Category Archives: Books – Other

Building The Beast: How (Not) To Build An Overland Camper

by Jacqueline Lambert

A Vintage Truck: An Amateur Team: An Immovable Deadline
The Comic Memoir of a Crazy Idea
Awarded a Readers’ Favorite 5* Seal!

In this captivating true story, join an intrepid married couple as they take another wild leap into the world of nomadic living.
Four years previously, Jackie and Mark gave up work to embark on a permanent road trip with four dogs. However, one Friday the 13th, forces beyond their control cause them to throw caution to the wind and buy a 30-year-old army truck sight unseen from the internet.

Their goal: to create an expedition truck fit to drive overland to Mongolia.

Follow them as they dive headfirst into the daunting but thrilling task of converting this rugged vehicle into a perfect off-grid tiny house on wheels.

Yet their first ever DIY van conversion proves to be a rollercoaster ride, when they sell their house to fund the build, and Friday the 13th comes back to haunt them.

Is their confidence that, ‘there’s always a solution,’ misplaced?

With their relationship, sanity, and finances on the line, can they navigate the pitfalls of their first-ever build and avoid becoming homeless?

Filled with quirky van life friends and unexpected twists, this is an inspiring tale of perseverance, friendship, and finding the courage to conquer the challenges that face those who dare to chase their dreams.

Building The Beast – Amazon

A Phase I’m Going Through

by Anthony Lindsay Jones & Trish Burt

A TRILOGY THAT RECORDS THE LIFE
OF ONE OF ADVENTURE TRAVEL’S PRIME PROTAGONISTS

Overland 1970

by David Shirreff

It is 1970 and in London a group of people gather around a Land Rover bedecked with jerry cans and hooked to a trailer.

Ahead lies a journey of many thousands of miles on ‘The Hippie Trail’, the well-trodden route from London to Nepal. They will encounter every imaginable hazard along increasingly dangerous roads that will take them through mountains, deserts, across empty plains and through teeming cities.

Overland 1970 vividly recreates the experience of the ‘Overlander’ at a time when a Western traveller could make this epic journey without encountering war or totalitarianism. The Hippie Trail had its dangers but to anyone possessed of the spirit of adventure it offered a wealth of fascinating encounters and stunning spectacles.

Author David Shirreff knows his subject well. Having driven the Hippie Trail several times, he captures the chilly mornings, the engine failures, the moments of rapture and the constant stimulus of new sights and experiences. But what sets his book apart is that he focuses on what is surely the essence of those journeys: what happened between the travellers themselves.

Inside a metal box for hours at a time, and for weeks on end, relationships ebbed and flowed. Travellers coupled and uncoupled, nursed grudges, formed bitter rivalries and, occasionally, arrived at a better understanding of themselves.

Overland 1970 takes the reader into that Land Rover and the experience of a vividly drawn cast of characters as they experience the journey of a lifetime.

The Last Overland

by Alex Bescoby

The Last Overland is the remarkable story of filmmaker and historian Alex Bescoby’s journey to recreate the iconic First Overland expedition made in 1956 in the original ‘Oxford’ Land Rover and the story behind the All4 documentary series.

Africa Overland: The Journey Home

by Michael Leytonstone

A sequel to The Overlanders: An African Journey

Had his quest ended in South Africa . . . or had it only begun?

“The path to virtue is a rising slope, each step more difficult than the one before.”

A quest for courage on an African odyssey becomes a quest for honor on the homeward journey. A quest for honor . . . and love.

The Overlanders: An African Journey

by Michael Leytonstone

What was he seeking in the wilds of Africa . . . the journey of a lifetime, or something greater?

“It sure makes me want to experience a similar adventure.”—Michael Garrett (Stephen King’s first editor), author of Keeper.

Breaking away from his office job in London, Alex Thompson joins a dozen other would-be adventurers on an overland expedition from Cairo to Johannesburg. His journey soon becomes a quest for courage as he confronts deserts, swamps, a civil war . . . and a few of his fellow passengers.

by Graeme and Luisa Bell

Would our Land Rover Defender with her large mud-terrain tyres, skull adorned bullbar and self-built habitat be as out of place and inappropriate on the streets of Europe, as a rooftop tent is bolted onto the feminine slope of a Porshe 911? And would Europe be so expensive that we would have to flee for Africa and Asia, desperately? Would we find adventure and un-spoilt nature, would we be able to travel freely and live our outdoor lifestyle? This book is written to answer those questions, and the best way to do so is to continue the narrative of our continuous intercontinental overland journey as written in our previous books – We Will Be Free and Overlanding the Americas “La Lucha”, the story of our family of four giving everything we have to give to achieve our goal of living the explorers lifestyle.We seek nature, beauty, tranquillity and adventure. Many Europeans who read this book may ask themselves whether us outsiders might have found what they may have not, in their own backyard. I believe that we have

Shhhhh…Don’t Tell My Mother

by Jennifer Wert

With a wish, a dream, and lady luck on her side, a naive 20-year old realized the world was hers to explore. Setting sail on the SS Australis in October 1974 — first as a passenger, then later joining the Chandris Crew family — Jenny shares her hilarious adventures and misadventures recovered from precious memories stored in letters she wrote home. Climb aboard for a trip of a lifetime! You don’t tell your mother everything, so it’s necessary to read between the lines.

The Hippie Trail

By Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland

This is the first history of the Hippie Trail. It records the joys and pains of budget travel to Kathmandu, India, Afghanistan and other ‘points east’ in the 1960s and 1970s. Written in a clear, simple style, it provides detailed analysis of the motivations and the experiences of hundreds of thousands of hippies who travelled eastwards. The book is structured around four key debates: were the travellers simply motivated by a search for drugs? Did they encounter love or sexual freedom on the road? Were they basically just tourists? Did they resemble pilgrims? It also considers how the travellers have been represented in films, novels and autobiographical accounts, and will appeal to those interested in the Trail or the 1960s counterculture, as well as students taking courses relating to the 1960s.

First Overland: London-Singapore by Land Rover

by Tim Slessor

Why not? After all, no-one had ever done it before. It would be one of the longest of all overland journeys-half-way round the world, from the English Channel to Singapore. They knew that several expeditions had already tried it. Some had got as far as the deserts of Persia; a few had even reached the plains of India. But no-one had managed to go on from there: over the jungle-clad mountains of Assam and across northern Burma to Thailand and Malaya. Over the last 3,000 miles it seemed there were “just too many rivers and too few roads”. But no-one really knew…In fact, their problems began much earlier than that. As mere undergraduates, they had no money, no cars, no nothing. But with a cool audacity, which was to become characteristic, they set to work-wheedling and cajoling. First, they coaxed the BBC to come up with some film for a possible TV series. Then they gently “persuaded” Rover to lend them two factory-fresh Land Rovers. A publisher was even sweet-talked into giving them an advance on a book. By the time they were ready to go, their sponsors (more than 80 of them) ranged from whiskey distillers to the makers of collapsible buckets. In late 1955, they set off.Seven months and 12,000 miles later, two very weary Land Rovers, escorted by police outriders, rolled into Singapore-to flash-bulbs and champagne. Now, fifty years on, their bestselling book, First Overland, is republished-with a foreword by Sir David Attenborough. After all, it was he who gave them that film.