Marco Polo’s legendary journey overland from Xanadu in China to his home in Italy has fired the imaginations of travellers for 700 years. Even today, traversing the 20,000km Silk Road between Europe and the Far East is a perilous undertaking. But it sounded like just the challenge for Wellington economist Gareth Morgan and his intrepid wife Jo. With five friends, they set off to travel the ancient route by a very modern mode of transport — motorcycle. Starting from the historic port of Ven...

In February 2012, Gareth Morgan trapped ten of New Zealand’s top experts on the region in a boat with 40 ordinary Kiwis for a month. Together with Geoff Simmons, he grilled them about the issues facing the region and Ice, Mice and Men is the result. What they found was startling. Our Far South – that part of New Zealand that extends from Stewart Island almost without interruption to the South Pole – harbours precious wildlife and is the engine room of the world’s oceans and climate. We are...

Extraordinary escapades from a late-life adventurer'Jo Morgan is a woman for our times. Fearless, determined, resourceful. An inspiring story of courage, vividly told with wry humour. A thoroughly engaging read.' JUDY BAILEYMountaineer, adventurer, avid motorcyclist and constant traveller, Jo Morgan has lived an extraordinary life.The youngest of eight children, Jo was brought up largely by her mum after her father died when she was only one, and sh...

The very first maps, oral maps made by early Polynesian and Maori settlers, were waypoints, lists of places in songs, chants, karakia and stories that showed direction.Hundreds of years later, Abel Tasman made the first attempt at a physical map; followed more than a century later by James Cook, whose more detailed map was made as he circumnavigated Aotearoa. Once the detail of the coastline was filled in, it was the turn of the surveyors, explorers, rockhounds, gold diggers and po...