Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile
10 best books like Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile (Sara Wheeler): Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah, Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, The Splendid Outcast: Beryl Markham's African Stories, To Timbuktu: A Journey Down the Niger, Hearing Birds Fly, Gringos in Paradise: An American Couple Builds Their Retirement Dream House in a Seaside Village in Mexico, Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel, Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes: A Year Alone in the Patagonia Wilderness
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,...
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah
| Author | Tim Mackintosh-Smith |
| ISBN | 0330491148 |
Ibn Battutah was the greatest traveller of the pre-mechanical age, journeying for 29 years and covering three times the ground Marco Polo covered. Tim Mackintosh-Smith follows the first stage of Ibn Battutah's journey, from Tangier to Constantinople. Destinations include and Islamic Butlin's...
With plenty of sunscreen and a cold beer swaddled in his sleeping bag, writer and botanist Jim Malusa bicycled alone to the lowest point on each of six continents, a six-year series of “anti-expeditions” to the “anti-summits.” His journeys took him to Lake Eyre in the arid heart of Australia,...
| Author | Patrick Leigh Fermor |
| ISBN | 1590171888 |
The Mani, at the tip of Greece's-and Europe's-southernmost promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is still very much a part of its people's...
The Splendid Outcast: Beryl Markham's African Stories
| Author | Beryl Markham |
| ISBN | 0865473013 |
I loved West With the Night, so I was looking forward to this one. Pah! Let's establish right up front that when I was a kid we had horses. I love their soft velvety lips with the prickly chin whiskers, their smooth coats, the way they twitch their skin to flick off the flies, their welcoming nickers, the way...
| 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,...
HEARING BIRDS FLY is Louisa Waugh's passionately written account of her time in a remote Mongolian village. Frustrated by the increasingly bland character of the capital city of Ulan Bator, she yearned for the real Mongolia and got the chance when she was summoned by the village head to go to Tsengel...
| Author | Barry Golson |
| ISBN | 0743276353 |
"A Year in Provence" meets "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" in this lively and entertaining account of a couple's year building their dream house in Mexico.In 2004, Barry Golson wrote an award-winning article for "AARP" magazine about Mexican hot spots for retirees longing for a lifestyle they...
Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as a rising star among travel writers, Jeffrey Tayler penetrates one of the most isolated, forbidding regions on earth--the Sahel. This lower expanse of the Sahara, which marks the southern limit of Islam’s reach in West and Central Africa,...
| Author | Robert Kull |
| ISBN | 1577316746 |
Years after losing his lower right leg in a motorcycle crash, Robert Kull traveled to a remote island in Patagonia’s coastal wilderness with equipment and supplies to live alone for a year. He sought to explore the effects of deep solitude on the body and mind and to find the spiritual answers he’d...
| 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 | Gavin Young |
| ISBN | 0525481060 |
It was a simple idea, the kind all of us have had at one time or another. Take a series of ships of different sizes and kinds, go where they lead and see what happens. Inspired by great sea writers like Jack London, Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, Gavin Young decided he would port-hop to some far destination...
| Author | Alexander William Kinglake |
| ISBN | 1426410794 |
A solitary Western traveler in the Middle East in 1834, this is an extraordinary work of travel writing that is more about the author's internal journey than it is about monuments and museums, one that replicates the personal experience of travel and how it changes who we are. Kinglake's intimate, conversational...
| Author | Peter Matthiessen |
| ISBN | 0140255079 |
A classic work of nature and humanity, by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), author of the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard and the new novel In Paradise
Peter Matthiessen crisscrossed 20,000 miles of the South American wilderness, from the Amazon rain forests...
The Panama Hat Trail: A Journey from South America
| Author | Tom Miller |
| ISBN | 0792263863 |
Next week I leave for a trip to Ecuador, so naturally I wanted to read something to put me in the mindset of a country I've never visited.
This book, while perhaps a bit dated by 2017 (we'll see once I get there), does a great job of exploring every step in the long process of turning Ecuadoran straw...
ARABIA is the story of Jonathan Raban's magic carpet ride through Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan. Not only does it reveal the Arabs and their culture, it also introduces us to a series of memorable individuals.
Much of the book's strength is the author's gift for friendships....
| Author | Tahir Shah |
| ISBN | 1559706775 |
A shrunken head from Peru and a feather with traces of blood are the clues that launch Tahir Shah on his latest journey. Fascinated by the recurring theme of flight in Peruvian folklore, Shah sets out to discover whether the Incas really were able to "fly like birds" over the jungle, as a Spanish monk reported....
| Author | Eric Newby |
| ISBN | 0864426275 |
Having decided to explore Ireland by bicycle, Eric and Wanda Newby set out one December - not the best time to ride a bike around the highways and by-ways of the Emerald Isle, even when protected by thermal underwear. From the Cliffs of Moher to St Brigid's Vat, Dublin, the Aran Islands, the Ring of Kerry...
The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China
| Author | Rosemary Mahoney |
| ISBN | 0618035494 |
One year before the protests in Tiananmen Square, Rosemary Mahoney participated in a teaching exchange between Harvard and Hangzhou University. At Hangzhou she was able to overcome her students' usual rigidity and achieve a rare and intimate glimpse of their culture and their attitudes. This remarkable...
Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend
| Author | Patrick Symmes |
| ISBN | 0375702652 |
Intrepid journalist Patrick Symmes sets off on his BMW R80 G/S in search of the people and places in Ernesto "Che" Guevara's classic Motorcycle Diaries, seeking out his own adventure as well as the legacy of the icon Che would become, Symmes retraces the future revolutionary's path. And on the way...
"Beyond the completion of a 3,000-mile journey, mostly under amusing conditions, through a little-known part of the world, and the discovery of one new tributary to a tributary to a tributary of the Amazon, nothing of importance was achieved."
Nothing indeed. In 1932, Peter Fleming, a literary...
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay
| Author | John Gimlette |
| ISBN | 1400078520 |
Haven to Nazis, smugglers’ paradise, home to some of the earth’s oddest wildlife and most baroquely awful dictatorships, Paraguay is a nation waiting for the right chronicler. In John Gimlette, at last it has one. With an adventurer’s sang-froid, a historian’s erudition, and a sense of irony...
| Author | Hugh Thomson |
| ISBN | 0753813580 |
One man goes in search of the lost cities of the Amazon in the Inca heartland.
The lost cities of South America have always exercised a powerful hold on the popular imagination. The ruins of the Incas and other pre-Colombian civilisations are scattered over thousands of miles of still largely uncharted...
When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler's Journal of Staying Put
| Author | Vivian Swift |
| ISBN | 1596914610 |
Following a lifetime of trekking across the globe, Vivian Swift, a freelance designer who racked up 23 temporary addresses in 20 years, finally dropped her well-worn futon mattress and rucksack in a small town on the edge of the Long Island Sound. She spent the next decade quietly taking stock of her...
