A guide to cycling in the European Alps in the days before surfaced roads and automobile tourism. As the author explains, the spectacular views are well worth the effort of pushing your bicycle up the passes and perfectly safe as long as your cycle is equipped with brakes.

The Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition was the famous survey that took place in 1913-14 to follow the path of the Rio da Dúvida in the Amazon basin. The expedition was jointly led by Theodore Roosevelt, the former President of the United States, and Colonel Cândido Rondon, the Brazilian military engineer known for his explorations of the Western Amazon Basin and his lifelong support of Brazilian indigenous populations. Almost from the start, the expedition was fraught with problems: diseases...

Unknown MexicoA Record of Five Years' Exploration Among the Tribes of the Western Sierra Madre; In the Tierra Caliente of Tepic and Jalisco; and Among the Tarascos of Michoacan By Carl Lumholtz, M.A. PREFACE In the course of my travels in Australia, and especially after my arrival at Upper Herbert River in Northern Queensland, I soon perceived that it would be impracticable for me to hunt for zoological specimens without first securing the assistance of the natives of the country. Thus it came about...

This recording of the 1931 book about Yosemite National Park comprises the narrative text about the Park from its discovery by non-natives in the Indian War of 1851 to the mid-twentieth century. The printed book contains dozens of early photographs and drawings, as well as an extensive timeline and bibliography, which are not here recorded. The author was an ecologist, historian, and administrator. He was an officer of the U.S. National Park Service for thirty four years, serving as the Chief Naturalist of Yosemite from 1923-1929 and later as Park Superintendent. - Summary by David Wales

This is a 1906 collection of three essays by men famously associated with The Grand Canyon: Charles A. Higgins, John Wesley Powell, and Charles F. Lummis. - Summary by david wales

The book, also known as Darwin’s Journal of Researches, is a vivid and exciting travel memoir as well as a detailed scientific field journal covering biology, geology, and anthropology that demonstrates Darwin’s keen powers of observation, written at a time when Western Europeans were still discovering and exploring much of the rest of the world. Although Darwin revisited some areas during the expedition, for clarity the chapters of the book are ordered by reference to places and locations rather than chronologically. With hindsight, ideas which Darwin would later develop into his theory of evolution by natural selection are hinted at in his notes and in the book .

American Notes for General Circulation is a travelogue by Charles Dickens detailing his trip to North America from January to June, 1842. While there he acted as a critical observer of these societies almost as if returning a status report on their progress. This can be compared to the style of his Pictures from Italy written four years later, where he wrote far more like a tourist. His American journey was also an inspiration for his novel Martin Chuzzlewit.

e: Dickens takes time off his novels to give an account of travels which he and his family undertook in France and Italy. There are vivid descriptions of the places, but also of the people and their lives.

This is a 1913 travelogue by a then-well-known botanist who wrote many books about the American Southwest and California in particular. This popular book went into three printings. “…the main concern of the author has been to draw attention to an immensity of almost unexplored mountain, desert, canon and flowery plain,… This is the real California…. Like all genuine things, it has the compelling charm of the primitive and to the lover of the unartificial it appeals with freshness and power.”

Personal narratives of climbing Mount Everest in 1922-1923. The expeditions did not reach the summit. The northern approach to the mountain was discovered by George Mallory and Guy Bullock on the initial 1921 British Reconnaissance Expedition. It was an exploratory expedition not equipped for a serious attempt to climb the mountain. With Mallory leading they climbed the North Col to an altitude of 7,005 metres . From there, Mallory espied a route to the top, but the party was unprepared for the great task of climbing any further and descended...

Lord Ernest Borrow and Captain Anthony Fenton think they know a secret – a secret that could make them both rich. En route, they are sidetracked by Sir Marcus Antonius Lark, a woman who thinks she’s Cleopatra reincarnate, a Gilded Rose of an American Heiress, and Mrs. Jones, a mysterious Irish woman with a past. Will they find the secret? Or will the trip up the Nile on the Enchantress Isis net them another discovery altogether?

Trying to get away from an engagement he had got himself into more or less against his will, Stephen Knight travels to Algiers to visit his old friend Nevill. On the Journey there he meets the charming and beautiful Victoria. She is on her way to Algiers to search for her sister, who had disappeared years ago after marrying an Arab nobleman. With the support of his friend, Stephen Knight decides to help the girl - but when she also disappears, the adventure begins...

The American Charles Warren Stoddard wrote quite popular travel books, especially those about Polynesia. South-Sea Idyls was his most popular book. A series of letters to a friend, "They are," wrote William Dean Howells, "the lightest, sweetest, wildest, freshest things that were ever written about the life of that summer ocean." Stoddard also wrote The Lepers Of Molokai , a book that brought Father Damien and his charges to public notice. - Summary by David Wales

"A steak and kidney pie, influenza and a cablegram. There is the triple alliance that is responsible for the whole thing." So begins Charlie Chaplin's My Trip Abroad, a travel memoir charting the actor-director's semi-spontaneous visit to Europe. Fresh off the success of 1921's The Kid, Chaplin decides to "play hookey" after his seven year stay in Hollywood. He return to his native Europe as an international superstar, beloved by fans and hounded by reporters. The "triple alliance" of the book's opening line sends Chaplin on an whirlwind tour through Great Britain, Germany, and France -- and the results are both funny and insightful...

One of the very first New Zealand novels, Over the Hills and Far Away is a heavily romanticised tale of a woman's journey from England to Otago, New Zealand, and her subsequent experiences in the wild new colony. - Summary by Lewis Fletcher

Travel with Little Lucy around the globe and learn a little geography and small bits about other cultures.

Clifford Simak deals with the implications of time travel in his own unique way in this story. What if a group of guys did it on their own, without any help from government or industry? On a shoestring,so to speak? Would anyone believe them? What would you do if you could go back 150,000 years to a time when mastodons and saber toothed tigers roamed North America? And what happens when they run out of money? All these questions are explored in the usual humorous, wry Simak way in this story.

Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe moved to California from Massachusetts during the Gold Rush of the mid-1800’s. During her travels, Louise was offered the opportunity to write for The Herald about her travel adventures. It was at this point that Louise chose the name “Shirley” as her pen name. Dame Shirley wrote a series of 23 letters to her sister Mary Jane (also known as Molly) in Massachusetts in 1851 and 1852. The “Shirley Letters”, as the collected whole later became known, gave true accounts of life in two gold mining camps on the Feather River in the 1850s...

“THE FARTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE; Being the Second and Last Part OF HIS LIFE, And of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe.” After the death of his wife, Robinson Crusoe is overcome by the old wanderlust, and sets out with his faithful companion Friday to see his island once again. Thus begins a journey which will last ten years and nine months, in which Crusoe travels over the world, along the way facing dangers and discoveries in Madagascar, China, and Siberia.

The Lure Of The Labrador Wild is a account of a expedition by Leonidas Hubbard, an adventurer and journalist to canoe the system Naskaupi River - Lake Michikamau in Labrador and George River in Quebec. His companions on this journey were his friend, New York lawyer Dillon Wallace and an Indian guide from Missannabie, George Elson. From the start, the expedition was beset with mistakes and problems. Instead of ascending the Naskaupi River, by mistake they followed the shallow Susan Brook. After hard long portaging and almost reaching Lake Michikamau, with food supplies running out, on September 15 at Windbound lake, they decided to turn back...

Miriam Henderson is one of what novelist Dolf Wyllarde (in her great work, The Pathway of the Pioneer) termed "nous autres," i.e., young gentlewomen who must venture forth and earn their living after their fathers have been financially ruined. Also, she has read Villette; she thus applies for and is offered a job teaching conversational English at a girls' school, albeit in Germany rather than France. Pointed Roofs describes her year abroad, as she endeavors to make her way in the hotbed of seething female personalities that populate the school, overseen by her employer, the formidable Fraulein...

An unlikely pair of wanderers they were; the orphan girl Lou and her travelling partner Jim Botts. Jim appeared in need of following some apparent 'rules' during the journey, while Lou seemed in need of better clothing, and perhaps some refinement. But who was most benefitting whom on the week-long journey from rural village to big city? And which of the two was willing to try anything once? (Introduction by Roger Melin)

Edmund Plauchut spent many years in China and gives an account of his observations of the places, people, and culture as he experienced them through the eyes of a European near the beginning of the 20th century.

"The White Heart of the Mojave" recounts a 1920's adventure "in the wind and sun and big spaces" of Death Valley by two independent minded women, Edna Brush Perkins and Charlotte Hannahs Jordan. Both women were early feminists, Edna as chairwoman of the greater Cleveland Woman's Suffrage Party (1916-18). At the end of the Great War, the two friends wanted nothing more than to escape "to the solitariness of some wild and lonely place far from city halls, smokestacks, national organizations, and streets of little houses all alike...

This is the final volume in the trilogy following the smart, stylish, divorced and independent businesswoman Emma McChesney in her career from stenographer, then drummer (traveling salesman) to owner of her own company. (The first was Roast Beef, Medium and the second Personality Plus). Edna Ferber first gained success with these stories and later went on to write Show Boat, Giant and other well known books. First published in 1915, Emma's son, Jock, has moved to Chicago with his new wife. Emma decides to sell in South America and proves she has not lost her magic touch...

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy, first published in 1888. It was the third largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.The book tells the story of Julian West, a young American who, towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up more than a century later. He finds himself in the same location (Boston, Massachusetts) but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000 and, while he was sleeping, the U...

In this fine sailing and exploring yarn, Edward Frederick Knight , sometime English barrister, journalist, sportsman, and amateur seaman, conspires over a fish dinner in Harwich to buy and refit the tiny yacht Falcon, recruit a crew of four , and sail across the Atlantic Ocean to South America. This they do, despite naysayers who advised painting the yacht's name conspicuously on her keel to aid identification when found floating upside down in some foreign sea. The book provides detailed descriptions...

A coasting voyage boyage in a small yacht from Hammersmith in the UK to Copenhagen and back, including various visits to places on the Baltic. - Summary by Jane Bennett

The book describes a voyage undertaken in 1889 by an English barrister Edward Frederick Knight to the South Seas. This delightful story takes the reader on a voyage to the forbidding desert island of Trindade, where it is rumored that immense treasure lies buried. Though the heroes of this treasure-hunt do not have to contend with malicious people, they have their share of adventures. Almost inaccessible desert island, changing weather, hideous land crabs and heavy digging in the mud are enough challenges for the brave adventurers.

Edward Granville Browne (1862 – 1926), born in Stouts Hill, Uley, Gloucestershire, England, was a British orientalist who published numerous articles and books of academic value, mainly in the areas of history and literature. His works are respected for their scholarship, uniqueness, and style. He published in areas which few other Western scholars had explored to any sufficient degree. He used a language and style that showed high respect for everybody, even toward those he personally did not view in positive light...

"THE ARCTIC EXPEDITION of 1875 left England on 29th May, crossed the Atlantic to Davis Straits in a succession of storms, and entered the Arctic regions on 4th July. It sailed with orders to 'attain the highest northern latitude, and, if possible, reach the Pole.'" This is the story of the crew of the HMS Alert, on its voyage of exploration up the Baffin Sea and toward northern Greenland. volunteers wish to thank the volunteers of Distributed Proofreaders for their work over the last 20 years to convert public domain books into e-books. "Shores of the Polar Sea" was DP's 35,000th title. Congratulations and Happy 20th Anniversary Distributed Proofreaders! .

A very personal and opinionated wander through the Sussex of around 1900, illustrated with anecdotes, literary and poetic quotations, gravestone epitaphs and a gentle sense of humour. The author colours the countryside with his nostalgia for times past and regret for the encroaching future, his resentment of churches with locked doors, and his love of deer parks, ruined castles and the silent hills.(I must add my apologies for my attempts at the Sussex dialect in the chapter on that subject.)[This book is of Reading Grade of 9...

Scrambles Amongst the Alps is one the great classics (some would say the greatest) of early mountaineering literature, and Edward Whymper (1840-1911) one of the leading figures of the early years of Alpine climbing. He is best known, of course, for his many attempts on the Matterhorn, and for the loss of four members of his climbing party after the successful first ascent of the peak in July, 1865. Although the Matterhorn stands in ways in the center of his book, there are descriptions of many other ascents as well, in the Alps of France and Italy, as well as those of Switzerland...

Three fellow travelers on a train enter into a discussion concerning what they would call an ‘indiscreet letter.’ The discussion albeit short, produces some rather interesting revelations during the journey and at journey’s end.