First published more than thirty years ago, Paul Theroux's strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey has become a modern classic of travel literature. Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia's fabled trains - the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express - are the stars of a journey that takes...

Chris Gooddie set fire to a carefully constructed career ladder and warmed his hands over the flames. Then he went traveling all over Asia and beyond in pursuit of the world's most beautiful birds, the pittas. A tale of one man's obsession with rainforest jewels, this is the story of an impossible dream: a quest to see every one of the world's most elusive avian gems--a group of birds known as pittas--in a single year. Insightful, compelling,...

The true history behind the Netflix original series Marco Polo, here is the remarkable story of the world's most famous traveler, retracing his legendary journey from Venice to China, the moment East first met West. In 1271, a young Italian merchant named Marco Polo embarked on a groundbreaking expedition from Venice, through the Middle East and Central Asia to China. His extraordinary reports of his experiences introduced medieval Europe to an exotic...

Cambodia is a long way from Germany - thousands of miles, as it turns out. And in between are some of the world's highest mountains, most inhospitable deserts and least welcoming countries. Trying to make the journey overland was always going to be difficult. But one group of twenty-somethings, bored with the predictable wanderings of the backpacker generation, thought they'd spice things up a little. They would go by car. The worst car in the world....

Italian merchant and adventurer Marco Polo traveled across Asia. This title guides readers through his major voyages, explorations, and discoveries. Topics include what led Polo to travel to China, the Silk Road, life in Central Asia, the Chinese empire, Polo's famous book, and his legacy.

While European intellectual, cultural, and commercial life stagnated during the early medieval period, Asia flourished as the wellspring of science, philosophy, and religion. Linked together by a web of religious, commercial, and intellectual connections, the different regions of Asia's vast civilization, from Arabia to China, hummed with commerce, international diplomacy, and the brisk exchange of ideas. Stewart Gordon has fashioned a look at Asia...

A biography of the thirteenth-century Venetian explorer whose book about his travels across Asia and work for Kubla Khan helped to launch the Age of Exploration.