Acclaimed travel writer Rick Antonson (Full Moon Over Noah’s Ark) tackles his most challenging adventure yet: a formidable trail through the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea.Rick Antonson has traveled to parts of the world that are not simply exotic but sometimes damned near inaccessible. He has climbed to the summit of Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, traveling beyond to Iraq and Iran and Armenia. He has undertaken an improbable overland journey to the a...

A captivating journey blending memoir, history, and biography that takes the reader on one of the world's most famous trains and tells of carving the dramatic route it follows, while pondering other international railways through the eyes of travellers past and present.Rick Antonson has ridden trains in more than thirty-five countries—but almost everything he thinks he knows about train travel changes when he boards the Rocky Mountaineer with his ten-year-old grand...

Acclaimed travel writer Rick Antonson sets his adventurous compass on Mount Ararat, exploring the region’s long history, religious mysteries, and complex politics.Mount Ararat is the most fabled mountain in the world. For millennia this massif in eastern Turkey has been rumored as the resting place of Noah’s Ark following the Great Flood. But it also plays a significant role in the longstanding conflict between Turkey and Armenia.Author Rick Antonson joined...

“You’ll never understand America until you’ve driven Route 66—that’s old Route 66—all the way,” a truck driver in California once said to author Rick Antonson. “It’s the most famous highway in the world.”With some determination, grit, and a good sense of direction, one can still find and drive on 90 percent of the original Route 66 today. This travelogue follows Rick and his travel companion Peter along 2,400 miles through eight states from Chicago to Los Angeles as they discover t...

Timbuktu: the African city known to legend as a land of scholars, splendor and mystery, a golden age in the Sahara Desert. But to many it is a vaguely recognizable name – a flippant tag for “the most remote place on earth.” With this fabled city as his goal, author Rick Antonson began a month-long trek. His initial plan? To get a haircut.Aided by an adventuresome spirit, Rick endures a forty-five hour train ride, a swindling travel agent, “Third World, three-lane” roads, rivers, an...

Slumach's Gold chronicles what is possibly Canada's greatest lost-mine story. It searches out the truth behind a Salish man's hanging for murder in 1891 and tracks the intriguing legend about him that grew after his death. It was a legend that turned into a drama of international fascination when Slumach—the hanged criminal—was mysteriously linked to gold nuggets "the size of walnuts." The stories claimed that Slumach had placed a curse on a hidden motherlode to protect it from in...

Full of intrigue, adventure, greed, and tragedy, the enduring legend of Slumach's Gold is examined in riveting detail in this newly expanded edition of a bestselling classicNewly expanded and revised, Slumach’s Gold: In Search of a Legend—and a Curse chronicles Canada’s most enduring lost-mine mystery. For more than 130 years, people have been captivated by the story of a secret cache of gold with nuggets “the size of walnuts,” supposedly buried near Pitt ...

Everybody has a train story. Whether it comes from a distant relative who worked on the railways or from a family train trip that formed a lasting impression of the Canadian landscape, trains inspire a sense of wonder and nostalgia. They are embedded in the history of Canada as a whole and western Canada in particular, and for generations they were how most people travelled and saw the country. Today, trains get the most attention in the context of tragedy, in the aftermath of rare but cat...

Rick Antonson has traveled to parts of the world that are not simply exotic but sometimes damned near inaccessible. He has climbed to the summit of Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, traveling beyond to Iraq and Iran and Armenia. He has undertaken an improbable overland journey to the ancient city of Timbuktu, an enlightening look into efforts to preserve the city's priceless manuscripts. Now he has traversed the notorious Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea, a country some call "the last wild p...

Fidel Castro is dead. Donald Trump was elected president. And to most outsiders, the fate of Cuba has never seemed more uncertain. Yet those who look close enough may recognize that signs of the next revolution are etched in plain view.This is Cuba is a true story that begins in the summer of 2009 when a young American photo-journalist is offered the chance of a lifetime―a two-year assignment in Havana.For David Ariosto, the island is an intriguing...

Walking to Samarkand is journalist Bernard Ollivier's stunning account of the second leg of his 7,200-mile walk from Istanbul, Turkey, to Xi'an, China, along the Silk Road—the longest and perhaps most mythical trade route of all time.After crossing the final mountain passes of Turkish Kurdistan, Ollivier sets foot in Iran, keen on locating vestiges of the silk trade as he passes through Persia's modern cities and traditional villages, including Tabriz, Tehran, Nishapur, an...

The European “discovery” and conquest of America was one of the most cataclysmic events in history, leading to the wholesale destruction of millions of people and hundreds of flourishing societies. As far as history books are concerned, Native Americans have been secondary to an essentially Euro-American story. Now, James Wilson presents a rigorously authoritative, beautifully written, comprehensive history that—as Richard Gott wrote in the London Literary Review—“places the ‘Nati...