In captivating style Giuffre tells what happens when she finds herself alone with her boys on Rarotonga, a tiny speck in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, 11,000 kilometres from home. She knows no one, the house she's been promised doesn't eventuate, and almost every other outsider is on a ten-day package tour.
Her unlikely saviour is Emily, an 82-year-old Māori woman with a large white house on the edge of the ocean, which the two women share with two callous missionaries, the ghosts of Emily's ancestors, and, briefly, a bizarre couple from Eastern Europe.
As time passes, ... more

From the crazy heat and colour of Saigon to the quieter splendour of Hanoi, Walter Mason gives us a rare, joyous and at times hilarious insight into 21st-century Vietnam. Seduced by the beauty and charm of its people, and the sensuousness of its culture, we can almost taste the little coconut cakes cooked over a fire in a smoky Can Tho kitchen, or smell the endless supplies of fresh baguettes and croissants just out of city ovens. As colourful city cafes and bars make way for visits to out-of-the-way shrines and temples, we pay an impromptu visit to forbidden fortune tellers, and glimpse a little of the Cao Dai religion. Travelling off the beaten ... more

Cons, Fools and Friends is about photojournalist, Peter Anderson's exploits: his journeys, misadventures, escapades and the array of extraordinary people he encounters throughout the world. Anderson takes his readers on his travels through Russia where he drinks with the Mafia; he also dines with a headhunter in Borneo, has dinner with a Senator in Morocco and is mugged in New York. He takes us on some of his favourite journeys through Tuscany, the Karakoram Highway, up the Rajang river in Borneo, on a safari in Kenya, through South America and New Zealand.
Written in a humorous way, this book also gives the readers little gems of information that would serve would-be travellers well.

Having survived their voyage to Carcassonne, you might expect pensioners Terry and Monica Darlington and their whippet, Jim, to retire to a comfortable corner of their favourite pub.
But no, they looked to the New World for an extraordinary new adventure...

No-one had ever sailed an English narrowboat in the US before, for reasons that became abundantly clear during the 9-month voyage of the Phyllis May - including 30-mile sea crossings, blasting heat, tornadoes, hurricanes and all manner of intimidating wildlife. But the real danger came from the locals: the Good Ole Boys and Girls of the Deep South. Colonels, bums, captains, planters, heroes, drunks, gongoozlers, dancing dicks and beautiful spies - they all want to meet the Brits on the narrow painted boat and their thin dog and take them home and ... more

DoP September 2009, NZ

In this revealing portrait, Jonathan Dimbleby crosses eight time zones and covers 10,000 miles in an attempt to get to the beating heart of the new Russia.
His epic journey takes him from the Arctic city of Murmansk in the west to the Asian port of Vladivostok in the east, and he encounters an extraordinary range of people: urban intellectuals and entrepreneurs, war veterans and migrant labourers, spiritual leaders and aging rock stars, bootleg vendors and fish poachers, loggers in the forests of Siberia and fellow journalists under siege in an increasingly autocratic society.

Russia is both a deeply personal odyssey and a mesmerizing account of a country undergoing profound economic, cultural and political change.

Having created his alter-ego, the Hungry Cyclist and with thousands of pedal-powered miles before him, Tom Kevill-Davies pushed off from New York City on one of the most ambitious gastronomic adventures ever undertaken. A ballsy travel memoir The Hungry Cyclist follows Tom's adventure into the hearts and minds of the people he meets. Revealing the diverse cultures of the Americas, Tom's journey from over the Rockies to Baja California, through Central America down all the way to Brazil via Colombia, gives the real flavour of this truly extraordinary landmass. This is a tale of death-battles with squadrons of mosquitoes, malodorous public toilets, of galloping dysentery one day, to drowning your sorrows with cowboys and dining with beauty queens the next. But above all it is an ambitious story of getting to where you want to be - even if you have to ... more

After two grueling years on the island of Tarawa, battling feral dogs, machete-wielding neighbors, and a lack of beer on a daily basis, Maarten Troost was in no hurry to return to the South Pacific. But as time went on, he realized he felt remarkably out of place among the trappings of twenty-first-century America. When he found himself holding down a job - one that might possibly lead to a career - he knew it was time for him and his wife, Sylvia, to repack their bags and set off for parts unknown.
Getting Stoned with Savages tells the hilarious story of Troost's time on Vanuatu - a rugged cluster of islands ... more

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 - from buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands, to an abattoir-turned-fashion mecca in Manhattan, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel.
Rinella is the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the ... more