Favorite Travel Topic/Area

I enjoy Chinese historical fiction/memoirs and long distance hiking memoirs. I have recently finished Pretty Woman Spitting by Leanna Adams. An American travels to Wuhu, China to teach English and encounters all kinds of unfamiliar customs. Also read The Kindness of Strangers by Mike McIntyre who hiked penniless across small town America. Excellent.

Jaimie,

You need to read The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. From Amazon: In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest?to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty.

Steven

Could I recommend The Old Ways for hiking the old (public) paths, To a Mountain in Tibet as a wonderfully lyrical introduction to Thubron. From there you will find his other journeys through Asia, There is also A short Walk in the Hindu Kush with a famously funny last paragraph involving Thesiger and Newby. Anything by Peter Fleming (brother of the James bond author) for example - on China - One's Company http://www.librarything.com/work/book/95211274.

Regards
John
p.s. in my catalog try Tags Asia, Russia, Black Sea for more....

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush tells an amazing story.

I'm looking forward to reading The Old Ways. Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places is a book I'll re-read many times. Sometimes, I just open it at random and enjoy whatever passage I find.

I agree - without disclosing a 'spoiler' - you know why that last chapter is so famous! I have already ordered The Wild Places as his prose so enchanted. Being a former Brit I know these places and paths of course, but now - to my regret - I can barely walk to the mailbox, so have to 'walk them" (and the tea-hills of Bandung, and my beloved Paris and London) just in my mind.

You might like Peter Hessler as a writer -- he has four books dealing with his experience in China.

I do. I enjoyed River Town.

Thank you Steven. I will check it out.

Thank you John. I have read Robert MacFarlane's The Wild Places, and I am eager to read The Old Ways.