Recently in Travel Books Category

New to backpacking and wanting to get your feet wet, though with-out actually getting your feet wet? Buy, rent or steal the Trailside Guide: Hiking and Backpacking. It's a must read for any starting out backpacker or all around adventurer. Much of the knowledge contained in this resource could very well save your life; so much so that I'd call this required reading for anyone that hasn't spent a few years on the trails or on the road already. The guide is billed as a reference manual; however it's not nearly as dry as it sounds. It's very detailed with many pictures and a great page layout, complete with full detailed text as well as quick informative captions and subtexts. Authored by Karen Berger, having backpacked more than 10,000 miles across four continents with her husband, is an expert on this particular subject.

Topics covered are as you would expect from a guide such as this, for instance: food as fuel, using a compass and off-season hikes. Of course it also contains medical knowledge that every backpacker should know, such as prevention and treatment of hypothermia, altitude-sickness and frostbite.

The new updated edition is available via Amazon.com for $12.89 here.

Tom Sheppard's book, the Vehicle-dependent Expedition Guide, is well-known because it is well-written and researched with an aim for "dead accurate detail."

Even though it is in a 2nd edition it is becoming hard to find. You can check this Amazon page for the softcover edition to see if any copies become available there.

From earthroamer.com (which may also be worth a look around):

This book started as a commission from Land Rover to 'do a little booklet on expeditions'. We had the idea of basing it around the Royal Geographical Society notes Tom Sheppard had done earlier - these in turn drawing on his extensive expedition experience and in particular the first west-east crossing of the Sahara for which he gained the Royal Geographical Society's prestigious Ness Award.

For those that don't know, the Ness Award is "for travellers, particularly those who have successfully popularised Geography and the wider understanding of our world and its environments." A list of other Ness Award winners is available, as well as a list of other Royal Geographic Society awards.

[Via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools.]

The Adventure Motorcycling Handbook is a ridiculously great book. The advice in this book will save you enough time to write your own. If you are looking to travel extensively by motorcycle then you need this book somewhere in your panniers. The books three parts (practicalities, continental route outlines, and tales from the saddle) are all well-researched and written with a focus on real life and situations that most riders will encounter many times throughout their trip.

There is a companion website, adventure-motorcycling.com, but it appears to be down at the moment. I will update this blog when it comes back online. In the meantime you can check out an archived version courtesy of the Wayback Machine, a great resource for finding information Google tells you exists but just isn't there anymore.

Kevin Kelly is an amazing man and will be featured in an upcoming traveler profile entry in this blog. His book, Asia Grace, is published by Taschen and is 320 pages of full-color photographs without any accompanying text. The pictures are beautiful and stand up on their own merits, but when you learn that the author was backpacking and carrying 500 rolls of film with him at a time you begin to see how amazing the story behind the book is.

Kevin details how the book was produced in the production notes; here is an excerpt:

My method of shooting was simple: smile, shoot first, ask questions later. It seemed to work. I spent enormous amounts of time hanging around places waiting for something to happen. Sometimes it did, often it didn't. Further years were spent in the back of local buses waiting to leave. I learned a lot, but the truth is, a lot of what I photographed I have only a vague notion of what was really going on. Asia is complex, infinitely deep, and I was just a kid with a camera. I slept in local inns; I ate whatever was being served, and yes, I drank the water anywhere the natives did. I got sick only once, in Katmandu - hepatitis A.

In addition to the book there is a website where you can view all the pictures from the book with Kevin's description of each. The site is also setup to allow visitors to share information about pictures that Kevin may not know much about, an idea that is quite obvious but rarely executed as well as it is here.