Back in 2004, I saw some adverts on TV for a new show called Long Way Round, featuring Ewan McGregor and his best friend Charley Boorman travelling around the world on motorcycles. I decided to give it a go – after all, I’ve been a fan of Ewan’s for year. Within minutes I was hooked, on the adventure, the fun and the camaraderie between the pair. Since then the intrepid duo have travelled through Africa in Long Way Down, and Charley has branched into solo projects, with Race to Dakar, By Any Means and Right to the Edge (By Any Means 2). Now he’s back with a new adventure, Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada.

In November this year I was lucky enough to see Charley’s live show, in which he talks in detail about the trips he has undertaken.

Charley Boorman

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Clean Breaks by Richard Hammond and Jeremy Smith is a guide to 500 things you could do around the world without a high environmental impact. The green aspirations of the book make it pretty clear that it’s not going to be the Richard Hammond of Top Gear fame that wrote it – I can’t somehow see him and his co-presenters offsetting their carbon when they head off to burn up the road in the latest super car. This is the kind of book that’s ideal for friends and relatives who love to travel and love to dream about where they might go next. If they suffer at least a basic level of environnmental ‘guilt’ about their travel, this is a nice choice to help them feel better about themselves.

Jeremy Smith, Richard Hammond

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They say the best way to get to know a city is to walk through it and there are many Delhis to walk through since it is like an onion, city within city, with the hallmarks of different conquerors, culminating in Lutyen’s city. A hundred years ago, Delhi had not spread beyond the protecting walls of Shahjahanabad, the city Shahjahan built as his capital in 1638 and the population was just about one lakh. Now that area is known as Old Delhi and lacks the grandeur of the city that the British built but it had its own quirky character, tastes and alleyways.

On the anniversary of Delhi’s centenary as India’s capital, came this book on Delhi’s historic walks.

Swapna Liddle

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The book is an accumulation of the columns that Mehta wrote for various papers, including HT Brunch. A compendium of some of the road trips that he took across India. Mehta’s chosen to group them according to all the chai stalls that he met on the road. ‘There’s not a highway, road or dirt track in India where you can’t find a cup of chai whenever you want it’ he writes and so he sets out to write about travelling down India’s rickety or mountainous roads fuelled by a passion for seeing new places and cups of tea. To begin with the chaiwala is a constant factor along with odd or touching encounters over cups of tea, like the saffron tea that he shares with a Kashmiri shepherd, but along the way tea gets overtaken by a love for Enfield Bullets.

Rishad Saam Mehta

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Some time ago I read and reviewed Tim Butcher’s Blood River, about his journey along the Congo River, and I’m afraid to say I wasn’t terribly complementary about it. I didn’t like his style or attitude, and thought I would rather find other books on Africa. Yet when I learnt about his recent book, Chasing The Devil: The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit, I found myself keen to give it a go. Perhaps it was the African journey again which drew me in, but I have to admit there was also a hope that I might enjoy Butcher’s writing more second time round.

Chasing The Devil is Butcher’s account of a journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia. Like Blood River, he is again recreating an earlier journey, this time the trip made by author Graham Greene and his cousin Barbara in 1935.

Tim Butcher

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When Father Ted presented her with a machine that would ‘take the misery out of tea-making’ TV’s most aesthetically challenged housekeeper Mrs. Doyle lamented ‘some people enjoy the misery’. It’s more or less the way I feel about camping; I certainly don’t camp for any pleasure I derive from it, rather a belief that it’s somehow character building and morally robust. I’m certainly not the first to think so and in The Art of Camping Matthew de Abaitua takes us on a trip back in (fairly recent) history to look at those people for whom camping was a means to rehabilitation or a way of instilling certain values, using socialist in principle.

Part history, part memoir (though happily much less so than Emma Kennedy’s ‘The Tent, the Bucket and Me’, a recent book about remembered camping trips in the 1970s that was so awful it set my teeth on edge) The Art of Camping:The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars reminds us that while a camping can be a much needed tonic from the irritations of modern life, a way of getting back to nature and temporarily forgetting the rat race, the practice has also been (and continues to be) advocated by extremists and oddballs.

Matthew de Abaitua

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“Get your kicks on Route 66” goes the song. As someone who grew up on rock and roll and dreamt of the wide spaces of America from Glasgow, Billy Connolly has always had a fascination with the iconic Route 66. In Billy Connolly’s Route 66, he travels the famous Mother Road, and invites us all along for the ride.

Stretching from Chicago to Los Angeles, Route 66 travels through many famous places, and is an integral part of the California dream – travelled by millions in search of a better life on the West Coast, particularly by the “Okies” escaping the dust bowl of Oklahoma during the great depression. Now however, with much of the small towns which relied on passing trade bypassed by the Interstate highway, the road is dying. Some towns and businesses are enterprising and manage to continue to attract visitors, but there are many more abandoned houses and premises.

Billy Connolly

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I am what you might call a vicarious traveller. I would love to travel the world but am not able to at this point in my life, so I travel from my living room, watching TV and reading books. Among my favourites are the Long Way Round and Long Way Down shows by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, along with Charley’s solo shows. Russ Malkin was an integral part of the team for these adventures, both as producer and as a member of the support team, so you can understand I was quite excited to hear about his book, Big Earth: 101 Amazing Adventures.

Big Earth is a kind of “directory” of trips, adventures and experiences which you can undertake around the world.

Russ Malkin

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I wasn’t expecting to like Holy Cow by Sarah Macdonald. She got off to a bad start for me with some glaring geographic and historical errors (claiming Rishikesh was 200 km from Dehradun – it’s about 40 minutes in a taxi) and a lot of moaning and whining about how filthy and smoggy Delhi was. I did think to myself “Oh no, here we go again. Another airhead antipodean off to India to ‘find’ herself and not bothering to do her research” and my instinct wasn’t entirely wrong – there’s far too much dipping into the smorgasbord of Indian religions and gurus for my liking – but along the way, I actually got drawn into her life in India, almost against my better intentions. As you might imagine, I didn’t buy this book – it was a donation from a kind friend and fellow review writer who I’m surprised to now realise hasn’t reviewed the book. Maybe it didn’t work so well for her either.

Sarah Macdonald

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For many years I have devoured travel books, usually about France or Italy but occasionally branching out elsewhere. As someone who doesn’t travel often or very far, they offer me an escapism and a chance to learn about and “see” other parts of the world.

Thumbs Up Australia: Hitchhiking the Outback by Tom Parry is the first travel book I have read about Australia however, and hopefully it won’t be the last. Parry sets off to Australia with his rather reluctant French girlfriend Katia, to re-explore the Outback which he hitched through when young and single. He has spent the intervening years lost in daydreams about Australia, and after much effort he managed to persuade Katia to join him in his journey.

Tom Parry

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Roy H Williams once wrote, “lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?”. This is a question that many of us will struggle to answer coherently, I suspect, but not Robert Penn. For Penn is a man with enthusiasm for all things pedal-powered; he has ridden a bike for thirty-six years, on nearly every day of his adult life, including one 40,000km, three-year, round the world trip as an apparent reaction to having been a pin-striped solicitor for too long. As his book “it’s all about the bike” – a cheeky riposte to Lance Armstrong’s best-selling biography about recovering from cancer to win the Tour de France – opens, Penn owns five bikes in various states of repair, but has decided he needs a new one. “I could go online right now with a credit card and spend £3000 on a mass-produced carbon or titanium racing bike” he writes. “It’s tempting, very tempting. But it’s not right. Like many people, I’m frustrated at the round of buying stuff that is designed to be replaced quickly…I want the best bike I can afford, and I want to grow old with it…I want MY bike.”

Robert Penn

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