Travel and Exploration books

Mostly travel

• In the UK:
• The Sea on Our Left by Shally Hunt: a middle-aged couple decide to walk around Britain
• Mud, Sweat and Gears by Ellie Bennett: a bicycle ride cum pub crawl from Land's End to John O'Groats
• Three Men in a Float by Dan Kieran and Ian Vince in which three mad Englishmen travel by milk float from Great Yarmouth to the Lizard
• Watling Street by John Higgs: from Dover to up north, Higgs walks the length of Watling Street and meets some interesting people along the way
• Abroad
• Escape from the Antarctic by Sir Ernest Shackleton: a classic tale of Polar survival: 
• The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
• Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia by Penelope Chetwode (but one is a horse)
• A Time of Gifts and its sequel Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor
• News from Tartary by Peter Fleming: travelling acorss remote and restricted China between the world wars
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: mostly about the trans-Siberian express
• The Amur River by Colin Thubron: a journey along the Amur from source to sea through Mongolia, Russia and China

Mostly exploration

1. 1421: The Year China discovered the world by Gavin Menzies
2. The Lost City of Z by David Grann: you'll never want to go to the South American rainforests!
3. Barrow's Boys by Fergus Fleming: a history of the British exploration of both the North West Passage and Africa; and its sort-of sequel Ninety Degrees North about the quest for the North Pole
4. Erebus by Michael Palin: following HMS Erebus as she explored the Antarctic and searched for the North West Passage

Mostly the biographies of explorers

• Stanley: The Making of an African Explorer by Frank McLynn: the biography of a horrid hero
• Livingstone by Tim Jeal: if Stanley was dreadful, the sainted David Livingstone was not much better.
• Prince Henry the Navigator by John Ure: the Portuguese prince who started the European exploration of Africa
  
• Alexandria by Edmund Richardson: the biography of Charles Masson, explorer and archaeologist in Afghanistan during the days of the East India Company
• Captain Cook by Frank McLynn who also wrote the Stanley book and this time describes a simlilarly obsessed explorer.