An extended stay in New Zealand determined the content of Gillian Orrells first book. NEW BOOTS IN NEW ZEALAND is a humorous, first-hand account of walking the nine Great Walks of New Zealand, encompassing many additional facts, anecdotes and insights about New Zealands culture, history and peoples. Deciding to go solo, Gillian accomplished all nine walks in the space of a few months, not only learning all she needed to know about tramping but also a huge amount about New Zealand. This sup...

An extended stay in New Zealand determined the content of Gillian Orrell’s first book. New Boots in New Zealand is a humorous, first-hand account of walking the nine Great Walks of New Zealand, encompassing many additional facts, anecdotes and insights about New Zealand’s culture, history and peoples. Deciding to go solo, Gillian accomplished all nine walks in the space of a few months, not only learning all she needed to know about tramping but also a huge amount about New Zealand. This s...

Chris tells of her years as a district nurse, first in London in the early sixties and then New Zealand in the late seventies. She tells of the rough living conditions in London, where we meet people like the solo mother dying of cancer and longing to give her children a good Christmas and the 90 year old blind lady who refuses a proposal of marriage. In New Zealand she has a large area, is on 24hour call as the only nurse and where most of the roads are not tar-seal. We meet the disfuncti...

What would you do if you realised that you had finally become too fat to wear your dad's pants? Pete Hepworth got his bike out and hit the trails of New Zealand, promptly suffering the indignity of being overtaken by some Danish pensioners. Along the way he met the cast of the Lord of the Rings movie in a seedy tattoo parlour in Wellington and many small marsupials with poor road sense.

In the tradition of Under the Tuscan Sun and A Year in Provence, here is Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s ode to his personal paradise–his adopted home, New Zealand. After living in California, why did Masson settle– out of all the places on earth–in such a faraway land? It turns out that while visiting a beautiful sandy beach just fifteen minutes from bustling Auckland, Masson and his family were utterly seduced by the exotic locale. There was little deliberation. This place,...

In 2010 Susie Wheeldon and Jamie Vining rolled back into London complete with stings, bites, leathery skin and thighs of steel. With their co-rider, Iain Henderson, they had set out nine months earlier on a 12,000 mile round the world bike ride, promoting solar power and being tracked using solar nanotechnology.Only, as Google maps and your thumb are not the most precise tools with which to plan a global circumnavigation, they had instead ridden 13,500 miles across North Africa, pa...

As seen on Discovery Channel and for readers of Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Bill Bryson, Jon Krakauer, and David Grann, a riveting, adventurous account of one man’s history-making journey along the entire length of the Amazon—and through the most bio-diverse habitat on Earth. Fans of Turn Right at Machu Piccu will revel in Ed Stafford's extraordinary prose and lush descriptions.In April 2008, Ed Stafford set off to become the first man ever to walk the entire ...

Life with New Zealand's remotest family in a follow-on from the bestselling A Life on Gorge River by Robert Long. In 2010, New Zealand met its remotest family, through the writing of Robert Long - aka Beansprout - and we were intrigued. Now Beansprout's wife, Catherine Stewart, tells her story, and answers many of our questions. Why did she decide to join him on the wild West Coast, two days' walk from the nearest road? Why and how did they raise their family there? Was it terrifying to be...

Keith’s wife Gail is looking forward to travelling the world and staying in comfortable hotels when Keith takes early retirement from his high-pressure job. But he has a shock in store for her. He unexpectedly decides to buy a huge American Winnebago-type motorhome (RV), tow a car behind ‘so they can bugger off for months on end around Europe’. Their only experience a brief episode 30 years earlier, when their VW pop-top blew up on a remote mountain road. Gail reveals her fear that anythin...

Spring 1993. 14 months earlier the USSR had collapsed and with Russia accessible once more Gregory Yeoman and his expedition companions set off on their bicycles to ride from the Baltic to the Pacific. Over 153 days they encountered wild landscapes, wild people, crumbling hotels and Siberia's two cheeses on an extraordinary adventure through a nation finding itself after 70 years of Communism.'Riding into the Sunrise' is the story of the first cycling expedition to cross the new po...

This true and very funny story involving six colleagues, some retired, proves the saying that we never really grow up - we just learn how to behave in public.On a sudden whim six men, mostly writers, decided to embark on a 1 000 kilometre cycle ride down the River Danube believing it would be downhill all the way. This was the first of many assumptions that proved to be not terribly correct.None had cycled since childhood nor even owned a bike.That first hilarious journey o...

After seven years of running their guest house and smallholding on the tiny feudal Island of Sark in the British Channel Islands, Chris and Ken Davies decided to have a two-year break.In 1972 they packed their suitcases and booked passage, with young son Roy,to New Zealand, calling at many exotic places en route.Arriving in Auckland, they bought a Bedford 18cwt delivery van and the three Davies set off to drive all over the two Islands, from Cape Reinga to Stewart Island, li...