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"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
Bill Vaughan
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Books by our members
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Family Adventures in Style, by Jill Nash |
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 Jill Nash and her husband Carlo have just published their fourth joint book under their own imprint Luxury Backpackers. Jill grew up in the Lake District where she trained as an outdoor pursuits instructor before travelling the world. She married Carlo in Italy and gave birth to Gaia Maria two years ago.
Family Adventures in Style (£16) includes nature and wildlife adventures, history, culture and action, all personally researched together. Eight destinations are covered – Ireland, Switzerland, Malta, UAE, Peru, Turkey, Tanzania and the Maldives – each one offering inspirational trip ideas for families on different budgets. But the emphasis is always on travelling independently.
‘With new boutique, family-friendly accommodation popping up all over the globe, parents can now enjoy quality local hospitality in total comfort,’ says Jill who is marketing the book across the UK, USA and Australia. ‘When we found out we were expecting our daughter, one of our first thoughts drifted towards travel. Naturally we thought she would just “fit in” with our intrepid travel plans. But we quickly discovered that travelling with children was a totally different ball game.
‘Our travel experiences have added something special to our daughter’s life. She has built up incredible social skills from constantly meeting new faces, her confidence has grown and her level of vocabulary is astonishing. Above all, we feel travelling together has brought us closer as a family, and built a special bond which we wouldn’t have experienced had we not had this precious time together.
‘The challenges we faced as travelling parents were enormous. From where to find a clean place to change a nappy, to entertaining in queues at the airport, and where to eat quickly at unusual times of day. We also learnt we had to make compromises. We couldn’t just head off to an island we had discovered or stay out all night at a local bar. Everything had to be more planned and considered. All our personal travel experiences have been recorded in the book, along with some valuable tips.’
Further details from www.luxurybackpackers.com
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Slow Sussex & South Downs National Park, by Tim Locke |
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Tim Locke writes
 The latest Bradt guide in the Slow series explores Sussex and the newly designated South Downs National Park (which includes a easternmost Hampshire). I have been project-managing the Slow series since its inception, and decided that the time had come for a series of guidebooks that returns to the joy of writing unfettered by top-ten lists, bite-size nuggets of background info and expensive restaurants that no travel writer can afford to research properly. I went for a concept where the writer pretty much chooses what to write about in search of what gives an area its sense of place, within the general framework of Slow tourism: taking time to look and find reasons for lingering.
In Slow Sussex and South Downs National Park I've touched on my extremely short career batting for the Sussex Flintknapper's Stoolball team in a description of the Sussex game of stoolball, an ancient Wealden cottage (Priest House) covered with anti-witch devices, an artist's retreat (Farley Farm House) where Picasso painted a kitchen tile above the Aga, a tour through the Brighton sewers, and the pleasures of cruising round Chichester Harbour in a solar-powered craft. I’ve included ten of my favourite walks in the area, a host of carefully selected pubs, individual places to stay (no charge for inclusion), and put in numerous stories and twists that don’t usually pop up in guidebooks.
In the intro, I summarised the principles of Slow:
The Slow concept tunes in with a reaction against 'clone town' Britain in an age of increasing standardisation, with the realisation that it makes no sense to travel without an awareness of one's surroundings. I feel one that personal contact is of the most rewarding aspect of travel, so I've chatted to local people including owners of gardens, craftsmen, curators of rural museums, shopkeepers and wildlife experts - among many others.
Purchase from Amazon. |
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Only in Cologne, by Duncan Smith |
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 Only in Cologne is the seventh book by new member Duncan Smith in his series of guidebooks which reveal the hidden corners, little-known places and unusual objects of historic cities. Previous titles include Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Berlin.
Published by Christian Brandstätter Verlag this month, the 232-page volume includes 200 colour photos, two fold-out maps and costs £19.90. Packed into its pages are more than 80 fascinating and unusual historical sites in Germany's most historic city, from religious relics and forgotten fortresses to unexpected sanctuaries, abandoned cemeteries and little-known museums.
Founded by the Romans on the banks of the Rhine, Cologne takes its name from the fact that it was their northernmost colony. Using Duncan's book as your city guide, you can discover Napoleon's cemetery and a road beneath the Rhine, the city lighthouse and the place where the Red Baron learned to fly, not to mention the world's first art hotel and the city's Turkish Quarter. Cologne's transport network is comprehensive and quick, but directions have been kept to a minimum so as to leave visitors free to find their own particular path and make their own discoveries.
And while readers are busy touring Cologne with his latest publication, Duncan will be off researching the next city in the series … Zurich.
Purchase from Amazon.
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Lambert's Railway Miscellany |
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 Reprinted twice already since its publication by Ebury Press last October, Lambert's Railway Miscellany by Anthony Lambert (£12.99) is aimed at the general reader who likes railways and railway travel, but can't tell a King from a Castle (locomotives apparently!) and doesn't want to.
The book is packed with stories from the early days when people worried that sparks from locomotives might ignite the fleeces of nearby sheep, to the Frenchman who got his arm trapped down the lavatory of a TGV whilst trying to retrieve his mobile phone. The whole device had to be cut out and he was carried off the train on a stretcher with the bowl still wrapped round his arm!
Many travel photographers must have envied the life led by Nicholas Morant who became the official photographer of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1939 and who was allowed to have a caboose shunted into a siding near a shot he wanted, to wait for exactly the right light.
'The caboose might be home for days, even weeks, for Nick Morant and his wife,' relates Anthony. 'But photography in the Canadian wilderness is not without its dangers and not long after his appointment, Morant was near Sherbrooke Lake in British Columbia with a Swiss guide, Christian Haesler, when they ran into the worst possible danger - a female grizzly with cub.
'The guide was badly mauled and Morant jumped down from the tree in which he'd taken refuge and attacked the bear with a long fir pole. It saved Haesler, but Morant was seriously injured. They lost contact and Morant was found 10 hours later by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable and his Newfoundland dog.'
Perhaps not the best job in the world after all …
Purchase from Amazon. |
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One of our Balloons is Missing, by Clive Tully |
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 One of our Balloons is Missing includes stirring stories from 30 years of professional writing. Read about Clive’s 90mph journey down the Olympic Bob Run in St Moritz; his 100-foot descent to the bottom of Lake Windermere in a high-tech submersible; and how he became the first Englishman to drive a dogsled across the Russian border from Finland to Karelia. The title harks back to 1990 when Clive was the first journalist to fly in a hot air balloon in Soviet Russia.
‘I was invited to join 27 British balloon teams to put on the first balloon meeting in Russia, where there was a ballooning club with a basket but no envelope,’ explains Clive. ‘So no-one had ever flown a balloon there before. I shall always remember being assigned my own KGB minder – not some James Bond-esque heavy, but a spotty youth with all his belongings in a plastic carrier bag. He got very upset the day I gave him the slip in one of those huge Russian department stores.
‘And my first flight was a cracker, which certainly wouldn’t have happened anywhere else. The wind speed was close to dangerous (ideally you need still conditions for a hot air balloon flight) and we were taking off from a packed football stadium with tall lighting towers at each corner.
‘In order not to collide into anything, we superheated the envelope, blasting lots of heat into it while loads of people hung on to the basket. So when they let go, we shot up like a champagne cork. The landing was pretty exciting too, as we were dragged across a field before we came to rest.’
Clive’s book was, he admits, somewhat of an experiment in producing an e-book, and he’s grateful to Guild member Mike Gerrard for his helpful tips. Once Clive had selected the stories – 46 of them spanning three decades – it took a weekend to do the formatting.
‘Because text on Kindles reflows depending on what font setting you have, the copy has to be uploaded to Amazon as an html file – in other words, a web page,’ he explains. ‘Converting it all from Words documents proved the trickiest bit, as some of the formatting put in by Word ended up doing unexpected things in the html file. That meant hacking the offending bits of code in the html file. Then all I had to do was upload it along with a cover image, and wait for it to go through their system.’
One of our Balloons is Missing is available to download from the Amazon Kindle store, price £3.16
Purchase from Amazon.
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Scotland, by Robin and Jenny McKelvie |
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 Robin and his wife Jenny are the co-authors of a 320-page monster guide to Scotland published by National Geographic Traveller. Robin promises ‘real and rare detail with all his favourite places to visit, a number of wee secrets revealed, and a plethora of top notch eating and drinking venues to savour.’
So whether you want to fine dine Michelin star style in capital, discover why Scotland is the world’s number one mountain biking destination, or find out which of the nation’s 800 islands you just have to visit, this is the guide.
‘Packed with an unusually subjective (for a guidebook) take on history and culture, this husband and wife labour of love is a Scottish guidebook laced with a wee dram of personality,’ says Robin who is offering the title at a discounted price of £10.72 through www.robinmckelvie.com.
Whilst travelling round much of Scotland’s 11,000 km coastline, Robin and Jenny encountered everything from brilliant blue skies to hurricane-force winds.
‘We tried never to let the weather get us down and we loved a hardy old gent we met on North Uist and his take on Scotland’s wonderfully characterful weather … “Aye, she’s the most beautiful country on a sunny day right enough, but she just gets bonnier and bonnier when the storms come in.” Quite.’
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Back Roads Germany, by Nevile Walker and James Stewart |
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 Two-thirds of a writing team who produced the all-new Rough Guide to Germany in 2009, Neville Walker and James Stewart have been reunited with non-Guild member Christian Williams to produce a new guidebook on Germany for Dorling Kindersley.
Part of the Back Roads series, the book presents Germany as a suitable destination for the sort of gastro- and regional tourism more familiarly associated with France or Italy. Readers can choose from 24 leisurely and scenic routes, each one offering charming hotels and authentic regional cuisine along the way.
‘One of the challenges of producing a guidebook that showcases Germany’s small hotels and regional cooking is that the German language doesn’t have much time for culinary euphemisms,’ says Neville. ‘A case in point is saumagen, a speciality of the wine-growing villages in the south-western Land of Rhineland-Palatinate. The name means simply ‘pig’s stomach’, and it was perhaps this that left Margaret Thatcher unmoved when Chancellor Helmut Kohl took her to his favourite restaurant in the chic village of Deidesheim to try it.
‘But as with haggis, you don’t actually consume the stomach. Instead, what you eat is the stuffing: a wholesome tranche of chopped pork and root vegetables, fresh herbs and spices, without so much as a bile duct or slab of tripe to be seen.
‘The saumagen at the Deidesheimer Hof is indeed rather fine; finer still is the version I ate at the Freinsheimer Hof, an elegant restaurant-with-rooms in the little walled town of Freinsheim. Chestnuts, pumpkin and a deliciously sticky reduction lift the Freinsheimer Hof’s saumagen to another level, while the setting in the loggia of a historic baroque weingut is as romantic as any in Provence.’
Purchase from Amazon.
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Cross-Channel France, by John Ruler |
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 Published by Bradt Guides, Cross-Channel France covers ‘the land beyond the ports’, a delightful area of northern France which is frequently bypassed by British travellers in their haste to head south.
‘After umpteen visits, each of them exploring a bit deeper, I was perplexed - and somewhat peeved – that even fellow writers generally ignore this lesser-known region of France,’ says John, who lives in Kent.
‘It is, after all, our closest cross-Channel neighbour but suffers from an image often casually based on Calais – and by Calais, I mean the port, not even the town or coastal region. This is about as logical as Dover being representative of Kent, itself a partner in an EU inter-regional programme with Nord-Pas de Calais.
‘OK, it is a mere Cinderella when compared with the many French honeypots who can happily rest on their laurels, but underdogs need their champions and I find that I am just one among a number of Guild members who have discovered this delightful tourist tearaway whose countryside alone needs far more recognition.’
In Cross-Channel France (Bradt Guides, £13.99), John guides both first-time visitors and more seasoned travellers from Calais and the coast through the Seven Valleys to the Flemish hinterland, the Great War battlefields to Lille and the rural Avesnois. Packed with fascinating anecdotes and insights, it’s a great companion guide as well as an armchair read.
Purchase from Amazon.
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“Slow, slow wanders the train, past minarets and mosques, out onto the plains where women dressed in black work in fields that are as neat as a grave on the day of its digging. There are plum trees and pear trees, half-built churches and telegraph poles that wait for the new season’s storks.”
By Nicky Gardner, writing about spring in northern Bosnia in the May 2008 issue of hidden europe magazine (page 15). Courtesy of hidden europe magazine (www.hiddeneurope.co.uk). |
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