With this brilliant account of his journey—at once edge-of-your-seat exciting and literary—Mark Jenkins established himself as the master of adventure/travel writing. In 1989 he and six companions—two Americans and four Russians—set out on an arduous, first-ever crossing of Siberia by bike, cycling across rutted dirt roads, swamps, the Ural Mountains, and through Moscow and Leningrad. This beautifully repackaged edition of Jenkins's travel classic vividly chronicles the highlights of this amazing voyage, including a month spent biking through an 800-mile swamp and the team's interactions with some fascinating characters—from the widow who makes Mark sleep in her dead son's bed to the Lithuanian searching for the concentration camp where his wife spent her childhood. Combining the exhilaration of record-setting adventure with thoughtful introspection, Jenkins's words allow readers to recognize the extraordinary in the day-to-day lives of ordinary Russians. USA Today called Off the Map "a literary epic." Newsweek declared "the ornery, observant Jenkins [is] good company on every page." And Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, wrote: "Jenkins is a master of the fundamental writer's talent: an ability to see things in new ways, as no one has ever seen them before."

“ It is late October, and the temperature is already –40 degrees . . . My thoughts are filled with frozen rivers that may or may not hold my weight; empty, forgotten valleys haunted by emaciated ghosts; and packs of ravenous, merciless wolves.” Having left his job as a high-school geography teacher, Rob Lilwall arrived in Siberia equipped only with a bike and a healthy dose of fear. Cycling Home from Siberia recounts his epic three-and-a-half-year, 30,000-mile journey back to England via the foreboding jungles of Papua New Guinea, an Australian cyclone, and Afghanistan’s war-torn Hindu Kush. A gripping story of endurance and adventure, this is also a spiritual journey, providing poignant insight into life on the road in some of the world’s toughest corners.

This is the true story of two twenty-year-old Australians who travelled for fourteen months on recumbent bicycles from Russia, across Siberia and Mongolia, to Beijing. It is as much a story about perseverance, passion and belief as it is about the people and remarkable landscapes of Siberia and Mongolia. Tim Cope and Chris Hatherly are fearless adventurers, willing and able to open themselves up to everything from the voice of the steppe to the Russian villagers and the nomads of the Gobi desert. From this, they draw an often funny, moving and inspirational tale of living out a dream.

This is the true story of two twenty-year old Australians who travelled for fourteen months on recumbent bicycles from Russia, across Siberia and Mongolia, to Beijing. It is as much a story of perseverance, passion, and belief as it is about the people and remarkable landscapes of Siberia and Mongolia. Tim and Chris are not just fearless adventurers but philosophers on wheels, willing and able to open themselves up to everything from the voice of the Steppes to the Russian villagers and the nomads of the Gobi desert. From this they draw an often funny, moving and inspirational tale of living out a dream. Mixed into this journey is the story of their tumultuous relationship as two opposing wills battle it out in the midst of heat, snow and hunger.

Through Siberia by Accident is a book about a journey that didn't happen - and what happened instead. Dervla Murphy never had any intention of spending three months in the vast territories of Siberia. Instead she had planned to go to Ussuriland, because it appealed to her as a place free from tourism. But by accident, or rather because she had an accident - a painful leg injury -, she found herself stymied in Eastern Siberia, a place she knew very little about. Although hardly able to walk, her subsequent experiences, in an unexpected place, and in an incapacitated state, provided many pleasant surprises. Above all she was struck by the extraordinary hospitality, generosity and helpfulness of the Siberians who made this strange phenomenon - a maimed Irish babushka - so welcome in their towns and homes. This book is an extraordinary story of fortitude and resourcefulness as Dervla Murphy finds friendship and culture in a seemingly monotonous, bleak and inhospitable place far from what we know as 'civilised'. Through Siberia by Accident is a voyage of Siberian self-discovery.

"In the middle of the night I crawled out of my tent into a silvery vastness truly unchanged since Genghis Khan and his hordes loped west more than half a millennium ago. There was no glow of city lights on the horizon, no ranger station at the edge of the next valley, no quaint general store, no paved road. There was nothing but space, unbounded and untamed. A brilliant moon lit the blackness crystal clear. Moonshadows of every blade of grass danced silently in the wildness. It was the emptiest, quietest place I had ever been. I threw my arms out wide and spun slowly around and around in the dazzling clarity of the night, the stars blurring into ribbons of light above me." Mongolia. It was Erika Warmbrunn's dream. To escape deep into parts of Asia inaccessible to tours and guidebooks, to abandon herself to the risks of the unknown. And so, with only a bicycle named Greene for a traveling companion, she set off on an eight month, 8,000 kilometer trek that stretched across the steppes of this ancient land, on through China, and down the length of Vietnam. Freed by Greene's two wheels from the tyranny of discrete points on a map, she found that the true merit of travel was not in the simple seeing, but in flowing with the unexpected adventure or invitation, in savoring the moments in between -- the daily challenges of new words and customs, the tiny triumphs of learning a new way of life, the daunting thrill of never knowing what the next day would bring. Wanting to ride a Mongolian horse and finding herself in the saddle for four hours, herding fifty head of cattle. Asking for a hotel in a Chinese village and being taken into a family's home to share their grandmother's bed for the night. Pedaling into the Vietnamese highlands and being stopped along the muddy road by a father asking that she join his two-year-old son's birthday party. Accepting a Mongolian village's invitation to stop pedaling and stay for a while, to live with them and teach them English. In the doing and the telling, Where the Pavement Ends is a much richer experience than any line on a map can show. Where the Pavement Ends is the recipient of the "Barbara Savage Miles From Nowhere Memorial Award." You can find out more about this author at her website: www.wherethepavementends.com

Spring 1993. 14 months earlier the USSR had collapsed and with Russia accessible once more Gregory Yeoman and his expedition companions set off on their bicycles to ride from the Baltic to the Pacific. Over 153 days they encountered wild landscapes, wild people, crumbling hotels and Siberia's two cheeses on an extraordinary adventure through a nation finding itself after 70 years of Communism. 'Riding into the Sunrise' is the story of their journey, the Trans-Siberian Cycle Expedition. 8304 miles through steppe, mountains, forest and swamp, spurred on by mental and physical will power, curiosity and a tremendous sense of adventure. As they headed east, the generosity of the people they met in the city tower blocks and village cabins kept their spirits high and after five months of cycling, as they reached Vladivostok, it seemed they had conquered the great Red Bear. Or had they...' 59 black and white photographs and 8 maps help bring the story to life.

Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.

The Sibirsky (Siberian) Extreme Project was a 2009 motorcycle adventure project by motorcycle adventurer Walter Colebatch to attempt to go into the ultimate depths of Siberia. The project aimed to push the boundaries of what is known and what is possible in terms of motorcycling in Siberia and hoped to ride new routes and tracks that had yet to be explored by adventure motorcyclists to date. On the ambitious schedule were: - the Tuva Track, a vague boggy unridden route linking the Altai and Tuvan Republics, near the Mongolian border, between the towns of Kosh Agach and Mugur Aksy - the Anabar Road from Lensk to Udachny, an unridden route leading further north in Asia than anyone had ridden before (over 66 degrees North). - the Vilyuisky Trakt, an unridden dirt track only completed in early 2009 that runs 1500 kms east (950 miles) between Lensk, Mirny and Yakutsk. - the legendary BAM Road, 4300 km from Vanino on the Pacific Ocean to Taishet in central Siberia; an abandoned road no motorcyclist had ever even attempted in its entirety, let alone ridden. To many adventurers, the BAM Road is the toughest road on the planet. This book covers the planning, the riding, the struggles, the triumphs and the disappointments of this incredibly challenging itinerary.