Travel > Armchair Travel

In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a single wild buffalo in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the odds, Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilisation, trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. American Buffalo is the story of Rinella's hunt. But beyond that, it is a chronicle of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped American identity. Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo's past, present, and future - f... read more

In 1999 Vicki Archer made a lifelong dream a reality when she moved into a seventeenth-century property in Saint-Remy-de-Provence with her husband and three children. She spent three years lovingly restoring the farmhouse, bringing back to life the abandoned apple and pear orchards and planting an olive grove of more than two thousand trees. In "My French Life" Vicky shares an insider's view of France, telling her personal tale of taking risks, facing challenges and falling in love with all things French. Intertwined with Vicki's w... read more

Notes on a Latin American Journey. Now a major motion picture directed by Walter Salles starring Gael Garc

At 5600 kilometres, the Australian dog fence is the longest barrier ever built. Following its course, James Woodford travels across four deserts to meet the boundary riders and pastoralists who maintain the fence, and encounters the dogs themselves. An extraordinary book about travel, history and a very lonely environment.

A deliciously different travelogue In 2005, Cathy and Jason threw in successful careers as TV presenters and producers to become olive farmers in Italy. With their one year old daughter and Italian dictionary in tow, they found themselves in the middle of a European nowhere untouched by modernity. They were on a steep learning curve in more-or-less everything -- finding out how to prune an olive tree so that a sparrow can pass through its branches, learning what beauty products are de rigeur in the changing rooms of a local Italia... read more

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What can a modestly capable man of adventure do when every mountain has been climbed, every river navigated to its source, and every Guinness record stretched to impossibility?He can spin a globe of the world and discover that his small country has its own antipodes CampaLider‚has gone before: through gorse and pines, skirting quarries and ponds, nimbly evading horses, pigs, nude farmersof noparticular- where in Spain, to photograph his would do La Campais funnier than any fiction. MARK PRICE works as a journalist ƒZealand and for ... read more

I'd throw in my job, do something so different, so bold, that it would change our lives; throw the cards in the air and the heck where they landed. Craving adventure, Bruce Ansley goes in search of happiness on the French canals. He and his wife Sally buy a canal boat, the River Queen, in Holland and sail it through Belgium to France. They travel through old battlefields, the great vineyards and wineries of Burgundy and find the ideal way to live in Paris: on a boat. La Belle France seems flawlessly to live up to Bruce's expectatio... read more

This book is a gripping account of a great adventure and a fascinating insight into one of the most extreme sea kayak expeditions ever undertaken.
In January 2001, three men set out to paddle down the length of the Antarctic Peninsula, the point below South Amercia where the Antarctic continent points an icy finger north. It was the southern-most sea kayak journey ever attempted, an 850-kilometre expedition through the freezing waste of ice, rock, and ocean that makes this one of the most inhospitable coasts on earth. The F... read more

This is an epic adventure story that combines curiosity, geography and history with the dangers of a wild river, wildlife, disease and guerrillas.

A blokes' weekend away. Yarns, jokes, good-humoured sledging, clowning around.. the usual guy-time thing, right? But for these five Kiwi chaps - a high country farmer, a radio DJ, a businessman, a photographer and a shoe-string traveller called Blanket Boy- it gets a bit more complicated when it's decided not to head for the Bay of Islands, the Sounds or Ohope. No, they're going to India, with a bat and a ball and a quest to play cricket wherever they can find a bit of clear ground and a team keen to take them on. From Varanasi to ... read more

On a tiny, sun-fried island in Melanesia, where visiting tourists provide the only income for a cash-starved populace, for a few bucks you can 'Have Your Photograph Taken with the Cannibals and the Cannibal Pot'. It's a microcosm of modern tourism, where the norms of cultural sensitivity are often sideswiped by the practicalities of commerce. It's also one of many charming vignettes in a new book from acclaimed New Zealand writer Graeme Lay, each chapter offering a view on what it is like to be a modern traveller. He begins with an... read more

Fascinating, highly readable tales of travels in the troubled land of Afghanistan by award-winning New Zealand travel writer Ian Robinson. Tourists in Afghanistan are rare: very few have the courage to travel there in today's uncertain and tense times. But, in 2008, Ian Robinson ventured into the hustle, bustle and dangers of the streets of Afghanistan's cities and towns. He also went alone, on horseback, into the sparsely populated northern-eastern regions of the country. Compelled by a romantic desire to find the 'old' Afghanista... read more

Mike Hyde's goal was a motorcycle trip - 50 states in America in 60 days, and Twisting Throttle America is the result. This is a classic roadside tale of an ordinary Kiwi bloke doing it alone, on the smell of an oily rag and cholesterol pills.

The witty tale of a real life mid-life crisis which took an ordinary Kiwi bloke around Australia on a motorbike, to fulfill his life-long Easy Rider inspired dreams of his long-lost youth. The result is a very dry look at the Big Dry Country told with self-deprecating wit by a first time author. A large market has been established for blokes on bikes doing things to recapture their long lost youth, following the exploits of multi-millionaire Gareth Morgan and his friends, who go to exotic places on luxury bikes. Mike's endearing a... read more

On every journey, you must die once - the person who arrives should not be the person who left. Tibetan proverb You Must Die Once is an epic story. After the death of his spiritual adviser, Ian Robinson vowed to deliver his ashes to Mt Kailas, Tibet's most sacred mountain. His journey through some of the world's toughest terrain, alone on horseback, ended in disaster when he was arrested and deported - only to come back two years later.The story of both journeys is enthralling - travel writing at its very best. Fighting cold, exhau... read more

While Ian Robinson was born and raised in rural New Zealand, he?s covered a lot of ground since then. He?s done it the hard way too ? backpacking through South America, China, Tibet, Nepal and India.In 1992 he was living in London, and was seized with the idea of travelling across Mongolia. Despite opposition from friends, family and so-called ?experts? who claimed it was impossible, he went on to became the first Westerner to cross Mongolia alone on horseback. His battle to find guides, horses and a safe place to sleep in some of ... read more

Backblocks America: Jo and Gareth Morgan take on the States, Mexico and Canada is the story of Jo and Gareth's latest trip. Backblocks America is a roadtrip of discovery. They start at St Augustine, Florida where the first European settlement was made in 1565 by the Spanish, and eventually wander to the Alaskan coast on the Arctic Ocean, where much earlier the Indians arrived. Along the route they take in the history and music of the South, from the War of Independence, to the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, country music... read more

This is a collection of travel writing about trips to strange and unusual places, and encounters with odd and eccentric people. The writing is often amusing and always informative. The destinations are not beyond the reach of the ordinary traveller and the characters encountered are those the average reader might also hope to run into. But places like Ullungdo off the coast of Korea is hardly a magnet for tourists, especially when the only attractions are seaweed, squid and candy. But Graham went there. As he did to Graceland Too,... read more

In her early 20s and with a marriage already behind her, Diane Brown set off across the world by ship. En route she found a succession of men. But where was she was en route to? Nearly 30 years on, she looks back at the stranger who was once herself, the woman who was yet to become a writer, and tries to make sense of the old self as well as the new.