A Ride In The Neon Sun

A Ride In The Neon Sun
Author: Josie Dew
Publisher: Sphere
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 140551969X

It's not easy landing unprepared in a country like Japan. The eccentricities of the calendar, the indecipherable postal system, not to mention the alien alphabet, language and culture, have all to be confronted before the disorientated traveller can feel at ease. Trying to ride a bicycle through the streets of one of the most congested cities in the world would seem to compound your problems. For Josie Dew, however, with over 200,000 miles already clocked up in the saddle few things could be more challenging - or for the reader of A RIDE IN THE NEON SUN, more wonderfully entertaining. From Kawasaki to Kagoshima, Odawara to Okinawa, Josie discovered a nation rich in dazzling contrasts. The neon and concrete were there in greater abundance than even she had imagined, but so too were bottomless baths, love burgers, long-tailed cocks, musical toilet rolls, oriental Elvises, cardboard police and a sense of fun belying the population's rigourous work ethic. Far from being the reserved race that she had heard about, the Japanese welcomed her into their homes with bountiful smiles and bows - and skin-scorching baths.

Ride in the Neon Sun

Ride in the Neon Sun
Author: Josie Dew
Publisher: Little Brown & Company
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1980-04-01
Genre: Gardening
ISBN: 9780316850094

Shows how to create a beautiful winter garden, detailing the extra care that must be taken and the measures for dealing with harsh weather and offering encyclopaedic coverage of winter plants

Long Cloud Ride

Long Cloud Ride
Author: Josie Dew
Publisher: Sphere
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2011-04-07
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0748129936

After two months on board a Russian container ship sailing 15,000 miles across the world, Josie finally arrives in New Zealand with her bike. Over the next nine months she cycles 10,000 kilometres all over North and South Islands while experiencing the wettest, windiest and stormiest year on record. During this time Josie was spat at, shouted at, honked at, and both run off and blown off the road. She got soaked, sunburnt, hailed on and snowed on and was alternately starved and over-fed, over-charged and under-charged. Then there was the wildlife: the possums (both dead and alive): exotic birds such as moreporks (with their eerie call) and fantails (who decided to follow); the ostriches, who liked to chase English cyclists and the harriers, who liked to dive bomb them; the more familiar but no less frustrating farm animals, who provided sheep-jams and cow-blocks to slow Josie down. In Long Cloud Ride, Josie brings New Zealand brilliantly to life. Warm, witty and acutely observed as ever, her latest adventure is sure to delight old and new fans alike.

The Sun In My Eyes

The Sun In My Eyes
Author: Josie Dew
Publisher: Sphere
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1405519703

Following on from the hugely enjoyable A RIDE IN THE NEON SUN, Josie takes us on the second part of her journey through Japan; a country whose keyword is peace, yet spends millions each year on high-tech armament. Josie's travels are as fascinating as they are varied; she endures a horrific storm at sea, samples the deadly puffer fish and visits the two cities which will forever symbolise the horror of war: Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But wherever she goes, no matter how remote or industrious the area, Josie encounters the friendly, quirky and unbelievably generous Japanese people, from those who load her down with cabbages and cans of Pocari Sweat to one couple who left her the key to their shop - and told her to sleep by the till!

The Wind In My Wheels

The Wind In My Wheels
Author: Josie Dew
Publisher: Sphere
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1405519681

As a young girl, Josie Dew developed an overpowering urge to travel. She also fell out of a fast-moving vehicle and, rather inconveniently, developed a lifelong aversion to cars. Along came her first bicycle, and she has never looked back. Four continents, thirty-six countries and eighty thousand miles worth of astounding adventures, eccentric characters, varied cultures and ever-enduring optimism are the result of her travels. From Saharan locust invasions to tree-climbing goats, and a customs official who wouldn't let her leave India because 'You are making me a very fine wife', her encounters are described with honesty, wit and perception. Strange incidents and bizarre circumstances punctuate her journeys: in Nepal she met a team of Frenchmen running from Paris to China, and a cyclist on his way from one Olympic Games to the next. In Udaipur she was greeted by everyone with the refrain 'Hello Mr. Jamie Bond Octopussy filmed here', whilst her view of post-Ceausescu Romania, a nation suffering and starving, affected her both physically and mentally. THE WIND IN MY WHEELS is informative, illuminating, and ceaselessly amusing.

Travels In A Strange State

Travels In A Strange State
Author: Josie Dew
Publisher: Sphere
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 140551972X

By most people's standards, Josie Dew is hugely adventurous. By American standards, she is completely insane. For Americans drive everywhere: through cinemas, restaurants, banks, even trees. But driving past Josie as she pedalled across America was a new and alarming experience. On her eight-month journey Josie experienced it all; race riots in Los Angeles, impossible heat in Death Valley, Sexual Tantric Seminars in Hawaii. From Utah to the Great Lakes, via improbable places like Zzyzx and Squaw Tit, her two-wheeled odyssey brought her into contact with all the wonders and worries of this larger-than-life country. Highly entertaining, richly informative, TRAVELS IN A STRANGE STATE is a personal memoir of an improbable journey, revealing the United States as it is rarely seen - from the seat of a bicycle.

A Traveller's Year

A Traveller's Year
Author:
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2015-10-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1781012016

A collection of anecdotes for each day of the year on the subject of travel and exploration from Charles Darwin, Michael Palin, Evelyn Waugh, and others. With an emphasis on the period 1750–1950—the classic era of both European exploration and diary-writing—this anthology features excerpts that convey men and women’s experiences of travel and discovery from the sixteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. The authors of the pieces range from famous explorers such as Captains Cook and Scott to modern travel writers journeying through the contemporary world, from people who pushed back the boundaries of geographical knowledge to people who wrote about what they did on their summer holidays. The book includes an introduction, explanatory notes and mini-biographies of all the contributors, including: Gertrude Bell (woman traveller in the Middle East) James Boswell (travels in Scotland and the Hebrides) William Cobbett (Rural Rides through England) Christopher Columbus (journals of his voyages to America) Charles Darwin (Voyage of the Beagle) Captain James Cook (voyages in the Pacific) Washington Irving (American writer travelled in Europe in first decades of nineteenth century) Edward Lear (landscape painter and nonsense writer produced journals of his travels in Greece, Corsica, Near East etc) Lewis & Clark (journals of famous journey of American exploration) William Morris (wrote a journal of a trip to Iceland in 1870s) Michael Palin (a Python abroad) Mungo Park (African explorer in early nineteenth century) Captain Robert Falcon Scott (doomed journey to South Pole) Evelyn Waugh (diaries of 1930s travels in Mediterranean and beyond) William John Wills (explorer of Australia)

Slow Coast Home

Slow Coast Home
Author: Josie Dew
Publisher: Sphere
Total Pages: 515
Release: 2011-04-07
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0748129928

Josie Dew's love of cycling has taken her across the world, travelling everywhere from Japan and Mexico to Iceland, India and Algeria. In her latest book, she sets off on another quirky and riotous ride, choosing to circumnavigate the coastline of the British Isles. And she discovers that her homeland can be as surprising and full of incident as anywhere she has ever been. Beginning in Portsmouth, Josie sets off in a clockwise direction after a Shetland grandmother warns her that she'll end up meeting the devil if she travels anti-clockwise. Through rain, hail, floods, bitter temperatures, minor earthquakes and dusty drought, Josie pedals on, eventually returning to Land's End to complete Stage One of her remarkably lengthy odyssey along 5,000 miles of seaside, estuaries, creeks and islands. But is all as it seems? Who is the mysterious builder who appears at all the wrong moments? Who are the two-wheeled taggers-on lurking in her wake? What did she find at Puckpool Point, Bozomzeal and Woon Gumpus? And how did Josie so badly miscalculate her approach to the seafront at Newhaven that she landed in France?

Book Lust to Go

Book Lust to Go
Author: Nancy Pearl
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1570617015

Adventure is just a book away as bestselling author Nancy Pearl returns with recommended reading for more than 120 destinations — both worldly and imagined — around the globe. From Las Vegas to the Land of Oz, Naples to Nigeria, Philadelphia to Provence, Nancy Pearl guides readers to the very best fiction and nonfiction to read about each destination. Even within one country, she traverses decades to suggest titles that effortlessly capture the different eras that make up a region’s unique history. This enthusiastic literary globetrotting guide includes stops in Korea, Sweden, Afghanistan, Albania, Parma, Patagonia, Texas, and Timbuktu. Book Lust To Go connects the best fiction and nonfiction to particular destinations, whether your bags are packed or your armchair is calling. From fiction to memoir, poetry to history, Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust to Go takes the reader on a globetrotting adventure — no passport required.

Women Travel

Women Travel
Author: Natania Jansz
Publisher: Rough Guides
Total Pages: 700
Release: 1999
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9781858284590

In this latest, completely revised Women Travel anthology, Rough Guides present a whole new crew of writers, journalists, travellers, dreamers and escapists, each with a journey to share and a tale to inspire. Featuring more than 80 adventures around the world, Women Travel tells you what it's like to: backpack around India with your mother in tow; hitch up with a shepherd in Spain; set up the ultimate writers' retreat on the icefields of Antarctica; hang out with hippies in the Australian rainforest; be crowned Queen Mother of an African village; have a girls' night out in the Kalahari Desert; and sweat behind the scenes at a Caribbean carnival.