Travels as a Brussels Scout

"This text follows a trail of modern-day sights and experiences that every well-rounded, late-29th century Eurocitizen should encounter. This latter-day ""Grand Tour"" takes in the musts of modern Europe, from the Channel Tunnel to the casino at Frankfurt Airport, from Eurodisney to the Parthenon, and from Legoland to the Vatican City. Travelling on Eurocheques and speaking only English, Nick Middleton is the stereotypical Englishman abroad.

About the Author
Nick Middleton was born in London. As a geographer he has travelled to more than 50 countries and teaches part-time at Oxford University. As a travel writer he has been accused of drug smuggling and spying but has never spent a night in jail. He has been fined for dropping a match in China, mugged in Moscow, conned in Casablanca and kidnapped in Outer Mongolia, but hasn't tired of travelling yet.

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Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meaning

"The Inside Passage to Alaska, with its outer fringes and entailments, is a very complicated sea-route. Parts of it are open ocean, parts of it no wider than a modest river, and it has been in continuous use for several thousand years. Its aboriginal past - still tantalizingly close to hand - puts the inside passaged on terms of close kinship with the ancient sea of the Phoenicians and the Greeks. This book is much more than a book about a sea voyage; it is about Jonathan Raban's journey home to his father who is dying; about his crumbling relationship with his wife and also about the historical journey of the maddening Vancouver in his search for the North West Passage. "

Long Way Round

"Long Way Round is the result of their adventures - a fascinating, frank and highly entertaining travel book about two friends riding round the world together and, against all the odds, realising their dream.

From London to New York, Ewan and Charley chased their shadows through Europe, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia, across the Pacific to Alaska, then down through Canada and America. But as the miles slipped beneath the tyres of their big BMWs, their troubles started. Exhaustion, injury and accidents tested their strength. Treacherous roads, unpredictable weather and turbulent politics challenged their stamina. They were chased by paparazzi in Kazakhstan, courted by men with very large guns in the Ukraine, hassled by the police, and given bulls' testicles for supper by Mongolian nomads.

And yet despite all these obstacles they managed to ride more than twenty thousand miles in four months, changing their lives forever in the process. As they travelled they documented their trip, taking photographs, and writing diaries by the campfire. "

Italian Neighbours/An Italian Education

Two books in one volume.

Cocaine Train: Tracing My Bloodline Through Colombia

"One of the most violent countries on earth, where the cause of death is regularly 'massacre', drink drivers play chicken and kidnap stories pass for dinner party conversation; nine times more dangerous than the United States, Columbia is no place for the nervous traveller. So it is much against his better judgement that, in the summer of 1998, coinciding with a World Cup and a general election, journalist Stephen Smith finds himself boarding the Cocaine Train out of Cali, home of Columbia's infamous drugs cartel. Its passengers prey to theives, extortionists and a dozen different varieties of paramilitary, the Cocaine Train is one of the last remnants of a once great railway system, and Smith is riding in it in search of a grandfather he barely knew: Fred Leslie Frost, pioneering railwayman, upright citizen and diplomat, with a Columbian mistress and an illegitimate son. As remote from his suburban British origins as it is possible to imagine. "