Category: Travel

Shipped

12/2/2021

Angie Hockman: Gallery Books $US16.00

CRUISING in comfort around one of the world’s most exotic and enticing archipelagos is hardly a tough way to audition for an intra-office promotion, but Henley Evans hasn’t been looking forward to this trip. In fact, she’s been dreading it.
After years of going well above and beyond her pay grade in order to demonstrate her loyalty to her employer and her department head, Henley resents being forced into one-on-one competition with the shiny new boy-wonder on the company block.
In the barely 12 months he’s worked alongside Henley, Graeme Crawford Collins has become her professional nemesis. The rivalry started the day Graeme brazenly accepted credit for material Henley had created and their conversation is now so strained as to consist of single-word emails fired back and forth with the velocity of an ice-hockey puck and copied selectively to third parties in a war of strategic one-upmanship.
It’s an unproductive situation, given that Henley and Graeme are communications colleagues on the marketing team of Seaquest Adventures, an expedition cruise line running small-group experiences in places as varied as Costa Rica, Alaska, Panama and Hawaii.
With a coveted seat at the executive table available, Henley and Graeme are vying to become Seaquest’s first director of digital marketing.
Their immediate manager has announced that the role will go to the candidate who produces the most compelling promotional plan based on the line’s Galapagos Islands offering. While sampling the itinerary, Henley and Graeme must out-manoeuvre each other without revealing their animosity publicly.
With her flirtatious younger sister, Walsh, under foot, can Henley salvage a winning presentation from a voyage that’s threatening to drive her career onto the rocks?
Humorous and heart-warming, Shipped is set against the real-life islands, inhabitants and issues of 21st-century Galapagos – a destination showcased to perfection in Hockman’s cleverly crafted debut novel.

Through Ice & Fire

18/10/2019

Sarah Laverick: Macmillan Australia $34.99

TWO things of note occur in Newcastle, near Sydney, in 1989: the city experiences a magnitude 5.6 earthquake that damages 50,000 buildings and cost $4 billion in repairs, and Australia’s first locally built Antarctic icebreaker, Aurora Australis, is launched.
It isn’t exactly an easy birth. Early in the process engineers at Carrington Slipways discover inconsistencies in plans supplied by renowned Finnish shipyard Wärtsilä Marine: ducts do not join up, services overlap, pipes are forced to compete for the same bulkhead space. With patience and ingenuity the team forges ahead – only to have production derailed again shortly thereafter when Wärtsilä enters bankruptcy.
Despite these hurdles Aurora Australis is completed on time in 1990 and delivered to operator P&O Polar on behalf of the Australian Government.
Fitted with 133 berths, it incorporates an array of laboratories, hull-mounted oceanographic sensors, a central data-logging system, a commercial-sized trawl net, finer sampling nets, a conference facility, a photographic darkroom and a surgery. It is the most sophisticated vessel ever used by the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition.
Its first voyage of significance is to Australia’s three stations on the edge of the continent itself (Casey, Mawson and Davis), combining on the brand-new ship both new personnel and new systems – a recipe for certain frustration if not complete disaster.
This is the start of a 30-year career during which Aurora Australis survives fires, besetment, breakdowns, a grounding, illness and injuries, and the failure of key pieces of scientific monitoring and recording equipment, all while making a priceless contribution to Antarctic research. Presented in biographical style, Through Ice & Fire records the highlights and lowlights of three decades of sailing in one of the world’s harshest environments and pays tribute to the people who populate the ship through until its retirement in Hobart at the end of the 2019–20 summer season.

Crossings

5/7/2019

Alex Landragin: Picador Australia $32.99

HOW many Earthly lifetimes can a single human soul endure?
In its initial chapter readers meet one of the two hosts of Crossings as an aged version of the debauched and desperate 19th-century Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire.
Encased in a body riddled with syphilis, penniless and itinerant, the essence of Baudelaire has every reason to embrace the notion of transmigrating from this broken carapace to re-emerge with a new physical identity, ready to embark on a reinvigorated existence but with its amassed memories intact. Baudelaire’s is not the only figure to be inhabited over the course of roughly 150 years by this relater of tall tales, however; in fact, it is not even the first.
The unfolding of the novel also reveals a second shape-shifting storyteller, originating as Polynesian islander Alula at the time of isolated Oaeetee’s discovery by seafaring French explorers.
In the course of making its way from the mid Pacific Ocean to the literary heartland of Europe, this latter raconteur travels via idyllic Mauritius, the squalid port city of Marseille in France and a sugarcane plantation in the American Deep South. Changing gender en route, it pursues its former lover, Koahu, around the globe, campaigning desperately for an long-awaited emotional reunion.
Presented in three distinct yet complementary parts, Melbourne author Landragin’s manuscript weaves together disparate periods in history (including the two world wars), locations as diverse as steamy New Orleans, sophisticated Brussels and the French-Spanish border region of the Pyrenees, and a pair of narrators.
Perhaps most remarkably, it can be read in a choice of two ways: conventionally, from the first page of the book as it stands published through to the last, or through the eyes of a secondary character, Baroness Beattie Ellingham, following a sequence outlined in the introduction that delivers a unique storyline.

The Tenth Island

11/1/2019

Diana Marcum: Amazon $30.75

NINE main islands make up the Azores; the 10th so-called “island” of the archipelago is the diaspora created by emigration after natural and political disasters ranging from volcanic eruptions to intellectual oppression and physical starvation under the rule of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.
Around the world communities of expatriate Azoreans thrive – nowhere more robustly than in the Central Valley of California, the fruit-and-vegetable-bowl of the US and one of the country’s most productive dairying regions thanks to farmers who originated in the Azores.
Now an autonomous region of Portugal, the Azores remain a haven for these loyal natives, many of whom fly in when possible to spend at least part of the northern summer socialising “back home”.
In this memoir Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Diana Marcum becomes acquainted with a cross-section of Atlantic-born Portuguese-Americans while writing for a regional newspaper in the valley and for the Los Angeles Times.
A brief initial visit to the rural island of Terceira fuels Marcum’s appetite so powerfully that it is inevitable she will one day return for a much longer stay.
The resulting year in a small agricultural village on Terceira’s northern coast allows Marcum to resurrect friendships founded a decade earlier and provides rich detail for this personal portrait of an island group that manages to balance an optimistic present and future with an intense respect for a deeply traditional past.
At the same time Marcum explores issues within her own life, including unfulfilling relationships and a career that has not always followed an outwardly clear trajectory.
With irreverence and humour, sensitivity and passion, she documents the personalities, practices and predicaments that set the distinctive people of Terceira apart as they dodge bellowing bulls, lament lost love, impress with newfound Californian prosperity, savour chewy shellfish and revere crusty home-delivered bread.

Vodka and Apple Juice

30/11/2018

Jay Martin: Fremantle Press, $27.99

JAY Martin is embarking on what appears to be every other Australian woman’s dream: spending three years as a lady of absolute leisure in northern Europe.
Accompanying husband Tom Armstrong on his diplomatic posting to Poland, Martin is at first excited by the promise of free time in which to explore their adoptive city, Warsaw, and its surrounding regions.
The novelty wears thin after only a few weeks, however, and in place of the initial wave of exoticism Martin feels herself quickly drowning under a tsunami of helplessness and rebellion as she struggles to read grocery labels, use public transport and make interpersonal connections in an entirely unfamiliar culture.
Her attempts to master a language of ‘ssshhhhhhes’ leave her mentally exhausted, and the sense of loss brought on by having stalled her own career as a senior political communicator in Canberra in order to travel with her husband leave Martin longing to reclaim the demands of full-time work with its structure and routine. The life of a non-working expatriate wife, it seems, is not the idyllic existence outsiders imagine it to be.
As Armstrong becomes increasingly ground down by his obligations to the embassy, Martin finally starts to regain her characteristic confidence, creating a role for herself as a freelance reporter and establishing a small but meaningful circle of loyal and engaging friends, both local and foreign.
In the process she explores areas of Poland few tourists visit, accepts that vegetarianism is an unfathomable concept to meat-loving pierogi traditionalists and develops a penchant for generous servings of vodka-spiked apple juice.
Yet, as the seasons tick slowly by and the emotional strain on her marriage intensifies, Martin begins to wonder whether she will ever settle comfortably into the apparently endless round of exhibition openings, cocktail parties, black-tie dinners and receptions for Australian government VIPs.

My Polar Dream

23/11/2018

Jade Hameister: Macmillan Australia, $29.99

JADE Hameister has always been an exceptional achiever.
Aged six she walked to the summit of Mt Kosciuszko.
At 12 she convinced her parents to take her on a family hike through the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp.
The following year, at 13 Hameister set her sights on reaching the South Pole.
Only one obstacle stood in her way: the Hameisters’ chosen guide insisted she be at least 16 years old before attempting such a gruelling expedition.
Undaunted, she decided to kill time with a couple of relatively straightforward warm-up treks: to the North Pole and across the Greenland icecap.
Never having skied, she prepared with a few days’ training in New Zealand’s South Island, then set out from the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway determined to become the youngest person ever to ski entirely unsupported and unassisted from outside the final degree of latitude to the most northerly point in the world.
Along the way her youthful ambition, inspiring teenage message and passionate environmental focus caught the attention of both the National Geographic Society (which engaged a videographer to accompany Hameister and her father on each of their three increasingly taxing challenges) and the team behind the global phenomenon of TEDx talks.
Those same characteristics quickly drew the ire of a cohort of anonymous online trolls, however, who used the phrase “Make me a sandwich” to suggest Hameister’s true purpose as a woman should be to wait on men.
Her reply – along with the nearly three years’ worth of agony, frustration, ecstasy and relief that preceded it as she completed her sub-zero hat-trick – is recounted in Hameister’s own voice, from the joy of opening special letters written by her closest school friends to the physical torture of hauling twice her own bodyweight in a sled over jagged ridges of ice.

One Italian Summer

28/7/2017

Pip Williams: Affirm Press $29.99

WHERE better to experience small-acreage self-sufficiency first-hand than in Italy: a country famed for its sun-ripened produce, luscious artisanal cheeses, plump piquant smallgoods and hearty pastas and breads?
It’s this reasoning that motivates a family of four Australians to pack their bags as lightly as possible and head to the opposite side of the world in search of both skills and inspiration.
Having already relocated from suburban Sydney to a semi-rural block in the Adelaide Hills, Pip, Shannon, Aiden and Riley decide to take their quest for a tree-change one step further by spending several months learning the essentials of the trade as ‘woofers’ – Willing Workers on Organic Farms.
With housesitters in place and sons Aidan and Riley bribed with the promise of gelato every day, Pip and Shannon guide the little troupe through pre-dawn Rome before arriving at the first of four properties on which they will volunteer their labour in return for basic board: a remote bee-keeping operation near Rassina, Tuscany.
As their adventure progresses, woofing carries them to Zambone in Calabria (from where they have a spectacular view of volcanic Stromboli), Pianoro near Bologna in Emilia-Romagna and Cassole near Turin in Piedmont.
In between stints on-farm, the family detours to Sorrento and Positano on the glamorous Amalfi Coast; Mount Vesuvius near Naples, long overdue to erupt again; the millennia-old limestone cave-dwellings of Matera; walled Lucca, with its terracotta-and-stucco labyrinth; and wondrous, watery Venice, where the boys discover that even their hotel-room toilet has its own private canal view.
Along the way they are challenged physically by the demands of planting, weeding, pruning, constructing and conserving for hours in Italy’s fierce midsummer heat and emotionally by the realities of extracting a sustainable existence from relatively few resources and of living side by side for extended periods with hosts they barely know.

Road No Good

13/4/2017

Bridget Isichei: Finch $29.99

WHEN a well-travelled, energetic young middle-class New Zealander arrives in Luganville, Vanuatu, she sees immediately that it’s more than merely her street – the literally named Road No Good – that’s in need of improvement.
Deployed to the country’s second-biggest population centre to help support preschool teachers on Espiritu Santo island, ‘Missus Bridget’ discovers a hierarchy in which the kindhearted, patient women who take on delivering early education to Vanuatu’s next generation are considered lower in importance than even domestic pigs.
From her base in a town where having a telephone line to her breeze-block apartment reactivated takes several months and the only internet access is through a single café, Bridget Isichei begins visiting far-flung community preschools via a time-consuming and frustrating combination of road, river and walking-path jungle travel.
Her task is to develop a reliable system by which the standard of preschool teaching on Santo can be strengthened and the status of the occupation raised in the eyes of the public.
She uncovers a millennia-old culture centred around communal village living, shaped by an absolute belief in black magic overlaid heavily with relatively recent Christian church-going.
The preschool teachers – all women, many of whom speak only the local dialect of pidgin English, Bislama, and are technically illiterate – are passionately proud of their work but readily accept that theirs is not a respected career. Because they do not hold any form of qualification, they are looked down on socially, poorly resourced and chronically underpaid.
As genuine friendships form, Isichei is enveloped in Melanesian family life and becomes fluent in Bislama, enabling her to communicate freely with her new colleagues.
She tells with sensitivity, humour, respect, discretion and love the story of the teachers’ achievements, disappointments and unquestioning acceptance of circumstances unimagined in developed countries and of her own learnings and realisations along the way.

The Lovers' Guide to Rome

28/10/2016

Mark Lamprell: Allen & Unwin $29.99

SEPTUGENARIAN British sisters-in-law Lizzie and Constance are in Rome on a mission: to scatter Henry’s ashes into the River Tiber.
American Alec and Australian Meg are equally focused – in their case, on finding the elusive source of a specific blue tile for their unhappy marital home in the US.
Alice is taking respite from her fine-art studies in New York to draw breath before becoming engaged to Daniel.
Architecture student and would-be artist August is also making the most of the school year’s long summer break, travelling with a group of fellow Brits to examine Italy’s magnificent buildings up close.
Stephanie, on the other hand, is more or less local, having put down roots in Rome, where she works as an emergency-room doctor after practising medicine for long stints in high-pressure war zones.
Narrated by the self-proclaimed “Genius of Love”, this novel brings together an eclectic cast of characters whose trajectories invariably intersect in one way or another once fate has delivered them to Rome.
Their adventures unseat scabs from emotional wounds and create both solid new alliances and fresh divisions as relationships are tested.
While the storyline is fictitious, the setting is almost entirely real. Lamprell uses creative licence only in his renaming of a few hotels – everything else is described exactly as it exists: the frustratingly traffic-clogged streets and cobbled alleyways, the graffiti-daubed walls, the rain-scoured marble monuments, whether world-famous or little-known.
Spanning roughly 30 locations in and around the centre of Rome, this book doubles as an insider’s peek into a side of the Eternal City that few tourists are likely to stumble onto when left to explore unaided.
What will eventuate for Lizzie, Constance, Alec, Meg, Alice, August and Stephanie during their encounters in enigmatic, enchanting, ever-lasting Rome? Only the Genius of Love can foresee their futures with certainty.

The Lonely Hearts Travel Club Destination Chile

14/10/2016

Katy Collins: Carina $23.99

MANCHESTER native Georgia is intelligent, successful and happily in love. Her relationships are solid; her career is booming.
This has not always been the case. Only 12 months ago Georgia was suffering from a bout of severely wounded pride, cut adrift by a two-timing fiancé and left emotionally shattered.
In an effort to escape her misery she embarked on an overseas trip – a journey that led to Thailand and a chance meeting there with Londoner Ben. Now the pair have just moved into their first shared home and Georgia looks forward to bonding with his father.
In the midst of this bliss, they have been invited to take part in a TV documentary examining the experiences of couples who work together in the travel industry. The shoot will take place during an all-expenses-paid week in Chile, visiting Santiago, the Atacama Desert and Torres del Paine National Park. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; their Lonely Hearts Travel Club – an agency specifically for single holiday-makers – will revel in the positive exposure this project will generate.
But perhaps above all else in Georgia’s buzzing-yet-contented mind sits the prospect of marriage. While unpacking Ben’s boxes during their move she discovered a magnificent diamond-and-platinum ring. This man understands Georgia so completely that it could not be more perfect if she had chosen it herself. Will he propose on camera in Chile – a spontaneous ‘happily ever after’ feel-good highpoint of the show?
Or does a less rosy future lurk beyond the horizon – one in which Ben is spending secret evenings with a former girlfriend, distancing himself from his family and pushing Georgia to take their joint business in a direction that terrifies her?
A blend of laughter and longing, Destination: Chile – the third in a series – delivers a comforting few hours’ bedtime or poolside escapism among enchantingly roguish characters.

Slow Boats to Europe

16/9/2016

Trevor Cherrett: tbcherrett@btinternet.com £5.00

TAKE two adventurous Englishmen, a desire to float clear across Europe and an assortment of watercraft, conventional and otherwise.
The result? The offspring of this rare blending is a highly entertaining travel memoir that is in equal measure informative, instructional and hilarious.
When community planner and long-time recreational sailor Trevor Cherrett and his offsider Pete decide to bring to life their shared dream, neither can foresee exactly how their exploration of three of the continent’s great rivers will unfold. All the pair can say with certainty is that they are determined to see through their pledge to journey together to the far eastern fringe of Europe. Having dismissed the idea of making the trip in a boat of their own, they agree to take a combination of whatever waterborne transport they can secure along the way.
What ensues is a three-year, five-stage pilgrimage from the North Sea to Romania’s Black Sea coast, bisecting the seven countries that hug the banks of a 3500km span of the Rhine, Main and Danube rivers.
The tone of Cherrett’s narrative is set in the opening pages, when an inauspicious start in the Netherlands sees the friends struggle so severely with unfamiliar technology, techniques and language that they risk capsizing the project on their first afternoon afloat.
Cherrett’s pen-sketches of the towns and cities through which the pair sail are lively, colourful and down-to-earth.
He describes with self-deprecating humour and humility the embarrassing, frustrating and heartwarming incidents that eventuate, writing at an engagingly personal level yet providing a thoughtful, sensitive and knowledgeable general commentary on European history, culture and politics in an era of significant change. This context makes Slow Boats to Europe a fascinating insight for sailors and landlubbers alike.
The inclusion of route maps and dozens of photographs throughout the book adds to its appeal.

The Desert Vet

2/9/2016

Alex Tinson: Allen & Unwin $29.99

REPTILE collector, camel expert, big-cat doctor, gazelle wrangler, antiques aficionado, father of five: Alex Tinson juggles disparate roles in balancing his career as a veterinarian and researcher with his pride in heading up a happily blended Australian-Emirati family.
Raised on Sydney’s North Shore watching Daktari on TV and reading zookeeper Gerald Durrell’s books, Tinson studied in Melbourne and gained his early vet experience at Bacchus Marsh and Tweed Heads.
While overseeing a Bicentennial camel race across the Outback in 1988 he was approached by a representative of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family. Within weeks Tinson had relocated to Abu Dhabi and from there to the remote oasis town of Al Ain to hone the crown prince’s stable of racing camels. There he found animals developed over generations to weigh less than a fine-boned Thoroughbred horse. The Melbourne Cup might stop Australia but throughout the oil-rich Gulf countries it’s camel racing that dominates.
Tinson’s story is ripe with exhilarating highs (the births of the world’s first embryo-transfer and frozen-embryo camel calves; a slashing of race speeds by 30 per cent; the advent of the camel ‘beauty’ show) and devastating lows (most notably, losing two babies to sudden infant death syndrome). He details the fervour with which he has pursued the most coveted trophy in the billion-dollar sport of camel racing: the Golden Sword.
Tinson writes candidly of his successes and failures, both professionally and as a husband, son and father. Tinson also delves into the psyche of Bedouin Arab culture: the importance of tradition, the loyalty to family and the laid-back “it’s God’s will” attitude that so surprises many Westerners.
His passion for camels – the animal that has fuelled his life in the Middle East and allowed him to pursue groundbreaking breeding projects in Western Australia, Mongolia, Pakistan and India – is obvious at every stage.

Elephant Dawn

29/7/2016

Sharon Pincott: Allen & Unwin $32.99

IF THERE'S one animal that symbolises Africa more than any other, it’s the elephant, yet within our lifetime, researchers predict, the last wild herds of this species will most likely disappear.
One of the most vulnerable elephant populations is in Zimbabwe, a country whose chronic social, political and economic conflict relegates wildlife conservation to the bottom of the priority pile for desperate subsistence game poachers and greed-crazed government officials alike.
Undaunted, in 2001 elephant-lover Sharon Pincott gave up an executive IT career in Australia and moved from inner-city Brisbane to the sparsely populated wilds of Zimbabwe’s western bushland. There, she set out to observe and then name and catalogue the hundreds of individuals that make up the Presidential Elephants, a group of 17 extended families ranging over a mix of private and public land adjoining Hwange National Park.
Elephant Dawn documents Pincott’s experiences, from her frustrating struggle to obtain a Zimbabwean entry visa to her brushes with the scorpions, black mambas and baboons that from time to time made themselves comfortable in her native-style hut. Most of all, it describes the author’s attachment to the elephants –young or old, newborn or battle-scarred – that, despite the supposed protection extended to them by President Robert Mugabe, 15 years after Pincott first began to identify them continue to face bullets, snares and poison as their numbers dwindle.
Her story is both a personal record of one woman’s endeavours and a first-hand analysis of the factors that together triggered the most self-destructive period in Zimbabwe’s history.
Elephant Dawn summons laughter and tears, smiles and grimaces, anger and pride at the determination with which Pincott carries out her mission, funded through her own efforts and in the face of considerable – at times life-theatening – opposition from parochial Zimbabweans determined to see white residents expelled from the country.

Ticket to Ride

17/6/2016

Tom Chesshyre: Summersdale £9.99

FORTY-NINE individual train journeys covering almost 36,000 kilometres through 22 countries on five continents – surely there must be a story or two worth telling in all that?
There’s an entire book, in fact, presented in colourful, bewitching and often-humorous fashion by British travel writer and rail enthusiast (read “train spotter”) Tom Chesshyre: journalist, raconteur and passionate passenger.
From the station platform at Crewe in England to the endless nut groves of Iran, the nausea-inducing switchbacks of the Andes and the battle-scarred valleys of the fractured Balkans, Chesshyre not only documents the mechanical intricacies of a plethora of locomotives and carriages but captures equally clearly the quirks and lurks of the people who ride them.
In a series of professional adventures that at times verge on tumbling into boys’ own escapades Chesshyre spends a carefully calculated 21 days, one hour and 28 minutes in motion on one track or another.
En route he experiences the Orient Express in two very different incarnations, revels in the refurbished glories of the Tolstoy Night Train, ventures deep beneath the surface – literally – of North Korea aboard the Pyongyang Metro and learns to dodge verbal missiles on the Indian Pacific while traversing the sand-blasted expanse of the Nullarbor Plain. China, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, Poland, France, Kosovo, Finland, Russia, the US, Peru: Chesshyre’s wanderings cause him to rub shoulders with some of the world’s true rail powerhouses and several of its smallest, most disadvantaged also-rans.
Fittingly, his travels conclude back in Britain, the traditional home of rail technology and site of spectacular, untamed scenery along two Scottish Highland lines.
Ticket to Ride is one book that really can be said to offer something for virtually everyone: an easy blend of good (and not-so-good) food, entertaining (if occasionally obnoxious) company, insightful current affairs, enchanting geographical snapshots and potted histories exploring railroads’ role in society.

In Brazil

20/5/2016

Fran Bryson: Scribe $32.99

WITH anticipation of this year’s Olympics now on everyone’s lips it’s hardly surprising that the games’ host, Brazil, is attracting more than its usual share of international attention.
Through a series of chapters profiling specific locations and events, Fran Bryson offers a colourful glimpse into the world’s fourth-largest nation, second only to Nigeria for its population of people of African heritage. (Approximately 100 million modern-day Brazilians are descended at least in part from slaves.)
Bryson draws comparisons between the histories, cultures and geographies of Australia and Brazil, arranging her observations – formed during repeat visits over many years – by region.
In lively, entertaining and at-times highly humorous detail she describes Easter passion plays performed by telenovela (soap opera) stars in Nova Jerusalém; the rise and then decline of the rubber industry around Xapuri in the upper Amazon Basin; the pedestrian-unfriendly but eyecatching architecture of the capital, Brasília; and the terror generated by taking public transport (“It can be curiously liberating travelling at such speeds that if something goes wrong, you know you won’t survive”). She relates tales of bushrangers’ exploits in the badlands of Piranhas, where the severed heads of 11 outlaws were arranged and photographed on the cloth-covered front steps of the local town hall, and remembers the eight young men and boys shot and killed by rogue police in the Candelária massacre of homeless people in Rio de Janeiro in 1993.
She also examines the at-times-uneasy marriage of Catholicism and African spiritualism that has produced in Brazil a unique religious landscape.
Along the way Bryson notes that Tasmania’s last Aborigines have not in fact died out but are alive and well in the small island communities of Bass Strait – an unexpected inclusion in a book about Brazil but one that in this instance feels natural.

A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino Portugués

29/4/2016

John Brierley: Findhorn Press Ltd US$25.99

ITS title is somewhat self-deprecating in the case of this newly updated, seventh-edition guidebook: in actual fact it describes in almost-literally-step-by-step detail not just one but 10 variations of the pilgrims’ pathways that wend their way northwards through mainland Portugal.
While writing on the infinitely better-known Spanish routes to the tomb of St James in Santiago de Compostela (originally a Roman town; Santiago is the saint’s Spanish and Portuguese name and compo stellae is Latin for “field of stars”) fills several feet of shelf-space in the pick of travel-focused bookstores, the Portuguese caminos are almost ignored in many quarters. Brierley’s sensitive, thought-provoking and motivational introduction to these less-travelled options is a perfect pocket companion for anyone intending to set out on the walk but at the same time delivers an entertaining and informative armchair experience for those not able to actually make the trip.
Beginning with an overview of modern-day pilgrimage, Brierley leads readers through the 10 alternatives, all of which start at Lisbon’s cathedral (the Sé) and head northwards either shadowing the coastline or traversing the country’s agricultural interior before crossing the international border at Valença. The background to the overall pilgrims’ trail is rich with Celtic colonisation, maritime discoveries and Medieval knights Templar crusades.
The production might not be of coffee-table-quality but the accuracy of the text and maps more than compensates for any lack of eye-catching full-page photographs.
Every stage of the possible paths is described succinctly and in the context of Christian belief, with explanations of the significance of religious sites, practical advice on the physical necessities of traversing more than 600 kilometres by foot and prompts for personal reflection during the trek. Lined space is included at the end of each stage chapter, enabling this guide to double as a journal kept by those who take up the challenge.

Five Nights in Paris

12/2/2016

John Baxter: Harper Perennial $24.99

SETTING out to write a fresh, engaging guide to Paris is not for the faint-hearted. Paris is, after all, the most visited city on Earth, and many of those visitors end up writing in one way or another about their experiences there.
Not easily deterred, Australian expat author John Baxter set himself exactly that challenge, informed in part by a quarter of a century of living the life of a Parisian local.
Sydney-born Baxter settled in Paris in 1990. With his French film-maker wife and their daughter, he has explored every one of its 20 districts – all distinct in culture and character and offering points of interest seldom seen by regular tourists.
Baxter’s eagerness to show off the city’s nocturnal side is a natural extension of his occasional role as a literary-walking-tour guide. Asked to devise an alternative to day rambles, he hit on the idea of leading newcomers down the famous boulevards and avenues and through the obscure backstreets and alleyways long after most foreigners have sat down to dinner and perhaps a cabaret show.
Five Nights in Paris: After Dark in the City of Light presents Paris at both its sparkling best and its seedy worst: lit up and ready to party, party, party with those in the know.
With chapters arranged around five sense-inspired themes (sound, taste, touch, scent and sight) Baxter invites readers into a real-life version of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris Hollywood success.
His lively narrative introduces characters as intriguing as they are unexpected, ranging from Surrealist painters, early 20th-century photographers and African-American jazz musicians to restaurant front-of-house staff and modern-day burlesque performers. Along the way he describes the X-rated activities of Paris’s bourgeois beneath the chestnut trees of the Bois de Boulogne parkland and identifies one-time brothels and opium dens among the city’s grand edifices.

Ultimate Travelist

8/1/2016

Lonely Planet Publications $34.99

WITH any new year come new resolutions, new interests, new dreams. Whether used as the basis for a 30-hour plane trip or as a virtual tour from the comfort of an armchair, Lonely Planet’s Ultimate Travelist is an inspirational and educational profile of 500 of the world’s most intriguing places.
Every continent is part of this superbly illustrated, coffee-table-style guide whose content ranges from deserts such as Valle de la Luna in Chile and Death Valley National Park in the US to manmade attractions as diverse as Icehotel in Sweden, Tsukiji fish market in Japan and the Acropolis in Greece. Religious buildings – Spain’s Mezquita, Ethiopia’s Churches of Tigray, Finland’s Temppeliauko Kirkko and England’s York Minster, among them – are numerous, as are palaces, museums, galleries and monuments.
The US is represented by 30 entries; France is a distant second with 17.
The top 10 – the Temples of Angkor, the Great Barrier Reef, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, Grand Canyon National Park, the Colosseum, Iguazu Falls, the Alhambra and Aya Sofya – are world-famous but sit comfortably beside dozens of lesser-known treats including Lake Baikal, Russia; Seyðisfjörður, Iceland; Kolmanskop, Namibia; Persepolis, Iran; Stingray City, Cayman Islands; Borobudur, Indonesia; Lisbon’s Alfama, Portugal; and Cimètiere du Père Lachaise, France.
Local readers keen to tick at least one of the top 500 off their ‘must see’ list this year can do so within a half-day’s drive of home – number 12, according to Lonely Planet, from an original field of thousands of candidates is the Great Ocean Road, ranked between two heritage-listed cities: Fez Medina, Morocco, and Petra, Jordan.
Tasmania has three drawcards: Cradle Mountain, the Museum of Old & New Art (MONA) and Port Arthur; other Australian attractions include Blue Mountains National Park, the Sydney Opera House, Uluru, Kakadu National Park and Ningaloo Marine Park.

Last Days of the Bus Club

23/10/2015

Chris Stewart: Profile Books $22.99

EVER wondered what became of the original Genesis drummer? No, not Phil Collins – the gangly youth who kept the beat for the rock band long before it found both Collins and world-wide recording fame.
Having left the bright lights of school-hall performances well and truly behind him, Chris Stewart is ensconced these days in a ramshackle farmhouse outside Málaga in the hinterland of Spain’s Costa del Sol, where he juggles producing organic oranges with writing hilarious and self-deprecating autobiographical books.
The title of the fourth instalment in his series about life in rural Spain refers to the winding down of his role as taxi-driver to daughter Chloé as she sees out her final year at the local secondary school and moves on to university.
With an empty nest following their only child’s departure, Stewart and wife Ana occupy themselves with shelling waves of homegrown fava beans, scouting for industrial quantities of fine Spanish red wine with which to toast their ever-helpful neighbours and cooking wild boar from their own hillside for a “mystery guest” who turns out to be celebrity TV chef and fellow Brit Rick Stein. Along the way Stewart manages to inadvertently label himself bisexual while trying to extol the virtues of coeducation to Chloé’s schoolmates in a language he has yet to conquer. He is also forced by a stroke of meteorological bad luck to reprise skills learned half a lifetime earlier while still a student as he labours long and hard to create a bridge over the roaring river that separates his family from civilisation beyond their rocky farmlet.
Last Days of the Bus Club is a highly entertaining, fast-paced and colourful continuation of the story launched in Driving Over Lemons and can be read equally effectively as a natural follow-on from its three predecessors or independently in its own right.

My Life in Ruins

28/8/2015

Adam Ford: ABC Books $29.99

WORLD traveller and TV presenter Adam Ford’s life is anything but shabby, contrary to his memoir’s cheeky play on words.
In his autobiography English-born Ford revisits his earliest schoolboy encounter with the field of science that would one day become both his livelihood and his enduring passion: archaeology.
This raw and colourful account carries readers from Ford’s training dig as a student on a beach in Barbados through the Middle East and Britain en route to his present-day incarnation as a TV host and director of his own archaeological operation in Australia. Along the way he returns repeatedly to Jordan, uncovering Bronze Age, Nabatean and Ottoman remains in the Biblical heartland, confronting fearsome fist-sized spiders, shivering through desert snowstorms and running the gauntlet of unreliable or non-existent plumbing on sites devoid of the cosy trappings of a standard 21st-century workplace.
His research into a reported French claim to land in the 1700s and a Dutch vessel’s 1841 wrecking on Dirk Hartog Island off the West Australian mainland is recounted, as is his month-long project in 2008 to excavate Annie Jones’ inn at Glenrowan where the Kelly Gang, when surrounded by police, staged its last stand.
Ford delivers a tale that is simultaneously a jaunty, entertaining and irreverently humorous travelogue and a potted history of archaeology’s emergence as a modern-day academic discipline of global significance. Now in his third season hosting Who’s Been Sleeping In My House? for the ABC, Ford outlines with more than a pinch of mirth the chain of good fortune that helped create his media career.
His summary of the colonial penal system is of particular relevance to Victorian readers; Bendigo stars in his search for everyday goldfield remnants around Golden Gully, where a man’s leather hat is found to have survived more than a century and a half underground.

Picnic in Provence

21/8/2015

Elizabeth Bard: Little, Brown $27.99

GIVEN that stories of expats settling in rural France are a dime a dozen in the English-speaking world, is there really room for yet another “I-moved-to-Provence-and-kept-a-diary” memoir? When said book is as well-written, revealing and informative as this one, the answer is unreservedly “yes”.
When American writer Elizabeth Bard and her French cinema-consultant husband Gwendal head to Céreste – a village of just over 1000 people in the hill country of the sunny south-east – for a quick break before the birth of their first child, their plan is certainly not to set in motion a life-changing tree-change.
However, fate – and a shared passion for literary history – intervenes.
On learning that the wartime home of French Résistance leader and poet René Char is for sale, they do not hesitate. Upping stakes in Paris they leave behind family, friends and financial security in search of a more relaxed, more enriching environment in which to raise their son.
The lifestyle might well be idyllic but what will pay their bills? In Céreste the family’s challenge becomes supporting itself.
What results is the establishment one of France’s finest artisanal icecreameries: a business built on non-traditional dessert flavours as typically Procençal as saffron, fennel seed, basil, black truffle, and rosemary, olive oil and toasted pine nuts.
Like its predecessor, Lunch in Paris, Picnic in Provence contains the perfect balance of personal reflection and cultural and social observation without veering into the self-indulgence and maudlin introspection that mar so many uncomfortably personal “finding oneself” books.
The 63 original Provençal-inspired recipes which food-lover Bard includes are a mouth-watering bonus. Rabbit with pastis, fennel and fresh peas; char-grilled sardines with vinegar and honey; split-pea soup with pork belly and Cognac; blood sausage with apples and autumn spices; and lavender honey and thyme icecream stand out.

Walking the Nile

14/8/2015

Levison Wood: Simon & Schuster UK, $22.99

THERE'S a reason even the most adventurous expeditioners don’t usually attempt walk the length of the world’s longest river – in fact, there are multiple reasons, all exceedingly sound, as army-officer-turned-explorer Levison Wood knew when he fixed his sights on doing just that.
In December 2013 Wood (a veteran of service with a British parachute regiment in Afghanistan) set out to become the first person to follow the Nile entirely on foot from its burbling headwaters in the highlands of Rwanda to the silty Egyptian delta on the Mediterranean coast.
Wood’s journey – to be filmed in part for a television documentary series – would see him traverse six of Africa’s most challenging countries, beginning with Rwanda and including Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan and Sudan.
The 6839-kilometre slog would pass through some of the least pleasant hiking terrain imaginable – slippery rainforests, crocodile-ridden marshlands, enervatingly humid savannah, parched sand dunes – all the while in an atmosphere that ranged from barely contained intertribal ethnic unrest to outright civil war. Into the bargain, the timing of his journey was such that he would need to cross a portion of the Sahara Desert at the height of summer – a feat rarely attempted by the most hardened nomadic camel herders, let alone Brits already weary and undernourished after months on the move. His only support would be occasional porters enlisted along the way.
In Walking the Nile, Wood’s experiences are documented in his own words and photographs, carrying readers with him and his minuscule party as they push ever northwards. He details the raw emotional extremes of his exploits: the anxiety borne of the likelihood that men whose hands he shakes have murdered their neighbours, the joys of adopting an abandoned baby monkey, the devastation of losing a travelling companion to heatstroke and the mateship cemented by trudging for weeks at a time in semi-silence.

' Books are treasure for the spirit and the soul. '

— VB 2020

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