, living later in the twentieth century, adds frequent flyer miles to coffee as a measure of his life. The Blue Man is this restless writer's compelling exploration of life, love and commitment across continents and relationships. From Ghana to Greece, from Tokyo to Timbuktu. from London to Los Angeles, Australian-born Larry roams where his work, desires and travelling companions take him. But his real journey is through the emotions of the interior world. The presence or absence of the beautiful yet elusive Kathryn is the hub around which all of his journeys, physical and mental, revolve. With or without her, even when they are both involved with other people, it is Kathryn who haunts Larry through the cafés and restaurants of the traveller's world. With a devastating eye for detail and a poet's feeling for language, Larry probes the demands of modern relationships - and the hazards of modern travel. Also available from Lonely Planet: Journeys travel literature
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Brief Encounters: Stories of love, sex & travel
Love affairs on the road, passionate holiday romances, erotic encounters, lovers who meet only to part... In Brief Encounters, a tourist in Peru falls for her handsome guide; backpackers check out who's on offer in the nightclubs of Prague; a couple trawl for adventure in a Mexican bathhouse; a beautiful Italian proposes marriage to the foreigner he's just met... Twenty seductive stories for everyone who has dreamt of escape with that perfect stranger.
Also available from Lonely Planet: Journeys travel literature
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Drive thru America
Beware, beware: pop culture junkie Sean Condon is on the road again. From New York to San Francisco, Sean investigates the legendary people, places and TV programs that sustained him through his difficult pre-pubescent years. Can he survive the channel-switching, the miles of highway, the country & western radio, the all-you-can-eat fast-food bargains? In Drive thru America Sean Condon behaves unwisely, risks several ironic remarks...and provides a shrewd and very funny take on life in the United States. The road book that makes you glad you stayed at home.
About the Author
Also available from Lonely Planet: Sean & David's Long Drive; Journeys travel literature
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Full Circle: A South American Journey
Full Circle invites us to accompany Chilean writer Luis Sepulvéda on a "journey without a fixed itinerary". Whatever his subject - brutalities suffered under Pinochet's dictatorship, sleepy tropical towns visited in exile, or the landscapes of legendary Patagonia - Sepulvéda is an unflinchingly honest yet lyrical storyteller. Extravagant characters and extraordinary situations are memorably evoked: gauchos organising a tournament of lies, a scheming heiress on the lookout for a husband, a pilot with a corpse on board his plane... Part autobiography, part travel memoir, Full Circle brings us the distinctive voice of one of South America's most compelling writers
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The Gates of Damascus
The Gates of Damascus is a beautifully drawn portrait of daily life in modern-day Syria. Through her intimate contact with Hala, a Damascene, Lieve Joris experiences the routines and celebrations of domestic life in the Middle East. She also witnesses the impact of Syrian politics on the lives of ordinary people. A travel writing classic, Lieve Joris's book offers a unique insight into the complexities of the Arab world.
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Green Dreams: Travels in Central America
A canoe glides silently through the rainforest. Monkeys bark warnings from the overhanging boughs as a caiman slips into the stream. Such is the stuff that green dreams are made of but, as Stephen Benz reveals, the reality of ecotourism can be closer to a nightmare. On the Amazon, in Costa Rica, Honduras and on the Mayan trail from Guatemala to Mexico, Stephen describes his encounters with water, mud, insects and other wildlife - and not least with the ecotourists themselves. He witnesses simulated cultural festivals and discovers that his fellow travellers prefer pursuing their own green dreams to coming face-to-face with the local people and their world. With witty insights into the phenomenon of modern travel, Stephen discusses the paradox at the heart of cultural and 'green' tourism. His shrewd observations make provocative and absorbing reading.
About the Author Also available from Lonely Planet: Journeys travel literature
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In Rajasthan
As she writes of her travels through Rajasthan, Royina Grewal takes us behind the exotic fascade of this fabled destination: here is an insider's perceptive account of India's most colourful state. In Rajasthan discusses folk music and architecture, feudal traditions and regional cuisine... Most of all, it focuses on people; from maharajahs to camel trainers, from a female Marxist leader to itinerant snake charmers. In Rajasthan doesn't dwell on the state's glorious past: it looks to the present and the future to convey the excitement and challenges of a region in transition.
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Islands in the Clouds
This is the fascinating account of a journey to the remote and beautiful Highlands of New Guinea - one of the most extraordinary and dangerous regions on earth. The author travels with a PNG Highlander who introduces her to his intriguing and complex world, a world that is changing rapidly as it collides with 20th-century technology and the island's developing social and political systems. Isabella Tree travels from PNG's Eastern Highlands to the Highlands of Irian Jaya, illuminating the tragic consequences of the island's colonial and post-colonial carve ups. Islands in the Clouds is a moving and thought-provoking book, full of insights into a region that has kept its secrets hidden like no other.
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Kingdom of the Film Stars
Kingdom of the Filmstars is a travel book and a love story. With honesty and humour, Anne Caulfield writes of travelling in Jordan and falling in love with a Bedouin. Her book offers fascinating insights into the country - from the traditional tent life of nomadic to the first woman MP's battle with fundamentalist colleagues. Kingdom of the Filmstars unpicks some of the tight-woven Western myths about the Arab world, but it is not an impersonal analysis: Anne Caulfield presents cultural and political issues within the intimate and immensely readable framework of a compelling love story.
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Lost Japan
Drawing on the author's personal experiences of life in Japan over a period of 30 years, Lost Japan takes the reader on a backstage tour of the country's cultural icons. The book explores different facets of Alex Kerr's cultural involvement: friendships with Kabuki actors, buying and selling art, studying calligraphy, exploring rarely visited temples and shrines. The author's experiences underscore the fact that Japan is heading towards environmental and cultural ruin.
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Mali Blues: Travelling to an African Beat
Mali Blues takes acclaimed writer Lieve Joris to West Africa. Traveling in Senegal, Mauritania and Mali, Joris finds countries troubled by drought, rebel uprisings and ethnic conflict. But the Africans she meets are survivors, fascinating individuals charting new ways of living between tradition and modernity. The story of Malinese blues singer Kar Kar (Boubacar Traoré) - celebrated in Europe, caught up in a family tragedy at home - epitomises the struggles facing so many people in these lands. With her remarkable gift for drawing stories out of people, Joris paints a hauntingly intimate portrait of the singer and his society, brilliantly capturing the rhythms of a world that refuses to give in.
About the Author She has expanded the boundaries of travel writing. - Times Literary Supplement
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Not the Only Planet: Science Fiction travel stories
Like a cyborg and a spaceship, like an explorer and a time machine, travel and science fiction have always gone together. Not the Only Planet is a unique collection of stories about travelling both ends of the space-time continuum by internationally celebrated sf writers. A family takes a package tour to the Crucifixion; astronauts on Mars confront the difficulty of reporting on the unimaginable; and a phrasebook for tourists offers a hilariously skewed vision of travel to come. Hi-tech galaxies, tattered futures, the shiveringly strange and the uncomfortably familiar: when every corner of our current world is thoroughly described in guidebook after guidebook, Not the Only Planet offers a set of exotic post-cards from worlds that don't exist. Yet. Compiled by Damien Broderick, Not the Only Planet contains stories by: Brian W. Aldiss, Stephen Dedman, Greg Egan, Lisa Goldstein, Garry Kilworth, Paul J. McAuley, Joanna Russ, Robert Silverberg, John Varley and Gene Wolfe.
About the Editor Also available from Lonely Planet: Journeys travel literature
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The Olive Grove: Travels in Greece
Katherine Kizilos travels to the fabled islands, troubled border zones and her family's village deep in the mountains. She vividly evokes breathtaking landscapes, generous people and passionate politics, capturing the complexities of a country she loves. The Olive Grove tells of other journeys too: the life-changing journey made by the author's emigrant father; the migration of young Greeks to cities which is transforming rural life; and the tremendous impact of tourism on Greek society. A lyrical homage to Greece and its people.
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The Rainbird: A Central African Journey
The Rainbird is a classic travel story. Following in the footsteps of famous Europeans such as Albert Schweitzer and H.M. Stanley, Jan Brokken journeyed to Gabon in central Africa. A kaleidoscope of adventures and anecdotes, The Rainbird brilliantly chronicles the encounter between Europe and Africa as it was acted out on a side-street of history. It is also the compelling account of the author's own travels in one of the most remote and mysterious regions of Africa.
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Sean & David's Long Drive
Sean Condon is a 29-year-old city boy and a connoisseur of hair wax. He can't drive, and he doesn't really travel well. So when Sean and his friend David set out to explore Australia in a 1966 Ford Falcon, the result is a decidedly off-beat look at life on the road. Over 14,000 death-defying kilometres, our heroes check out the re-runs on TV, get fabulously drunk (again), listen to Neil Young (again) and wonder why they ever left home. Read it out loud.
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A Season in Heaven: true tales from the road to Kathmandu
"It wasn't hard to leave: Nixon, the Vietnam War, the Bomb... it's fair to say that I was interested in Indian things... but I knew very little." A Season in Heaven presents the true stories of travellers who hit the hippie trail in the late sixties. David Tomory, himself a veteran of the road to Kathmandu, interviewed a group of travellers who went looking for enlightenment and discovered a world that changed their lives. In Iran and Afghanistan, in Indian ashrams, mountain villages and dubious hotels, a generation of young people got hip, got busted, lost their luggage, and sometimes even found themselves. A Season in Heaven travels with the Americans, Europeans and others who took the trip overland from Europe to India, Pakistan and Nepal. By turns funny and fascinating, spiritual and sensual, their experiences reflect one of the most significant and rarely described social movements of recent times. A Season in Heaven will stir the memories of those who went, and reveals the attraction for those who wish they had.
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Shopping for Buddhas
Shopping for Buddhas is Jeff Greenwald's story of his obsessive search for the perfect Buddha statue. In the backstreets of Kathmandu, he discovers more than he bargained for...and his souvenir-hunting turns into an ironic metaphor for the clash between spiritual riches and material greed. Politics, religion and serious shopping collide in this witty account of an enlightening visit to Nepal.
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Songs to an African Sunset: A Zimbawean Story
Songs to an African Sunset is the story of a Zimbabwean woman returning to her country after many years of living in the West. Sekai Nzenza-Shand captures the texture of life in an African village: mourning rituals, village courts, polygamy, traditional beliefs about fertility, ancestral spirits and witchcraft. Her book also offers a moving account of the impact of AIDS on her family, as well as looking at drought, deforestation and the breakdown of traditional structures. An unforgettable picture of contemporary Zimbabwe seen from the perspective of an African women.
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Larry Buttrose
edited by Michelle de Kretser
Sean Condon
Luis Sepúlveda
Lieve Joris
Stephen Benz
Royina Grewal
Isabella Tree
Annie Caulfield
Alex Kerr
Lieve Joris
edited by Damien Broderick
Katherine Kizilos
Jan Brokken
Sean Condon
David Tomory
Jeff Greenwald
Sekai Nzenza-Shand