Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Travel & Tourism

In the spring of 2021, as the UK's latest pandemic lockdowns were lifted, Nick Butter set out from the Eden Project to become the fastest person to cover every mile of Britain's mainland coastline on foot. Battling the most extreme winds Britain had seen in 100 years, days of torrential rain and the unrelenting hills of Western Scotland and Cornwall, Nick suffered two broken bones and countless injuries, whilst taking on two marathons a day, every day, for 100 days.

Leaving Europe for the first time in his life, Graham Greene set out in 1935 to discover Liberia, then a virtually uncharted republic on the shores of West Africa. This captivating account of his arduous 350-mile journey on foot - a great adventure which took him from the border with Sierra Leone to the Atlantic coast at Grand Bassa - is as much a record of one young man's self-discovery as it is a striking insight into one of the few areas of Africa untouched by Western colonisation. Journey Without Maps is regarded as a masterclass in travel writing.

As far back as stories go, pioneers have reached for the skies. In the last two hundred years, they have mastered the air and made the modern world possible. Today they are bringing outer space within our reach. They're inventors and toymakers, amateurs and adventurers, visionaries, dreamers and, yes, crackpots. Some have called them irresponsible, even dangerous. But I have met many of them. I have worked with them, and funded them, and flown with them.

Best-selling author of Italian Ways Tim Parks follows the hair-raising journey of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, 250 miles on foot from Rome to Ravenna, to look at Italy past and present.

For longer than recorded history there have been tales of spirits and of places where our hackles rise and our skin turns cold. Bestselling historian Neil Oliver travels the British Isles on a deliciously spine-chilling tour that spans several centuries and explores more than 20 sites - castles, vicarages and towers, lonely shorelines and forgotten battlefields - to unpick their stories..

After first meeting over sixty years ago while filming a costume drama for the BBC, Prunella Scales and Timothy West have enjoyed a partnership like no other. In this book, Tim traces their united steps through life professionally and personally, and covers the highs and lows of caring for Pru since her dementia diagnosis, twenty years ago. As with all things in life, she and Tim have tackled it together, often with a glass of wine in hand and almost always with a smile.

As far back as stories go, pioneers have reached for the skies. In the last two hundred years, they have mastered the air and made the modern world possible. Today they are bringing outer space within our reach. They're inventors and toymakers, amateurs and adventurers, visionaries, dreamers and, yes, crackpots....

Pen Hadow is an authentic British hero, one of the world's most experienced and successful living polar explorers. In spring 2003, fulfilling a deathbed vow to his father, he became the first man ever to complete a solo trek to the North Pole from the far more arduous and hazardous North American side. The nine days he then spent weatherbound at the Pole with dwindling supplies catapulted him to worldwide fame.

Danny Wallace is about to turn 30. Recently married and living in a smart new area of town, he's swapped pints down the pub for lattes and brunch. For the first time in his life, he's feeling, well...grown-up.

‘I am fascinated by people turning their daft dreams into a reality. How did they do it and why?’ Driven by his own passion for collecting Hunter Davies has packed his notepad and set off in search of Britain’s maddest museums. As he explores these hidden gems he soon discovers that they are everywhere and that they celebrate just about everything, from lawnmowers in Southport to pencils in Keswick.

The Yukon river is over 2,000 miles long, flowing northwest from Canada through the Yukon Territory and Alaska to the Bering Sea. Every summer, hundreds of thousands of king salmon migrate the distance of this river to their spawning grounds, where they breed and die in what is the longest salmon run in the world. For the communities that live along the Yukon, the fish have long been the lifeblood of the economy and local culture. But with the effects of climate change and a globalised economy, the health and numbers of the King salmon are in question, as is the fate of the communities that depend on them.

At 10.41am on a Tuesday morning in September, Mark Mason boards the number 1A bus at Land’s End in Cornwall. Forty-six buses and eleven days later he disembarks at John O’Groats in Scotland. Move Along Please is his account of that gruelling 1100-mile odyssey; a paint-by-bus-numbers portrait of Britain. Along the way he visits everywhere from the village where the internet enters Britain to the urban sprawl of Birmingham (inspiration for the Two Towers in Lord of the Rings).

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.

A child who never quite fit in, Rebecca Dana worshipped at the altar of Truman Capote and Nora Ephron, dreaming of one day ditching Pittsburgh and moving to New York, her Jerusalem. After graduating from college, she made her way to the city to begin her destiny. For a time, life turned out exactly as she’d planned: glamorous parties; beautiful people; the perfect job, apartment, and man. But when it all came crashing down, she found herself catapulted into another world....

For many years a farmer in England, John Lewis-Stempel yearned once again to live in a landscape where turtle doves purr and nightingales sing, as they did almost everywhere in his childhood. He wanted to be self-sufficient, to make his own wine and learn the secrets of truffle farming. And so, buying an old honey-coloured limestone house with bright blue shutters, the Lewis-Stempels began their new life as peasant farmers.

In a centuries-old tradition, farmers in northwestern Iceland scour remote coastal plains for the down of nesting eider ducks. High inside a vast cave in Borneo, men perched atop rickety ladders collect swiftlets’ nests, a delicacy believed to be a cure for almost anything. Eiderdown and edible birds’ nests: both are luxury products, ultimately destined for the super-rich. To the rest of the world these materials are mere commodities but to the harvesters they are all imbued with myth, tradition, folklore and ritual, and form part of a shared identity and history.

This is the story of Shane and Timothy Spall and their Dutch barge, The Princess Matilda. After a summer on the Thames they head out to sea with only a road atlas and a vast amount of ignorance - and it is absolutely terrifying! A decade before, Tim had been diagnosed with acute leukaemia and was given only days to live. Shocked at how life can pass you by, they decided that if and when Tim got better, they would buy a boat. The Spalls' adventures have already been the subject of two BBC4 series.

In 1938 Graham Greene was commissioned to visit Mexico to discover the state of the country and its people in the aftermath of the brutal anti-clerical purges of President Calles. His journey took him through the tropical states of Chiapas and Tabasco, where all the churches had been destroyed or closed and the priests driven out or shot.

As the human world settles down each evening, nocturnal animals prepare to take back the countryside. Taking listeners on four walks through the four seasons, acclaimed nature writer and farmer John Lewis-Stempel reveals a world bursting with life and normally hidden from view. Out beyond the cities, it is still possible to see the night sky full of stars, or witness a moonbow, an arch of white light in the heavens. It is time for us to leave our lairs and go tramping. To join our fellow creatures of the night.

With the coming of the first decade of the 21st century, One Place de l'Eglise had become rather derelict. The roof leaked, the mortar in the ancient walls was crumbling; a fertilizer bag stuffed a broken window. There was no electricity to speak of; the plumbing was a lead pipe in one room; the cellar doors had rotted. And there it stood. Shutters and doors firmly locked, the villagers of Causses-et-Veyran passing by to the church next door. Then, an impoverished—in his mind at any rate—Londoner and his wife went a little crazy and bought it. It was love at first sight.