The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers
10 best books like The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers (Eric Hansen): Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure, Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness, Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon, Coasting: A Private Voyage, The Black Nile: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River, To Hellholes and Back: Bribes, Lies, and the Art of Extreme Tourism, An African in Greenland, Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles To Timbuktu, To Timbuktu: A Journey Down the Niger
Malaria Dreams is a book about the author and his friend's trip from West Africa to the Mediterranean in a questionable car, and it's well written. So why the one star?
I like adventure travel and adventure travel books better than the next guy usually- depending on who the next guy actually is,...
| Author | Jeffrey Tayler |
| ISBN | 0609808265 |
Faced with an identity crisis in his work and his life, seasoned traveler and journalist Jeffrey Tayler made a bold decision. He would leave behind his mundane existence in Moscow to re-create the legendary British explorer Henry Stanley’s trip down the Congo in a dugout canoe, stocked with food,...
In 1996, Tom Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a naive Peace Corps volunteer. Though he lasted only a few months before illness and personal crisis forced him home, Bissell found himself entranced by this remote land. Five years later he returned to explore the shrinking Aral Sea, destroyed by Soviet irrigation...
| Author | Redmond O'Hanlon |
| ISBN | 0679727140 |
A mixture of minute, old-fashioned naturalistic observation of plants, mammals, and especially birds in the Amazonian rain forest, and the vicissitudes of traveling with a motley crew of locals along with O'Hanlon's alcoholic English friend Simon, who comes along for a kind of comic counterpoint...
| Author | Jonathan Raban |
| ISBN | 0375725938 |
Put Jonathan Raban on a boat and the results will be fascinating, and never more so than when he’s sailing around the serpentine, 2,000-mile coast of his native England. In this acutely perceived and beautifully written book, the bestselling author of Bad Land turns that voyage–which coincided...
| Author | Dan Morrison |
| ISBN | 0670021989 |
A spectacular modern-day adventure along the Nile River from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea
With news of tenuous peace in Sudan, foreign correspondent Dan Morrison bought a plank-board boat, summoned a childhood friend who'd never been off American soil and set out from Uganda,...
| Author | Chuck Thompson |
| ISBN | 0805087885 |
The guru of extreme tourism sets out to face his worst fears in Africa, India, Mexico City, and—most terrifying of all—at Disney World
In the widely-acclaimed Smile When You're Lying, Chuck Thompson laid bare the travel industry's dirtiest secrets. Now he's out to discover if some of...
| Author | Tété-Michel Kpomassie |
| ISBN | 0940322889 |
Tété-Michel Kpomassie was a teenager in Togo when he discovered a book about Greenland—and knew that he must go there. Working his way north over nearly a decade, Kpomassie finally arrived in the country of his dreams. This brilliantly observed and superbly entertaining record of his adventures...
| Author | Kira Salak |
| ISBN | 0792274571 |
After 37 years of never reading about Mali, I have managed two books about that country in the last month. The previous book (The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts) gave more information about the history of the region, and informed my reading...
| Author | Mark Jenkins |
| ISBN | 0688115853 |
Twenty years ago, when the author and his best friend, Mike Moe, were eighteen years old, they lit out from Wyoming to explore the world. They washed up in Africa and without forethought or planning set off for the most remote place on earth they could imagine: Timbuktu. Stopped by disease and the desert,...
By the time that travel writer Jeff Greenwald hit his late thirties, he had covered more ground than Magellan, Marco Polo, and Columbus combined. But he also came to a sobering conclusion: airplanes had reduced his exotic explorations to a series of long commutes. So he set out to rediscover the mass,...
| Author | Jennifer L. Leo |
| ISBN | 1932361111 |
Following on the heels of the successful Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures: Funny Women Write from the Road comes another collection of hilarious travel stories by women. From America to Australia to everywhere in between, the true stories in Whose Panties are These? will have you shaking your...
| Author | Stanley Stewart |
| ISBN | 1592281060 |
Vivid, hilarious, and compelling, this eagerly awaited book takes its place among the travel classics. It is a thrilling tale of adventure, a comic masterpiece, and an evocative portrait of a medieval land marooned in the modern world. Eight and a half centuries ago, under Genghis Khan, the Mongols...
| Author | Julia Weiler |
| ISBN | 1932361502 |
Following on the heels of the best-selling Sand in My Bra, this sequel is a collection of hilarious women's travel stories. From Australia to Zambia and everywhere in between, these true stories are full of bust-a-gut laughter. Nothing helps a travel story more than something going wrong — the frustration,...
| Author | H.M. Tomlinson |
| ISBN | 0810160110 |
Considered a masterpiece of travel literature for nearly a century, The Sea and the Jungle is a wise and witty book of firsts: ostensibly a lighthearted story of a Londoner's first ocean voyage, it is also a carefully crafted journalistic account of the first successful ascent of the Amazon River and...
| Author | Taras Grescoe |
| ISBN | 1582344299 |
Not exactly what I'd thought it would be, but that worked out fine. As it turns out, Grescoe is far less concerned with forbidden foods than he is with why they might be prohibited. Which means, in this case, that he's largely talking about current (as of 2005, at least) laws much more so than, say, ancient...
| Author | Paul Bowles |
| ISBN | 0061137375 |
Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue is an engaging collection of eight travel essays. Except for one essay on Central America, all of these pieces are concerned with locations in the Hindu, Buddhist, or Islamic worlds. A superb and observant traveler, Paul Bowles was a born wanderer who found...
| Author | Tim Cahill |
| ISBN | 0552771570 |
Tim Cahill brings 'em back alive. Not only has he survived fantastic journeys through the Himalayan rapids, the Grand Terror of Montana, and Dian Fossey's forbidden zone, he writes about them, too. Fearless and hell-bent on destroying all obstacles in his path, Cahill takes us to places rarely seen...
Gullible's Travels: The Adventures of a Bad Taste Tourist
| Author | Cash Peters |
| ISBN | 0762727144 |
One of the funniest travel books ever written. British radio journalist makes his final journey around America, visitng the tackiest and kitchiest tours and theme parks, desperate to leave this part of his life behind before he becomes jaded.
Places visited include the Museum of Feet, the...
Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story
| Author | J. Maarten Troost |
| ISBN | 1592407897 |
The bestselling author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals recounts his latest hilarious misadventures in the South Pacific, following in the footsteps of his unlikely idol, Robert Louis Stevenson
Readers and critics alike adore J. Maarten Troost for his signature wry and witty take on the adventure...
| Author | M.F.K. Fisher |
| ISBN | 0394713486 |
M.F.K. Fisher only came on my radar this year, and I didn't pick her up to read until I heard part of her essay about canning, and her earliest memory of jam-skin. She is one of the great foremothers of food writing, in fact there is even an award named after her for excellence in culinary writing.
I'm...
